Richmond Theater- Part III- Vaudeville to Cinema- 1920-1940

This is the final part of a three-part overview of theater and theater architecture in Richmond. Part One can be found here and Part Two can be found here.

The “motion picture palace” has its roots in the vaudeville palaces that preceded it by as much as  two decades. Both the Colonial (1919) and National (1920) were more architecturally significant and luxuriously furnished than any earlier theaters in the city.
 

 




Colonial Theatre, Library of Virginia. The unusual curved ceiling of the lobby is
caused by the tiered seating extending overhead.

The interiors of each were treated with spare, restrained, Neo-classical forms. The Colonial was designed for Wells, Wilmer, and Vincent by Richmond architects Carneal and Johnson. An astylar facade covered with diapered stonework was topped by an Ionic cornice. A central bay held a tall blind loggia. The Colonial had no balcony but tiered seating that rose to the rear. Box seat on the sides were surmounted by Adamesque panels and the ceiling was given an elegant geometrical form and a shallow saucer dome to correspond. The Colonial and the National incorporated sophisticated use concealed lighting and other “effects.” The National had colored lights that could be combined to create dramatic interior shading [NR form]. 

Both the Colonial and the National differ from the design of earlier theaters in the city. Designed for use with film, they no longer exhibit the horseshoe shape typical of earlier buildings. Provision of a single, deep balcony without columns supports and extending over the lobby gave a less restricted view of the stage and better visibility and acoustics from each seat. Marble stairs gave dignity to the balcony seating. The provision of nearby theaters for the use of the African-American population and increased regulation meant that many of the new theaters were not designed with segregated entrances and seating areas.

 

The Bluebird, 1917 (the Grand
Theatre after 1933).

The pioneering “motion picture queen” Amanda Thorpe, together with W. P. Kline and Walter Coulter built a modest movie theater at 620 E. Broad Street in 1917. Coulter eventually purchased this theater, called the Bluebird, from his partners along with its sister Bluebird Theatre in Petersburg. The Bluebird specialized in first-run western films for many years [Richmond News Leader, Dec 22, 1928]. Like the Bluebird Theatre in Petersburg, this modest film theater, as seen in an historic photograph, looks like a reworked storefront. It originally had a large electric sign depicting a bluebird opening and shutting its wings.  Since there are no building permit documents preserved for this theater, details are sketchy. Coulter sold a half interest in both Bluebirds to Charles Somma and the two formed the Bluebird Theatre Company. Coulter and Somma were planning more costly investments to come, such as the Brookland and the Byrd. 

At the same time that vaudeville and film were developing side by side, theatre design, construction, and decoration became codified and even industrialized in step with the architectural era known as “the American Renaissance.” New approaches to engineering, fabrication, and assembly made possible the huge spans, complex details, advanced mechanical, electrical, and projection equipment, and “gangs” of decorative craftsmen who could bring a palace to a life in very short order. Theaters in large cities like New York and Chicago set the tone for smaller towns. The provision of “dry” modern cooling (instead of passing air over blocks of ice used at Richmond’s National Theatre in 1922 ), developed by the Carrier Engineering Corporation, was pioneered at the Rivoli Theatre in New York in 1925. Like the Rivoli (1917) and other earlier palatial theaters designed by New York architectural impresario Thomas W. Lamb, the National has restrained, elegant Neo-classical interiors, rather than the ornate Baroque interiors that he popularized in the mid- to late 1920s.

The National Theatre, built on the site of the Rex in 1923.

The National was designed by Richmond-based architect Claude K. Howell, who had previously designed a number of theaters across the South in connection with the chain of vaudeville and film theaters supplied by the Keith-Albee circuit, including Jake Well’s Lyric. It was developed by owners John Pryor and Frank Ferrandini in connection with the highly respected First National vaudeville and film circuit. The 1,300-seat National was generously planned and lavishly decorated. The deep-bracketed eaves of the “Italian Renaissance” facade sheltered terra cotta figural bas reliefs. The lobby, decorated with Adamesque reliefs, had a circular opening giving views of a second-floor dome. The building included a billiard parlor in the basement and a nursery theatrical office on the second floor. The auditorium has a flat, Adamesque form with a pilaster order surmounted by a frieze of bas relief panels. Three arcaded box seats symmetrically flank the elliptically arched proscenium. The flat ceiling carried on beams and supports a small oval dome. 

