I thought it would be fun to devote several posts to some of the Midwest’s grand old historic theatres you can still visit. This is the first of a five-part series.
My wife and I have found that old theatres are a perfect intersection of her love of the stage and my devotion to history and historic playhouses.
In fact, our vision of a happy retirement features many short trips to favorite cities for a night or two in a nice hotel and then restaurant and performance sampling.
We’d much rather do this several times a year than make the predictable trek to Florida or Arizona to sit around all winter. But to each his own.
Actually, the Midwest is blessed with a number of fine old theatres. Throw in the offerings of Toronto, Stratford and Niagara on the Lake in Ontario, and you have venues and variety to spare.
Collectively, these posts won’t be an exhaustive list of all the historic theatres throughout the Midwest—nor are they intended to be. We’re just going to pick a few randomly to visit.
Many of these venues began life as playhouses, noted for their stage productions. Some later theatres were built as movie palaces. Nowadays, restored theatres tend to be a little of everything—movie palace, concert venue, playhouse—even a space for community gatherings, proms, wedding receptions and special events.
Kalamazoo’s State Theatre is no exception. At their official website, you can find details about renting the facility. It almost has to be that way today. The cost of restoring—and then maintaining—these old buildings is so great that officials need to squeeze out of them every dollar of revenue possible just to keep things going.
Many of the theatres designed and built in the late 20s and 30s were of the “atmospheric” style. This simply meant that the inside of the theatre tried to transport audience members to exotic, foreign settings. This might be a village square, a castle or an open-air amphitheatre, complete with twinkling stars—thanks to hundreds of low-wattage bulbs builds fitted into the ceiling.
The Great Depression made the lavish theatres of the early 20s impossible, so architects turned to the atmospherics because they did not require grand auditorium ceilings with their expensive chandeliers. Atmospherics only needed a smooth dome-like structure to create their magic. The side walls added to the illusion, giving the impression of a garden or the grounds of a palace.
Atmospheric theatres caught on and spread quickly in both the United States and abroad. Since they whisked audiences into a fantasy world, they were a means of escaping the tough economic realities of the Great Depression, if only for a couple of hours. The first atmospheric opened as the Orpheum Theatre in Wichita, Kansas, in September 1922.
John Eberson, a Romanian-born American architect, was one of the most prolific proponents of the atmospheric style theatre. According to cinematreasures.org, he designed some 118 of them here and around the world during his career.
“He specialized in depicting outdoor settings with no formal walls and made the whole auditorium a gigantic stage set that enveloped the whole audience,” says Ross Thorne in Picture Palace Architecture in Australia. Kalamazoo’s 1927 State Theatre is an atmospheric designed by Eberson.
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