CINCINNATI — A multi-million dollar theater renovation is underway after an anonymous donor gave $5 million, and celebrity rapper and actor Ludacris stepped in. The money is going to help restore the old Emery Theater in Cincinnati's Over The Rhine neighborhood. 

What You Need To Know

  • The Emery Theater has been vacant for decades and is now set to be restored after multi-million dollar donations

  • The theater will be home to Cincinnati's Children's Theater after a $48 million upgrade

  • Construction on the project is set to start in January and be finished by late 2025

Brandi La’sherill made the stage her career. She's an actress who started at the Cincinnati Children's Theater more than a decade ago.

“All of the auditions, all of the rehearsals happened in this one-room studio,” said La’sherill.

It’s part of the reason just seeing an old run-down theater nearly brought her to tears.

"This is home, this is home," she said. 

She’s taking a tour of the old Emery Theater, hidden in plain sight in Cincinnati’s Over The Rhine neighborhood. It’s getting a major upgrade that will house Children’s Theater productions.

“Well, this space has sat in this state for quite some time because no one knows how to utilize it. It is a very tight space as far as the stage. So, we are using our imaginations and creating a story that happens before the story begins. So we're using projection mapping. So all these architectural details you see, all the framework will have projectors that illuminate the space even before the show begins,” said Children's Theater Artistic Director Roderick Justice. 

Justice said while they are making major upgrades, they’re keeping the sound quality that was designed to hear anyone on stage from even the farthest seats.

In order to restore the theater to its glory, it comes with a $48 million price tag.

“The bones of the facility are good. The damage that you see in certain places, because this has really been empty for decades, is mostly cosmetic. But getting it to the point where we need it to be includes all of that technology,” said Children's Theater CEO Kim Kern. 

Kern said they recently received a $5 million anonymous donation, and $50,000 extra from rapper Ludacris. She said they still need about $4.5 million to finish everything.

“The theater itself was built for the symphony, so it is a concert hall and it doesn't really have the lobby space or the other public spaces that we need. So we actually are purchasing some adjacencies from the developers that are not technically part of the theater, but that will allow us to expand and create that public space that we need,” said Kern.

She said construction will start in January and it’s expected to be finished in 2025, when Lla’sherill hopes to take the stage again.

The Children’s Theater is currently putting on productions and plays in rented space at the Taft Theater in Cincinnati. For more information on their productions, click here.