A key figure in the creation of Richmond’s many theaters, Ferrucio Legnaioli executed the decorative plasterwork for most of them. Legnaioli came to Virginia to execute ceiling designs of McKim Mead and White in Garret Hall at the University of Virginia. His work brought to life the designs of the Empire (1911), the Lyric (1913), the Colonial (1920), the National (1922), the Capitol (1926), and the Byrd (1928).
 
As the film industry developed, Southern theater magnate Jake Wells was squeezed by new distribution networks and the studio system. Although he sold thirty of his theaters to a national chain in 1919, he managed to keep chain theaters out of Richmond entirely. With the help of his partners, Wilmer and Vincent, he purchased the National. By 1925, Wells controlled the programming at all of the major movie theaters in Richmond, including the National. Unable to keep up the quality of the films and accompaniment at the National and other theaters, Wells reputation as a promoter soured. Under pressure from the city’s merchants, and faced by the announcement in 1925 that Loews intended to build a major theater in Richmond, Wells sold all of his shares in the Richmond theaters to Wilmer and Vincent [Dewberry]. His theaters ended up as part of the Paramount chain.

Neighborhood Theaters



 

The Brookland Theatre, exterior and interior, 1924

In the mid-1920s, the focus of the major movie theater chains on the downtown movie patron meant that local theater developers saw opportunities in potential movie-going in the residential suburbs.  By this time, the increasing popularity of movies meant that many grand theaters, particularly those in suburban locations, were designed exclusively for film. Even as the Loews and Paramount chains made their appearance in downtown Richmond, the provision of theaters for Richmond’s suburbs remained a local concern. According to a contemporary article, Jake Well, who controlled the downtown theaters, “hesitated and yielded to protests not to establish a motion picture house in the residential section in which the Brookland was built. Four suburban theaters were built in the 1920s.

In 1924, Walter J. Coulter and a new partner, Charles A. Somma, left behind Broad Street and vaudeville entirely. Their firm, the Bluebird Theatre Company, built the 574-seat Brookland Theatre, the city’s first neighborhood “movie palace,” in the streetcar suburb of Brookland Park. The small, but elegantly appointed theater was equipped with a Wurlitzer theater organ played by virtuoso Carl Rond, who would move to the greatest of the neighborhood venues, the Byrd Theatre, four years later. As the possibility of talking pictures became a reality, movie theaters were quick to adapt by adding sound systems. The theatre organ, needed to accompany silent films, would recede in importance, but a few, notably at the Loew’s and Byrd theaters, remained in use for concerts between the shows.


The Capitol Theatre, built in the city’s West End in 1926. I
nterior (above) and exterior (below)

A smaller, but no less elegant theater with a resident organist was built in 1926 across from Broad Street Station where it could serve the nearby residential sections along Monument Avenue and adjacent streets. It took the form of the city’s first atmospheric theater, which simulated the appearance of an outdoor courtyard. The exterior, designed by Richmond architects Carneal and Johnson for Neighborhood Theaters Inc., headed by Morton G. Thalhimer, was one of the most elegant sole-purpose movie houses in the city.  It showed the city’s first talkie movie [http://richmondtheatres.tripod.com].

 

The Venus Theatre, Hull Street, Manchester, 1926

 

The Venus Theatre (834 seats) was commissioned by Amanda Thorpe from Fred Bishop, who had designed the Brookland earlier for her previous associate, Walter Coulter and his partner, Charles Somma.  The Venus made motion pictures easily accessible to southsiders who lived nearby or along the streetcar line that passed through Manchester. The Venus had a expensive stone facade befitting a civic institution as much as a commercial establishment, lending moral seriousness to the daily matinee shows.

