Review: Carolina Theatre is off to a beautiful start, with perhaps one exception
When someone proclaims Charlotte as one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., well, that can easily be fact-checked, quantified, backed up with data.
It’s a lot trickier when someone says: “There is not a theater any nicer in America.”
That was an assertion by Music With Friends founder Larry Farber, made as he welcomed members of the Charlotte private-concert club on Tuesday night to its first show in its new home, Carolina Theatre at Belk Place in uptown. The historic venue soft-reopened almost two months ago, 46-1/2 years after its original demise and after a $90 million restoration.
But this was my first time seeing a performance inside of it, therefore my first time getting a chance to share some reactions.
I’ll start by saying I can’t agree with Farber, for a pretty basic reason. It’s not that the music-industry veteran doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s just that I’d need to personally visit dozens of theaters around the country in order to form my own opinion.
What I can say, based on my first visit, is that Charlotte should be extremely proud of it. There’s definitely potential for it to get on the national radar.
I think there is also, however, a bit of room for improvement.
Carolina Theatre looks great. Does it sound great, too?
Tuesday night’s Music With Friends concert starred the husband-and-wife duo of hit-making super-producer David Foster and singer Katharine McPhee, with singer Daniel Emmet and Foster’s three-piece band in a supporting role.
“This place is unbelievable,” Farber said in his address to the crowd before introducing the headliners.
“And I have to tell you that walking out here, I wish everybody that’s out there could stand and see what I’m looking at. I am blown away. Because I promise you — I’ve been in the business many years — there is not a theater any nicer in America, I mean, and here it is right here in Charlotte.”
While many if not most of the audience members were making their first visit to the theater, it’s actually already been utilized several times already, including for, among other things: the Charlotte Symphony’s “Spring Gala” concert, which marked the first official event, on March 28; a poetry event celebrating Charlotte Black history on April 11; a Broadway-themed concert on Mother’s Day weekend; and a show by bluegrass band Punch Brothers just last week. Carolina Theatre also recently kicked off a classic-movie series that will run through the summer and feature titles like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.” and “Ghostbusters.”
And as soon as Foster and McPhee came onstage, he called Carolina Theatre “so beautiful” and she described it as “stunning.”
I agree with that. I wrote a story back in December, when the renovation was in its homestretch, that gave a fairly comprehensive overview of the project. (You can read it here, and it has much more detail about what’s been done to the historic, 98-year-old theater than this review.)
It was breathtaking to behold then, when there was still plastic over most of the seats to protect them from construction dust. Now, with that new-theater smell still wafting through the air, just the act of marveling at the room’s details is a show in and of itself.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet sound quite as good as it looks.
When McPhee’s vocals came forward on softer songs like her cover of Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing,” they were processed immaculately through the theater’s sound system (which reportedly had a $7 million-to-$8 million price tag), with right-on-point reverb that created a rich sense of both space and depth. When the band kicked things up a few notches, though, things got muddy. She periodically became drowned out enough that certain lyrics weren’t clear enough to be understandable.
I don’t think it’s just me. Multiple recent Google reviews have dinged the audio quality (e.g. “still working out bugs with sound system,” “the sound in the venue was ok”), and a Facebook user who said he saw “Star Wars” there on May 4 called the audio “horrible.”
During my tour back in December, Farber told me “it’ll probably take six months to a year for the best sound technicians to get it exactly dialed in, but we hope that they can dial in quickly.”
I do, too.
Meanwhile, on to the good news.
For Charlotte, an intimate space, immense opportunity
Foster and McPhee’s performance features a healthy amount of interaction with the audience, and this is a great place for a performer to engage in a healthy amount of interaction with the audience.
It’s intimate on paper, with seating for around 900 — half the size of nearby Belk Theater at Blumenthal Performing Arts Center.
But it’s intimate in practice, too: The edge of the stage is less than 15 feet from the first row of seats in the orchestra, with basically nothing separating that stage edge from that front row. This means McPhee can, and did, sit down on and easily scoot off the edge of the stage in a form-fitting gown and heels in order to get even closer to front-row ticketholders mid-song.
I also love the unique seating, which includes banquettes, loose chairs, and love seats.
I get that the majority of the seats are of the traditional fixed variety, and if you wind up seated in one of those — overall beauty and the sound system aside — you might not find you’re any more or less comfortable than you would be in a theater like the Belk. If you’re lucky enough to sit in a non-traditional seat, however, you’re in for a treat. We were in living-room-style chairs at the front of the balcony, and I would liken it to the difference between first class and coach on an airplane in terms of comfort.
In other words, it’s an upgrade of significance. Worth the extra cost if you can afford it.
And uniqueness in the seating configurations just adds to the overall uniqueness of the whole venue. The theater is absolutely unique, in addition to beautiful enough, to become renowned well beyond the borders of Charlotte.
In fact, this might seem a little out of left field, but during Tuesday night’s concert I was struck by an idea I couldn’t get out of my head:
I could see a comedy special shot here.
I was still thinking about this when I woke up Wednesday morning. I was thinking about one of the most recent comedy specials I’ve watched — Sarah Silverman’s “Someone You Love,” which was filmed in Boston in 2023 at The Wilbur, a historic theater that’s only slightly larger than Carolina Theatre.
A number of notable comedians have filmed specials there, from Joe Rogan to Dana Carvey to Jim Gaffigan.
Down the road, I think attracting this type of attention would be something to aspire to, something that would give us some national cachet, something that might even help strengthen the argument that there is not any theater nicer in America.
In the near-term, though, let’s just try to dial in that sound...
This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
