Double Take: The Story of the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres

Abstract

Double Take is an intelligent, accessible, well-documented, and attractively illustrated history, designed to increase appreciation for and understanding of the Elgin / Winter Garden theatre complex on Yonge Street in Toronto. The complex is unique, not only because it is the only example in Canada of an eccentric turn-of-the-century architectural phenomenon, the “stacked” theatre, but because it was recently purchased by the provincial government of Ontario, restored with care and accuracy at great expense, and re-opened in 1989 as a venue for live theatre. Any such manifestation of cultural generosity on the part of a government certainly deserves a publication; this book, more than a souvenir of the theatre’s re-opening, may be seen as a souvenir of and defence for such government financing.