Loew’s Theatre, 1928, exterior above, and interior below

Richmond’s Loew’s Theatre, part of the Loew’s chain associated with MGM, was also built in 1928. It represented the first inroad of that theatre chain in the city. It was designed for theatre magnate by John Eberson as a representative of a new type of motion picture palace in which he specialized, the atmospheric theater, which simulated an exotic outdoor setting. The atmospheric theater, designed to represent an exotic courtyard in Italy or Spain, represents the perfection of the movie theatre as a new theater type breaking with the past. Air conditioned and lit by artificial stars, the artfully aged stucco walls and irregular skyline transported the viewer directly into an illusory stage set, supporting and extending the intimate physicality of the film image.  A massive theatre organ provided accompaniment to films until the advent of sound and continued in use for concerts between shows until c 1970.   

 

Mosque Theatre, 1926, Exterior at top and interior below

A few years earlier, in 1926, the massive 4,600-seat Mosque Theatre was introduced in the West End. It was built as a performing arts venue containing in a hotel/convention center by the Acca Temple Shrine and was designed by Marcellus Wright,Sr. in association with Charles M. Robinson and Charles C. Robinson. The theater was built in a Moorish or Middle Eastern style with elaborate murals, a large dome, and Moorish grille work. Also equipped with a Wurlitzer organ, the building began by showing movies on a regular schedule, but this did not continue for very many years.  Acquired by the city in 1940, the Mosque (now the Altria Theatre) served as Richmond’s principal municipal auditorium for many years, housing the city’s ballet, symphony, and opera performances.

Byrd Theatre 1928, exterior (above) and interior (below)

Just as talking pictures were introduced, the Byrd Theatre was opened as an architecturally elaborate film-only venue in the city’s West End in 1928 by the partnership of Coulter and Somma. It took its decorative program from European opera houses of the previous century, but as translated by big-city vaudeville and movie houses of previous years, like the vast Chicago Theatre, built in 1921 to the designs of  architects Rapp and Rapp in the “Neo-Baroque French Revival style” with elaborate mural paintings or the 5,000-seat Roxy Theatre in New York conceived by film producer Herbert Lubin, Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager, and decorator Harold Rambusch and completed in 1927. 

Behind its restrained “Empire” facade, the Byrd’s interior was intended to astonish Richmonders accustomed to the cool Neo-classicism of the city’s principal theaters. Most viewers responded positively to the lavish lobby and auditorium: “from the moment of entering the lobby, wainscotted with Grecian marble in tones of brown and buff, with its bronze doors and stair railings, it unusually well-executed frescoes and its beautiful crystal fixtures, one is impressed with the feeling of luxury the promoters of this enterprise have tried to provide- not costliness merely, but beauty, comfort and refinement” [Helen De Motte, “At the Theatres: New Byrd is Place of Beauty,” Dec. 25, 1928].

Byrd Theatre Lobby

Like the Brookland, Coulter and Soma’s earlier effort in Brookland Park, the Byrd was designed by Richmond architect Fred Bishop. When it was built the Byrd Theatre was intended to impress. The architect emulated the best of French Empire theaters, seen through the reality of American commercial theatrical entrepreneurship. Because of the fully developed construction industries and decorative techniques that had evolved over the previous decades, Coulter and Somma were able to achieve an architecturally unified building that embodied the complexity, if not the delicacy, of its European models.

In a move seen at the time as similar in significance to the $1.8m sale of Jake Wells Richmond theaters sale in 1926, Coulter announced just before the opening of the Byrd that he had purchased Somma’s interest in the Byrd, the Bluebird, the Brookland, and another theater in Petersburg for more than $1m [“Local Theatre Sale Involves over $1,000,000: Coulter buys Somma’s Interest in Richmond and Petersburg houses,” Richmond News-Leader, Dec. 22, 1928].

Large new theaters were built for many years after the financial crash of 1929. The first four neighborhood theaters were followed by at least eight more around the city in the 1930s. These include the Bellevue and Ginter theatres across from each other in Northside, the Robinson in the East End named for movie star Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, the East End Theatre on 25th Street, the Westhampton on Grove, the Westover in Forest Hills, the Carillon on Cary Street, the Lennox in Fulton (built in 1909 as the Star and rebuilt as the Lennox in 1948), and the Henrico in Highland Springs.  Many of these incorporated the new architectural detailing associated with modernism, particularly the modern or Art Deco forms.



