This area directly abuts McCaw Hall’s backstage, with the two connected by a 40-foot-high door and serviced by parallel loading docks. West Hall is the same size as the McCaw Hall stage, so performers can work in a space as similar as possible to a production’s actual set, and Speight Jenkins Hall is equipped with a dance floor and theatrical lighting, again to approximate McCaw performance conditions. The Center’s rehearsal spaces, too, can be used for chamber-opera performances, an informal (even hip) alternative to full-dress mainstage productions that will greatly enlarge the company’s capacity for contemporary works and experimental stagings (which the opera has been staging at venues across the city such as Washington Hall). The glass walls can be left open, covered with gauzy white curtains, or blacked out totally for theatrical performances. There will be performances (including a working rehearsal of Il trovatore and a Verdi sing-a-long) there during the open house, at 2, 3 and 4 p.m., so check out the acoustics.

Next to it, in the ground floor corner, is the new 318-capacity performance space, Tagney Jones Hall: a perfectly simple, marvelously airy box-within-a-box with tiers of chocolate-colored wood for seating. Start with the outside: The huge Fourth Avenue windows look into the spacious beehive that is the wig and costume shop, with the staff already at work on the dozens of costumes needed for Verdi’s Il trovatore, running January 12–26. at the Center’s open house, free to the public. You’ll get a chance to do just that this Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. The public was also kept very much in mind, and the Center’s crystalline glamour as seen from the street was clearly devised to entice opera mavens and newbies alike to explore what’s inside. The $60 million structure, designed by architecture firm NBBJ, is built to provide the company’s staffers and visiting artists an upgrade over the drab John Street offices and rehearsal spaces (once a carpet factory) in South Lake Union that Seattle Opera had been making do with for years. This is the attention-getting facade of Seattle Opera’s new Seattle Opera at the Center, at Fourth Avenue and Mercer Street in the Seattle Center’s northeast corner. At street level are all-glass walls above, small panels of scrim-arranged as if fragments of a larger scrim had been broken up and scattered by the wind-can be lit up to glow and sparkle and programmed for variable lighting effects. It could be a jewelry box, or perhaps a treasure chest.

Seattle opera il trovatore