IT HAS been five years in the making, but Belfast's £32 million glass fronted Waterfront Hall is about to open. Depending on who is speaking, its prime function oscillates between conference venue and concert hall. But if in programming its splendid Opening Festival (from January 17th to February 15th), the management team is signalling its intentions for the future, the city ratepayers may take heart that here is a civic building in which they might all take pride and pleasure. A free family fun day on January 18th sets the tone, with street theatre, circus entertainments, clowns, puppets and Punch and Judy shows taking place on the stone terraces and metal walkways. The serious entertainment will have begun the night before, when the Ulster Orchestra, with Barry Douglas and James Galway, play the opening gala concert. The month long programme unfolds with, among others, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Monserrat Caballe, the Donal Lunny Earth Band, the Belfast Harp Orchestra, Van Morrison, Paul Brady and Altan, Phil Coulter, Boxcar Willie, Let Loose, Ben Elton, Mary Black and Phil Coulter and his Orchestra.

Meanwhile, the smaller studio space will stage the Lyric Theatre's The Playboy of the Western World, Theatre Sans Frontieres, Pig Boy, Box Clever's Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, an Irish language celebration of Valentine's Day in association with An Culturlann McAdam O Fiaich, and much more besides. Counter bookings are at the temporary box office in the Grand Opera House Ticket Shop in Great Victoria Street, Belfast; telephone bookings on Belfast 334455.