Bellevue Theatre, 1937

Bellevue Theatre today





Ginter Theatre, 1937, closed 1939



 

The Robinson Theatre was built in 1937. The Moderne-
style building designed by Richmond architect,
Edward F. Sinnott served an African-American
community in Richmond's East End.



 



Henrico Theatre, Highland Springs, 1938



East End Theatre, 1938



 

Lee Theatre, West Grace Street, 1935



Westhampton Theatre, Grove Avenue, 1938



After the construction of the Byrd, Loew’s and the Mosque theaters on the eve of the Great Depression, there were no more grand, architecturally expressive theaters to take their place on the streets of Richmond. After the demolition of the Lyric in 1963, Richmond never built another stand-alone, purpose-built theater for stage plays and concerts. Instead, the city has relied on the rehabilitation of a small stock of existing, architecturally significant theaters that were built between 1910 and 1950 for stage plays, vaudeville and film. These fully functioning theaters include the Empire (Sara November Theatre), the National, the Mosque (Altria Theatre), Loewe’s (Carpenter Center), the Robinson Theatre (1937), the Henrico (1938), and the Hippodrome (1914/1945).

Post-War II theater and movie viewing became a much more personal experience. Architecture that prevented imaginative immersion in the program was avoided. The Virginia Museum Theatre (1955-2003) was an important venue, but it had no visible exterior and a purposely plain interior designed to draw maximum attention to the stage. The Richmond area has seen the creation of places for performance in other building types, such as rehabilitated taverns, department stores, and firehouses, or in shopping-mall movie houses. However, the grandest film theater of them all, the Byrd, has, from its suburban location, resisted alteration. It has adapted to changing practices in the film industry for 85 years without losing its focus on film, popular entertainment, and architectural and musical spectacle.  

  
 

 

 

 

 

  

Richmond Theater Part One- "An Edifice Devoted to the Tragic and Comic Muses:" the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The ‘old Theatre near the Capital’…was so far old, that the walls were well browned by time, and the shutters to the windows of a pleasant neutral tint between rust and dust colored… Within, the play-house presented a somewhat more attractive appearance. There was ‘box,’ ‘pit,’ and ‘gallery,’ as in our day; and the relative prices were arranged in much the same manner.

                                — John Esten Cooke, 1854



Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, 1813

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London,

The ancient building type known as the theater is, in the most general sense, where the community gathers to remember the great deeds of the past and to imagine the future. From the Renaissance to the early twentieth century theatres incorporated tightly curving plans and raked stages derived from what was known of the ancient theaters of the Greeks and Romans. This tight arrangement allowed each theater-goer present not only to enjoy the spectacle of an opera or play, but to participate in the collective experience of a gathered company. The Renaissance interpreted the form and content of classical drama in ways that continue to affect theater design today, basing their work on surviving texts and the accessible physical fabric of actual theaters.

The theaters of the continental Renaissance had virtually no exterior presence, since they served the court and were located within the princely palace. As drama became democratized in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the theater emerged from the palace to take its place as a civic building, equipped for this role with the elements of the classical orders.

On the interior, the intention was not to produce a realistic illusion, but instead, through sumptuous music and art to transform and inform the vision of an entire community. American theaters by the mid-nineteenth-century were well equipped, spacious, and architecturally sophisticated. Never simply a place of amusement, theater managers followed a conventional program incorporating in the same evening popular entertainment and dramatic works that stimulated the moral imagination. In order to take its place in the civic order, the theater was given a prominent location and a high level of architectural finish, often including a fully articulated architectural order.

Background

Most American theaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like their European models, were urban buildings in which the height of the stage and auditorium were concealed behind a classical streetfront. While stages tended to be very deep, they did not have tall fly lofts. Lobbies were often minimal in size and scale. Demands associated with the development of the dramatic art and the expansion of building amenities caused a gradual bloating of the structure housing the theater, which continues to this day. The nineteenth-century impulse to present theaters and other buildings as singular temple-form structures became problematic as the secondary features of the theater form, such as the fly loft and lobby, expanded.

