The Keith-Albee Theatre is a performing arts center in downtown Huntington, West Virginia, United States. It was named after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation, one of the leading traveling vaudeville performance companies of the early 20th century, in an effort to convince the corporation's directors to make Huntington a regular stop.
The Keith-Albee Theatre opened to the public on May 7, 1928. Brothers A. B. and S. J. Hyman of Huntington built the theater and added it to roster of theaters, along with the State, Orpheum and Huntington.
The new theater was constructed under the supervision of vaudeville tycoons B. F. Keith and Edward Albee and eventually became part of their Keith-Albee circuit, a top-tier vaudeville tour along the East Coast of the United States. The Scottish-born architect Thomas W. Lamb, who designed the Keith-Albee, also designed approximately 150 theaters around the world. (Only 43 of these are still open; 71 have been demolished.)
Keith and Albee oversaw the construction of two other Lamb-designed theaters at the same time: The Stanley Theater in Utica, New York, which has since been completely renovated and hosts a variety of performances; and Keith's Theater in Flushing, New York, which sits barren and gutted, awaiting demolition.
Seating approximately 3,000 patrons, the Keith-Albee exemplified the opulence and grandeur of the 1920s with a Mexican Baroque design style. Intricate plasterwork, chandeliers, and balconies created an atmosphere of sophistication, along with cosmetic rooms, smoking rooms, and fireplaces in men’s and women’s restrooms adjoining the main lobby.
The Keith-Albee cost $2 million USD to construct in 1928[3] and was dubbed a “temple of amusement” by Huntington's Herald-Dispatch newspaper. The opening day performance on May 8, 1928, featured performer Rae Samuels, nicknamed the “Blue Streak of Vaudeville.”
The Keith-Albee originally was equipped with a Wurlitzer organ to accompany live performances and motion pictures. The organ was said to be capable of creating almost any sound effect needed for the silent films shown in the theater. The organ was removed and sold in the 1950s after live musical accompaniment had lost some of its appeal. Following an effort by Huntington native Robert Edmunds and his Huntington Theatre Organ Project, a 1927 Wurlitzer organ was purchased and reinstalled in the Keith-Albee in 2001.
The Marshall Artists Series, formed in 1936 and moved to the Keith-Albee in 1939, is a nonprofit organization based at Marshall University that continues to bring a variety of entertainment to Huntington, such as film festivals, Broadway shows, orchestras, and comedians.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Keith-Albee and the Hyman family began to feel the impact of competition from the growing television and motion picture industries. Faced with significant competition from surround-sound multiplexes, the Hymans divided the Keith-Albee's main auditorium into three movie theaters. Two smaller theaters were constructed in the east and west sections of the main auditorium. A fourth theater was later added in a street-facing retail space and has since become a screening room.
In celebration of its 50th anniversary in 1978, the Keith-Albee featured a recreation of a vaudeville show starring singer Rudy Vallee.
In 2006, the Keith-Albee ended its run as a functioning movie theater and, after almost 80 years of ownership, the Hyman family donated it to the Marshall University Foundation, which in turn passed it over to the newly formed Keith-Albee Performing Arts Center Foundation (KAPAC).
As vaudeville suffered a major decline in the 1930s, the Keith-Albee began to run movies, as did its nearby competitors such as the Cinema and Camelot.
By the 1970s, grand movie houses were being torn down to make way for larger cinemas. A group of citizens fought to save the theatre from closure demolition
In 1986, the Keith-Albee was placed on the National Register of Historical Places in conjunction with several blocks of downtown Huntington.
The Marshall University Foundation took a 99-year lease on the theatre in 1990 and conducted renovations.
In 2004, a new cinema opened in the nearby Pullman Square development. This time, the competition proved insurmountable[4], and on January 22, 2006, the Keith-Albee ceased being an active movie theater and became a performing arts center under the management of the Marshall University Foundation[5] Contractors and volunteers restored portions of the theatre to their original form. The partitions dividing the main auditorium into three theaters were removed[6]
In March 2024, KAPAC was in the midst of a $12 million capital campaign to continue the historic preservation and revitalization of the Keith-Albee. The theater has become a downtown Huntington center for community development, artistic enrichment and new programming for adults, students and children.
Related Research Articles
A movie palace is any of the large, elaborately decorated movie theaters built between the 1910s and the 1940s. The late 1920s saw the peak of the movie palace, with hundreds opening every year between 1925 and 1930. With the advent of television, movie attendance dropped, while the rising popularity of large multiplex chains in the 1980s and 1990s signaled the obsolescence of single-screen theaters. Many movie palaces were razed or converted into multiple-screen venues or performing arts centers, though some have undergone restoration and reopened to the public as historic buildings.
Thomas White Lamb was a Scottish-born, American architect. He was one of the foremost designers of theaters and cinemas of the 20th century.
