BBC presenter Donna Traynor (41) is a regular theatre-goer and is looking forward to attending the gala concert. She says: It will be a bit of a glamorous affair. I love going to the Grand Opera House to see anything from boogie nights to Stones in His Pockets.
I performed on the Opera House stage in the BBC show Making a Difference in 2000. I sang two duets, Baby it's Cold Outside with Desune Coleman from EastEnders (he played Lenny Wallace), and the Tom Jones song Endless Love with Joe Savino (Liam) from Ballykissangel.
It was great and so exhilarating.
I had a ball. I was given a feather boa to wear. I thought 'I don't know about that, it's a bit over the top', but when you see it on the stage it is completely different.
The whole thing was brilliant.
On the night of Making a Difference there were a lot of different people getting ready to perform. It did seem very cramped and suffocating behind the scenes, but it can't all be salubrious.
Everyone can be hot and sweaty, but at the end of the day when you walk onto that expansive stage and perform, that is the most important thing.
You have to have nerves to get the adrenaline racing. But once on stage the performer in us just clicks into gear and you're flying.
I also hosted a school celebration day at the Opera House, introducing different types of musicians and artists.
I have been involved in singing since I was small, entering talent contests and that sort of thing. I love going on the stage and performing, mostly through song.
When the chance came up to appear at the Opera House I thought it was fantastic. I have never had that experience of being in a professional theatre before.
It's very different from being on TV, where you are in the studio before filming.
You know the intricacies of it. There might be a small audience but normally it's just a camera and the camera crew.
The only thing that was surprising were the tiny little changing rooms.
It's difficult for those who work and perform there. They needed the extra space the refurbishment will give them and so they can bring in bigger productions.
There is, though, something intimate and personal and very enjoyable about the Opera House.
I have been to big West End and Broadway theatres. Sometimes you are just lost among the huge, huge crowd.
At the Opera House there can be hundreds of people inside, but you feel you are part of a small group.
You can have boogie nights, where everyone is up dancing, or one full of emotion.
I haven't been asked to do the panto in the revamped theatre - yet! - but if the BBC are going to do something there I wouldn't write off the chances of me making an appearance.
There is always something in the melting pot.
Belfast-born GMTV reporter and presenter Aideen Kennedy (28) spent many a youthful hour behind the scenes and on stage at the Grand Opera House. Aideen began her career in the limelight at the tender age of 10 when she joined the Belvoir Players.
She says: I attended St Dominic's on Belfast's Falls Road, where I studied GCSE and A level drama before joining the National Youth Theatre, touring around Ireland.
We did two weeks at the Opera House in a performance of Grease - Maurice Jay from U105 was Danny. I was in the chorus dancing and singing, trying to learn as much as I could.
At 16 it was an eye-opener. The following year I was at the Opera House again in the musical Chorus Line.
On leaving school I studied for a degree in communication, advertising and marketing at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown, but I kept up my drama as a member of St Agnes's Choral Society.
While at university I took part in the rousing musical Oklahoma and played the part of Jacqueline in Me and My Girl, again both performed at the Opera House.
Jacqueline was my first main part. It was nerve-wracking.
It was also the first time my future mother-in-law had come to see me. It was quite a raunchy part and I was mortified.
It is one thing to be taken to a show by your parents, but quite another to go behind the curtain and see the workings of a theatre.
To have been there was just magical, especially to be part of a large cast at a young age. It is very special to get to see both sides, in the audience and as a cast member.
The Grand Opera House is a beautiful building and quite mysterious.
It was fascinating to see all the lighting, the sets and all the workings going on around, and very thrilling and exciting to perform before a live audience.
I remember when the wigs arrived for Oklahoma. There were about 30 dancers lining down the corridor to get theirs, hoping their wig would suit them.
They were swapped around and combed down. We were told to treasure them as they were so expensive. The costumes came from London and were stored and looked after so lovingly.
One of the really nice things is when you see the sets for the first time after months and months of rehearsals. Putting on the costumes and the make-up and the lights coming up - there's no feeling like it.
For me it was so confidence-building and a great chance to work with a team like that.
It was so good to realise what was possible.
I'm delighted to see the Opera House improved and extended, the old married with the new. I know it's a bit clich e d, but if we are to try to attract people from all over Europe we need to have a first class venue where people can come and see the many different kinds of theatre.
Maybe it will open drama facilities to the community even more. There are very few places now where community theatre groups can go.
I'm one of the invited guests being given a tour of the new-look theatre today and I plan to go and see Marie Jones' play Stones in His Pockets next week.
Reporting has taken over my life these days but is just as exciting. It has replaced drama for me but I still love musicals. I have bought tickets for The Sound Of Music in the West End before Christmas but I hope it will come over here.
I think people would love it.
Veteran journalist Eddie McIlwaine, who has covered hundreds of events at the Grand Opera House, has loved the theatre all his life. He says: There's a magic about the Opera House that no other theatre in the province can equal.
I've loved the old place since I was first taken there as a little boy - and found myself sitting next to a lion in the circle. He had swung up like Tarzan on a rope from the stage to give me a bar of chocolate. I liked that and ignored adults who tried to tell me my lion was only a boy actor in a skin from that week's circus.
But I had an embarrassing moment at the place that still makes me cringe to this day. One night in the 50s I took this girl from Ballyclare to a show. I was the blossoming newspaper novice trying to impress and Jimmy Young was top of the bill, in the days when he was a pop idol with his career as a BBC Radio 2 icon still ahead.
We strolled nonchalantly into the stalls - only to discover to my horror that she was on one side of the aisle and I was on the other. And I was too green and inexperienced to ask the box office to sort it out. Needless to say, that was the end of this boy-girl relationship.
She laughed all the way home.
I've a bundle of happy memories of the Opera House. My old friend, the late Ruby Murray, had the audience on their feet with her Softly Softly and another Belfast singer, Ronnie Carroll, charmed packed houses with his Roses are Red.
Then there was Dana playing Snow White and singing All Kinds of Everything, the so-fluent words of actor Colin Blakely, the inspired singing of Heather Harper, and the lilting flute of Jimmy Galway.
The house had lean times too. It was once a downmarket place of entertainment called The Palace and when live theatre lost appeal the management turned it into a cinema.
In fact, there was a time in the Sixties when the Opera House, with its theatre bar still operating, was the only picture house in town where you could get a drink.
Well, the Opera House has been given yet another facelift; not the first in its long career, during which it has even had to survive terrorist bombs. What I like about the new look, though, is that so much remains the same.
The stalls, the circle and even the gods are as they always were, unhampered by time and modernisation.
I will still be able to take my seat and wait for the curtain to rise, confident that all my memories of the theatre Belfast loves the most, are untouched, intact.
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