With a live theater and a cabaret club, Cape Cod will get a taste of Las Vegas when Bill Hanney’s Entertainment Experience fully opens this coming spring at the Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis.
Last March, Bill Hanney took over the old Regal Cinema at the mall when the Regal’s lease ran out and immediately put his plan to convert it into a multi-entertainment complex into action.
Over the years, Hanney has built and operated 30 various entertainment venues, mostly movie complexes, but also other live performance venues.
But he’s never built anything on this scale before.
“This is the first time anything like this — all under one roof — has been done,” Hanney said.
The first phase of the plan was to reduce the number of cinemas from 12 to eight.
Hanney said cinemas with 12, and sometimes up to 30, theaters are too much now.
“So we made it eight and will use the space for other things,” he said.
The eight remaining movie theaters were converted into what he described as “super luxury” theaters.
Each theater, with seating for about 130 people, now has large reclining seats, like people might have in their own homes, with a tray for snacks and a cup holder for each seat.
Auditorium and cabaret club
The next phase of converting the former cinemas, previously numbered 10, 11 and 12, into the live entertainment auditorium and cabaret club is now beginning.
Cinema 10 will become a 300-seat room with a stage and dressing rooms for live entertainment performers.
Cinema 11 will become a 700-seat auditorium, and Cinema 12 will be converted to a cabaret club and restaurant.
Many of the live performances in the larger auditorium will be Broadway-type shows, both musicals and dramas, and there will be an IMAX screen in that venue.
One of the first shows planned will be “Grease,” followed later in the summer by a production of the 2023 Broadway play, “The Shark Is Broken,” about the relationship between the actors in the 1975 film Jaws. Hanney is the executive producer for “The Shark is Broken.”
The cabaret club will feature a variety of acts, including jazz and blues, comedy and personal appearances; it can also be used for weddings.
Hanney said he hopes to be able to establish a children’s theater, as well.
The lobby will be redone to include a bar area with outside seating, extending toward the pond behind the mall and the theater complex.
Above the concession stand will be a mezzanine area with a piano player, sometimes accompanied by a singer, and a bar.
Hanney had a kind of Las Vegas atmosphere in mind. In fact, he is now working to book Wayne Newton for some shows, he said.
Million dollar sound system
The total cost of the project is somewhere between seven and eight million dollars.
“The biggest cost is the equipment, the lighting and things like that. The sound system alone costs over a million,” Hanney said.
Hanney, admits to being rather ambitious in this project, but is shooting to have it completed and ready to go “hopefully by May.”
Hanney said he fell in love with the movie and movie theater business when he was 14 years old and volunteered cleaning up the theater after shows, receiving movie posters as payment.
His passion for the movies will be on display in the lobby where he wants to install the original billboard poster of The Godfather that he received as one of those payments.
And he began operating his first theater when he was just 19 years old.
The idea for this most recent project came during the pandemic when movie theaters, along with everything else, were shut down.
“I had the idea and no place to do it,” Hanney said.
Then the lease on Regal Cinemas ran out and he had his place.
“I wanted to do big shows on Cape Cod where I live. I wanted it to be a gathering place, like Las Vegas,” Hanney, a part-time Brewster resident, said.
Somewhere along the way, he wants to put fountains and lights in the pond behind the theaters.
“We’re just starting,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of things coming.”
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