Anyway to make this theme load faster?

Hi,

I have a wordpress CMS site running on this theme that is loading kind of slowly.

When I look at the code of the pages generated, it seems there's a lot of code at the top before the actual content. Is all this code necessary? Doesn't it slow down the site?

Another question is how to make the center container load before the left sidebar. This will allow the readers to start reading while both sidebars load.

How can this be done?

Thanks, John
p.s. any other tips to make the site load faster will be appreciated.