All the analogies to things in the physical world -- like building a theater -- are, IMO, terrible. Refactoring is like... refactoring. Software is malleable in ways that other things are not. As things get more and more complex, refactoring is a way that we use to redo massive or small parts of a codebase so that we can continue to increase the complexity without going insane.
Code that is never refactored costs more per minute to maintain and change.