Orpheum Theater

About this property

The Orpheum Theater 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. Prior to 1900, a "theater" was usually a place to see live entertainment: vaudeville, opera or live music. A good example in Madison was the Fuller Opera House, built in 1890 at 5-10 West Mifflin. Motion pictures arrived around 1900. They were initially shown in stores and warehouses, and often called "nickelodeons" because a ticket cost five cents. The Fuller Opera added the new motion pictures to its schedule, and other movie/vaudeville theaters were built: the Majestic Theater at 115 King St. in 1906 and the Amuse Theater at 16 E. Mifflin in 1910. In 1909 the Grand Theater at 204-206 State St was built specifically for motion pictures. The new motion pictures had become somewhat a craze. By 1913 there were eight theaters in Madison showing only movies, and as many a tenth of the population went to a movie each day. Once the market was established, some theaters were created extra fancy to stand out from the others - movie palaces. They were larger, with lavish interiors meant to transport theatergoers to exotic places like ancient Egypt, the Palace of Versailles, or Moorish Spain. Madison's Orpheum was such a movie palace, and it remains the most intact survivor of the city's movie palaces. The Orpheum was designed in 1925 by C.W. and George L. Rapp of Chicago, one of the U.S.'s top three designers of theaters at the time. They designed a limestone, Art Deco exterior, with a towering vertical "NEW ORPHEUM" marquee that became an icon of State Street. Inside, the ticket lobby retains the original terrazzo floors. Beyond that is the Grand lobby, a two story space with a concession stand at the back, flanked by two terrazzo staircases with bronze rails, and the area decorated in French Renaissance style with swags, wall sconces, chandeliers, vases, and a marble statue of "The Young Shepherd" overlooking the lobby. The stairs lead to a stack of foyers which curve along the west side of the auditorium. The decor from the grand lobby, based on Louis XIV's palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleu, continues through the foyer and auditorium. The auditorium was designed to hold 2,500. The Orpheum was partially financed by dentist William Beecroft, also known as "Mr. Theater." It cost $750,000 to build, with great attention to the comfort of customers in the climate control system, state-of-the-art lighting, a "cosmetique salon" for ladies, and smoking lounges for both sexes. The building project was begun for the Orpheum Circuit theater chain, but that business was merged into RKO Pictures shortly after the Madison Orpheum opened. It opened March 31, 1927 with a program that included a newsreel, the silent film Nobody's Widow accompanied by organ, and vaudeville acts. This program started at 1pm, and was repeated three times, ending at 11pm. Over 7,000 people attended that day, and many others gave up after waiting in line.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Dane County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Dane County.

More historic places in Wisconsin

Browse all historic places in Wisconsin.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Wisconsin history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.