Tour-goers get a sneak peek backstage

A backstage tour of the Alex Theatre was a walk down memory lane for some locals who turned out for Saturday’s free guided tour of the landmark theater.

Nancy Machtolf, a 77-year-old who came to the theater in her youth, looked up at the auditorium and remembered the two murals that had been painted there in 1948, and subsequently removed during the restoration of the theater to its 1925-state during the early 1990s.

She also recalled coming to the theater with her husband, and smoking and kissing in the balcony, she said.

“I was a teenager here,” Machtolf said.

Machtolf’s 54-year-old daughter Valerie Machtolf, who grew up in Glendale and recently moved back to the city after spending 15 years in Colorado, said she remembered watching Ben-Hur from the balcony when she was about 6 years old.

“This was my childhood theater where we watched all kinds of movies,” Valerie Machtolf said.

For other area residents, Saturday’s behind-the-scenes look at the Alex Theatre was the first time they’d ever stepped into the building, which now hosts performing arts events and screens classic movies.

Heather Dingley, 47, a Van Nuys resident who attends Pierce College in Woodland Hills, said she had never been to the theater before, and her cinema teacher at Pierce encouraged her to check it out.

The backstage tours have been offered several times a year at the Alex Theater since 2000, but it’s only the second year the tours have been held the weekend after Thanksgiving, said Barry McComb, the theater’s executive director. About 40 people attended Saturday’s tour, which is about as big as the tours get, McComb said.

“Thanksgiving weekend has proven to be the most popular weekend to do these,” McComb said.

The tours are designed both to introduce people to the theater for the first time, and to give longtime fans a fresh look at different parts of the building.

Andrea Humberger, who was on the committee that advised the city to purchase the Alex to use as a performing arts center during the early 1990s, led the tour.

“There’s nothing I like to talk about more than the Alex,” Humberger said. “I just really like sharing it with other people.

Humberger escorted the tour through the lobby of the Alex, into the auditorium, backstage, onstage and into the projection room.

Pausing in the auditorium, the group saw an historic fire curtain from the 1940s with the word ‘ASBESTOS’ proudly printed across it. Now, Humberger explained, the curtain was encapsulated so that it wasn’t a danger to people who worked near it; decades ago, the reminder that asbestos was present in the curtain probably reassured people who saw it.

Tour-goers learned about the rope and weight system backstage that hoists and lowers curtains and other pieces of the set, and they saw a demonstration of the theater’s lighting system.

“So much about Glendale has changed,” Valerie Machtolf said. “It’s wonderful that they have restored this and preserved it.”