The interiors of many of the nation’s most sophisticated nineteenth-century theatres were inspired by London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This famous building, as rebuilt in 1812, utilized the baroque horseshoe theater or opera house plan, with several tiers of boxes and sloping seats arranged in a horseshoe shape around a central floor or pit.

St. Charles Theater, New Orleans of 1843 shows the familiar form derived from the Theatre Royal, Drury lane.

Theater in Early Virginia

The first documented theater in British North America stood on the east side of the Palace Green in Williamsburg. It was built between 1716 and 1718 and was used for amateur and student plays until it was sold to serve as a city court building. It was replaced by a new structure just beyond the eastern end of town in 1751. This new theater was built for the Murray-Kean Company, a troop of actors whose first performance in Williamsburg was of Shakespeare’s Richard III. A new group of actors, probably the first professional theater troop in the colonies, arrived in Williamsburg in 1752. The London Company of Comedians, managed by Lewis Hallam, arrived in the colony and purchased and improved Williamsburg's theater building. After a season of plays, including the Merchant of Venice and the Anatomist, or Sham Doctor, the troop departed. Soon after the theater was seized to satisfy Hallam’s debts and converted into a house. The troop returned under different management in 1760 and built a new theater, used sporadically by the London Company and others over the following twelve years. The theater or “playhouse” became a popular social center and was patronized by colonial leaders like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.  There is no evidence that the theater was used after 1772 and by 1780 it had been demolished.

Study Model of The Old Theater, Williamsburg, from http://research.history.org/vw1776/revcity/





Archeology at the site of the 1752 theater shows it to have been an earthfast frame structure measuring about 72 feet in length and 44 feet in width and built of posts spaced about eight feet apart. Traces of a brick foundation at the west end indicated some sort of brick entrance. A large excavation at the center, bounded by a low brick wall near the center of the building, would have been the “pit”  which held much of the theater’s audience. The stage took up approximately half of the theater’s volume,

According to Lisa E. Fischer, whose "Douglass-Hallam Theater: Excavation of an Eighteenth-Century Playhouse," produced for Colonial Williamsburg, documented the early theater,

These itinerant companies developed a touring circuit and, whenever possible, presented their plays in actual theater buildings, sometimes even constructing their own prior to their first scheduled performances in a city. Typical Colonial theaters were relatively large structures, measuring at least 70′x30′, and resembled provincial theaters found in England at the time. The interior of the theater would have exhibited a large stage area on one end, possibly taking up as much as half of the building. An unusual characteristic of eighteenth-century stages was that they were commonly lined with a set of iron spikes designed to discourage audience members from getting onto the stage to disrupt the performance. The seating within the theater was divided into three sections. In front of the stage, sunk below the ground would have been the pit, crammed with benches. The most expensive seating was in the boxes around the sides and back of the theater. The cheapest seating was in the gallery located around the theater above the boxes. . . .An evening at the theater in the eighteenth century would have consisted of two plays, a longer opening play and a shorter and lighter concluding one, and possibly several entr’actes.                                   

Virginians were never long without access to theatrical performances.  A single thread of theatrical endeavor was nearly continuous with the colony’s urban history, beginning in 1718 and corresponding closely to the annual gathering of leaders associated with the legislative function. Theater was, however, temporarily discouraged by the authorities as frivolous during the Revolutionary War.

Theater in Early and Antebellum Richmond

The capital was moved to Richmond in 1779.  Clearly, one of the essential urban building types that moved with the capital to Richmond was the theater, direct heir of its predecessors in Williamsburg. Indeed, the second act of the “Common Council” of the newly formed City of Richmond at its meeting on July 3, 1782 was to require that Mr. Ryan, the theatre manager, account for the number of performances “since the last settlement” and pay the required tax. The first theater building for which there is a record stood on Main Street near the market. This “old theater” was mentioned in 1788 [Christian, 1912]. 

