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A building that was very nearly a parking lot is now one of the most storied stages in Kentucky. This week Aram and Gabbi sit down with Edd MacKey — from Mt. Sterling by way of the Bahamas, a former LFUCG engineering technician who helped design the trails Lexington walks and bikes on, and now the man running the Lexington Opera House 🎭. (The friendship started, as Aram recalls it, in a Kroger checkout line.)

Edd makes a case that engineering and the arts aren't nearly as far apart as they look — everything from the sciences to the cosmos is design, he says, and the performing arts are just a more flamboyant sphere of it. From there the history pours out: the Opera House's original site at Broadway and Main, where the Hilton now stands and where Kentucky's first governor was inaugurated; how talking pictures gutted theaters nationwide and turned this one into a movie house before it shuttered entirely; and how absentee owners with no stake in the community left it slated for demolition in the 1970s. It was saved by locals who were invested — W.T. Young, Jim Host, and George and Linda Carey, with Linda spearheading the effort — at the same moment the city was spending $40 million on Rupp Arena. Gabbi asks the important question about ghosts. Edd can neither confirm nor deny 👻.

The rescue came with foresight that still defines the building: the Opera House Fund, which in fifty-plus years has put more than $13 million toward helping local performing arts groups afford a stage that would otherwise be out of reach. Edd explains the two halves of his job — managing thirteen local companies that each use the stage two to three times a year, plus the Broadway Live touring series now marking fifty years in Lexington — and how the calendar actually gets built, with Broadway dates locked first (touring routes wait for no one), then local groups slotting into their three optimum dates each. He also walks through Broadway Buddies, the thirteen-year-old outreach program started by Linda Carey and his predecessor Luann Franklin, which brings roughly 250 underserved kids a season in for a tour, theater etiquette, and a session with the technical crew on how spotlights, fog, and flying scenery actually work — then brings them back to watch a real Broadway show, paid for by donors 🎟️.

Then the conversation widens to the whole ecosystem Edd sits at the center of: the Fayette County Public Arts Commission, which evolved from an approval body into a funded one that backs murals, sculptures, and gardens across the county; and the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, now led by Grammy-winning artistic director and Lexington native Zach Brock. He shares a surprising thread between his birthplace and his adopted city — discovering E.P. Taylor's monument at Thoroughbred Park, a Kentucky horseman who developed property in Nassau and was tied to a Bahamian racetrack dating to the 1700s 🐎. And he closes with what still happens inside those walls: one of the country's first integrated stage productions in the early 1920s, Josephine Baker, three Netflix comedy specials, a UK Opera broadcast seen by millions on KET, and The Lexington Theatre Company's Les Misérables, the highest-grossing production in their history.

In this episode:

• Why an engineer ended up running an opera house
• The original Broadway and Main site, and Kentucky's first gubernatorial inauguration
• How talking pictures killed America's theaters, and how this one nearly became a parking lot
• The locals who saved it, and why absentee ownership abandons a community
• The Opera House Fund: $13M+ over fifty years for local performing arts
• Two jobs in one — thirteen local companies plus fifty years of Broadway Live
• How the season calendar actually gets built
• Broadway Buddies: ~250 k