Benjamin Marcus Priteca was a Scottish architect. He is best known for designing theatres for Alexander Pantages.
State Theatre New Jersey is a nonprofit theater, located in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It has seating for 1,850 people. Designed by architect Thomas W. Lamb in 1921, it is one of the oldest theaters in the State of New Jersey.
Frederick Freeman Proctor, aka F. F. Proctor, was a vaudeville impresario who pioneered the method of continuous vaudeville. He opened the Twenty-third Street Theatre in New York City.
The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation was the owner of a chain of vaudeville and motion picture theatres. It was formed by the merger of the holdings of Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II and Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit.
The Count Basie Center for the Arts, originally Count Basie Theatre, is a landmarked performing arts center in Red Bank, New Jersey.
The Orpheum Theatre, a 2,308-seat venue listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is located in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, on the southwest corner of the intersection of South Main and Beale streets. The Orpheum, along with the Halloran Centre for Performing Arts & Education, compose the Orpheum Theatre Group, a community-supported nonprofit corporation that operates and maintains the venues and presents education programs.
The Plaza Theatre is a historic building in El Paso, Texas built in 1930. The theater stands as one of the city's most well-known landmarks, and remains operational today. The theatre is a National Historic Building of Significance featuring the 2,050-seat Kendall Kidd Performance Hall, and the smaller 200-seat Philanthropy Theatre. It hosts Broadway productions, musical concerts, individual performers and the annual Plaza Classic Film Festival.
An atmospheric theatre is a type of movie palace design which was popular in the late 1920s. Atmospheric theatres were designed and decorated to evoke the feeling of a particular time and place for patrons, through the use of projectors, architectural elements and ornamentation that evoked a sense of being outdoors. This was intended to make the patron a more active participant in the setting.
The Orpheum Theater is a theater located in Omaha, Nebraska. The theater hosts programs best served by a more theatrical setting, including the Omaha Performing Arts Broadway Season, presented with Broadway Across America, and Opera Omaha's season. The theatre is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The main auditorium is a proscenium theater known as "Slosburg Hall". The theater has a theatre organ, made by Wurlitzer.
The Orpheum Theatre at 842 S. Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles opened on February 15, 1926, as the fourth and final Los Angeles venue for the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. After a $3 million renovation, started in 1989, it is the most restored of the historical movie palaces in the city. Three previous theatres also bore the name Orpheum before the one at 842 Broadway was the final one with that moniker.
The Hippodrome Theatre is a theater in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Palace Theatre is a 2,695-seat restored movie palace located at 34 W. Broad Street in Columbus, Ohio. It was designed and built in 1926 by the American architect Thomas W. Lamb as part of the American Insurance Union Citadel. Today the theater functions as a multi-use performing arts venue. It is owned and operated by The Columbus Association for the Performing Arts. The Palace Theater's "house" is considered separate from LeVeque Tower, while the marquee and lobby are part of the LeVeque complex.
The Orpheum Theatre, also known as New Orpheum Theatre and Orpheum Electric Building, is a performing arts center located at 528 S. Pierce Street in Sioux City, Iowa. Built in 1927 as a vaudeville and movie palace, the theatre was restored in 1999 and today is the home of the Sioux City Symphony Orchestra.
The Orpheum Theatre is a historic theater in downtown Wichita, Kansas, United States. It was designed by renowned theatre architect John Eberson with funding from a group of local investors and opened on September 4, 1922.
The Orpheum Theatre is a live performance and musical theater built in the 1920s as a movie palace in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, located one block from the Wisconsin State Capitol. In 2008 the Orpheum was added to the National Register of Historic Places as Madison's best surviving representative of the movie palace era.
The Boston Opera House, also known as the Citizens Bank Opera House, is a performing arts and esports venue located at 539 Washington St. in Boston, Massachusetts. It was originally built as the B.F. Keith Memorial Theatre, a movie palace in the Keith-Albee chain. The chain became part of RKO when it was established just before the theater opened on October 29, 1928, and it was also known as the RKO Keith's Theater. After operating for more than 50 years as a movie theater, it was rededicated in 1980 as a home for the Opera Company of Boston, which performed there until the opera company closed down in 1990 due to financial problems. The theater was reopened in 2004 after a major restoration, and it currently serves as the home of the Boston Ballet and also hosts touring Broadway shows.
The RKO Boston Theatre was a movie theatre in Boston, Massachusetts, located at 616 Washington Street, near Essex Street in the Boston Theater District. It opened as the Keith-Albee Boston Theatre on October 5, 1925.
The Orpheum Circuit was a chain of vaudeville and movie theaters. It was founded in 1886, and operated through 1927 when it was merged into the Keith-Albee-Orpheum corporation, ultimately becoming part of the Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) corporation.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