A large frame school building was built in 1785 on the “Academy Square,” in “Turpin’s Addition” on the eastern slope of Shockoe Hill. It faced west, fronting on Twelfth Street. After the academy failed to prosper, the building, known as the “New Theatre,” was leased to Hallam and Henry, a successor to the English company that had previously put on plays in Williamsburg.  According to early historian Samuel Mordecai, Hallam and Henry converted the Academy into a theater, "and here the tragic and the comic muses first bestowed their tears and smiles — in an edifice devoted to them — on a Richmond audience." The Beggars’ Opera was performed in 1787.  This building served for theatrical purposes until it burned in 1798.



The new Richmond Theater of 1808 at the back of the Academy lot, shown at the letter "P" on the Young Map of 1809.

This diagram of a 1788 English theater (The Theatre Royal in Richmond, Yorkshire)

shows the typical relationships between stage, boxes, and pit seating in a provincial theater of the period [Richard Leacock, Development of the English Playhouse. Methuen, 1973]. Trap doors provided entries for supernatural effects and tracks in the floor permit the sliding of set panels into place.

In 1798, Benjamin Henry Latrobe prepared a design for a ground-breaking theater/hotel to replace the academy building at this key nodal location where the main route (Broad Street) turned to descend the hill. The plan was never executed. Had it been built, it would have represented a new and unique building type, but it still employed a pit, boxes, and a gallery as seen in the section below.



Latrobe's extraordinary drawing of the disorderly state of the Green Room at the Richmond Theatre in 1798

Section through Latrobe's Theater

After 1802, plays were performed in the hall over the market house and in “Quarrier’s Coach-shop” at Cary and Seventh streets until a new brick theater was built in the rear of the “Academy or Theater Square” in 1806. It was this three-story building that burned, with terrible loss of life, in 1811 and was memorialized by the construction of Monumental Church on the site.

Engraving of the Richmond Theater Fire. The theater is depicted as a three-story building with windows in the front area. A central door is apparently flanked by doors to the upper floors, while windows in the body of the building are few. The building to the rear (the west front of First Baptist Church) is shown inaccurately, so the drawing cannot be treated as completely reliable, but the form is similar to theaters from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

According to several accounts, Richmonders abandoned theatrical endeavors for a time after the disastrous 1811 fire. A new theater was built in 1818 on the southeastern corner of Seventh and Broad on Shockoe Hill. In 1838, it was remodeled and named after Chief Justice John Marshall [Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Celebrate Richmond Theater (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 2002)]. An evening there was remembered by the editor of the Richmond Daily Dispatch. His description of the night provides clues to the form and fittings of the theater, which seems similar to that of the eighteenth-century examples mentioned earlier. A evening at the theater in 1820 included a performance of “Virginius,” followed by a farce called “High Life Below Stairs.” “We believe we half exhausted our power of laughing that night; for we never have been able to laugh as we did then, from that time to this. We roared, we shouted, we screamed, we fairly danced in the box, until we attracted the attention of everybody in the house. We leant over, as though we were ready to jump into the pit” [Daily Dispatch on 5 Jan 1862].

Management and funding for the theater were always a problem, but in spite of that Richmond saw about three hundred different plays, some repeatedly, in the years between 1819 and 1838, including fourteen of Shakespeare's. Twelve of these were written in Richmond [Agnes Bondurant, Poe's Richmond, 1942]. During this period Richmond was a major theatrical center, typical in its tastes and requirements to other cities up and down the eastern seaboard. 

The Marshall Theatre, of which no image survives, burned in 1862, likely as a result of arson. Losses included “the valuable scenery, painted by the elder Grain, Getz, Heilge, and Italian artists employed by George Jones; all the wardrobe and "property," including some costly furniture and decorations; rich oil paintings and steel portraits of celebrated dramatists; manuscript plays, operas, and oratorios, all are involved in the common destruction. . . in addition to the whole stock wardrobe. . . [while] the orchestra lost between $300 and $400 in instruments and sheet music” [Richmond Daily Dispatch, 6 Jan 1862]. The company and theater were managed by Gilbert. Junius Brutus Booth appeared there in 1821 in his first appearance on the America stage. The Marshall saw appearances by many of the great actors of the day, including Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, John Drew, and Joseph Jefferson, as well as Edwin and John Wilkes Booth.   

