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Now Reading: Three Thousand a Week: Parque Mayer Wakes From a Thirty-Year Sleep
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Three Thousand a Week: Parque Mayer Wakes From a Thirty-Year Sleep
Three Thousand a Week: Parque Mayer Wakes From a Thirty-Year Sleep
On a Saturday in April, two stages came alive a hundred metres apart. Inside the Capitólio, Sofia Escobar was about to become Eva Perón; across the courtyard at the Teatro Variedades, a cast readied Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights—for the first time in Portuguese. Between the two houses, more than three thousand people a week were passing through doors that a decade earlier led nowhere.
That figure, reported by Lisboa Cultura in mid-April, quantified the shift at Parque Mayer, the entertainment quarter that spent the better part of thirty years behind plywood hoardings. At the pace of those spring weeks the complex projected roughly 156,000 spectators a year—nearly 2.6 times the 60,000 who passed through the Capitólio and Variedades combined in all of 2024. The comeback is no longer a rendering pinned to a hoarding. It is a box-office fact.
The Capitólio returned to public management under EGEAC (now Lisboa Cultura) in late 2023. The Variedades, shuttered for roughly three decades, reopened on 5 October 2024 after a rehabilitation by architect Manuel Aires Mateus that preserved a hall seating more than 300. With the Teatro Maria Vitória, open since 1922, Parque Mayer now fields three working stages for the first time in a generation.
The programming that drew the crowds was deliberately accessible: established musicals with star casts. Evita, produced by the Yellow Star Company with Escobar and Diogo Morgado, ran Thursday to Sunday at the Capitólio through 28 June (€25–€35). In The Heights, directed by Sissi Martins with Luísa Cruz in the cast, played the Variedades from 25 March to 3 May (€20–€30). This summer the programme extends to the rooftop: the second edition of Cinecapitólio Rooftop, curated by Rui Pedro Tendinha, screens cycles devoted to David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, and Tim Burton until 26 September (€14).
Not everything is resolved. The Câmara approved changes to the Parque Mayer masterplan in October 2024, introducing housing and reducing underground parking to protect buried watercourses, but the surrounding blocks remain largely untouched. Three stages are alive; the urban plan is still catching up.
On 8 July the Variedades turned one hundred, a century after it first opened. The queue outside looked the way queues have always looked at Parque Mayer: people choosing where to eat after the curtain, in a neighbourhood that finally gives them a reason to linger.