Although no image of either the interior or the exterior survives, it seems likely, based on examples in other cities, that the auditorium included, in addition to the central pit filled with benches, a proscenium flanked by classical columns, perhaps similar to the 1798 Park Theater in New York, seen below.

The Park Theatre in New York, built in 1798, occupied a stone structure.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 Oct  1938

While there was enough business for only one theater for the city's first century-- from about 1782 until 1886, it was not the only assembly hall. At first, public events were held mostly in the Masons' Hall of 1787 or the Market Hall of 1794. As the nineteenth century progressed, other venues for shows, concerts, lectures, and meetings were built across the city, often on upper floors to serve a primary purpose as meeting rooms for various organizations. Corinthian Hall on Main Street was the site of Adelina Patti’s concert in 1860. Odd Fellows Hall was used for public events from 1842 to 1858. Metropolitan Hall was opened in 1853 with the adaptation of the former First Presbyterian Church building of 1828 for secular audiences. It stood on the northeast corner of Fourteenth and Franklin streets. According to Mary Wingfield Scott, it was used for “lectures, theatrical entertainments and political conventions, and later as a rather questionable variety-house.” Mechanics' Hall included a lecture room in 1857 to assist young men learning “the useful arts.”  

Drama was important to the doomed, crowded Confederate capital city. The burned Marshall Theater was rebuilt as the Richmond or New Richmond Theater at the height of the Civil War, opening in 1863. It closed in 1896 [Christian 452], a tired and down-at-heel veteran of many scenes. It seems likely that the Richmond Theatre reused at least a portion of the walls of the Marshall, since few structures were built in the city in 1863. The Greek Revival elements of the building are, however, unlikely to have been features of the previous theatre, built in 1819. Other theatrical venues prospered as well during the years that Richmond served as the Confederate capital. According to one source, these more popular venues included the Metropolitan Hall, the Richmond Varieties, a bawdy precursor to vaudeville, and the Richmond Lyceum [Kathyrn Fuller-Seeley. Celebrate Richmond Theater (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 2002). 

Richmond Theatre seen on the 1876 Beers Map of Richmond.

The Richmond Theatre, which was about 160 feet deep (the size of a Richmond lot),  stood four stories tall. The regular windows on the front and west side do not give any clue of the varied rooms within (some windows on the west side may be false windows, but light was needed on the interior for work associated with preparing for the plays). Like most fully equipped theaters of the time, the Richmond Theater did not have a fly loft for raising sets above the stage.

Richmond Theater shortly before demolition in the 1890s.

As an important civic building, the Marshall Theater was given the full form of a temple. The building was detailed in the Greek “Tower of the Winds” Corinthian order with fluted three-quarter engaged columns on the inset front flanked by pilasters called “antae,” which continue along the west side separating every second window bay. The ornate Corinthian order was appropriate for a building used in the pleasurable festivities associated with drama. Entrance was through five openings in the first floor front, which was detailed to provide a basement to the temple front above.

The interior of the Richmond Theatre soon after the Civil War. The illustrator appears to have increased the dramatic value of the political meeting depicted by combining a view of the proscenium and boxes from the seats with a view of the auditorium from the stage.   http://richmondtheatres.tripod.com 

The images of the interior shows that it was similar to other antebellum American theaters and that it continued the tradition of a central pit surrounded by raised horseshoe seating. Like other theaters derived from English models such as the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the angled boxes to either side to the stage were flanked by colossal fluted Corinthian columns.

Interior of the Richmond Theatre, 1890, Valentine Museum. The flats for the scenery can be seen behind the painted stage curtain. Before electricity, theaters needed windows for illumination when a play was actually not being staged.

The history of theater in Richmond did not end with the burning of a significant portion of the city, in fact the Richmond Theatre wasn't harmed at all and the plays continued. The late nineteenth century saw the further diversification of entertainment. Increased disposable income among the urban working class encouraged the breakdown of theatrical productions into high- and low-brow and the introduction of competition among a growing number of theaters, although entertainment in Richmond at all levels continued to have a decidedly "Southern" plot and cast of characters.

This account is continued in Part Two, located here.