Orpheum Theatre

Ron- I have all the info necessary to create pages here in CT for the Wilbur and the Shubert in Boston but there is no history that I can find that they ever presented movies. Unlike the Orpheum which was a first-run cinema for decades before becoming a live theater today. Too bad that CT does not have some sort of a link to a sub-program called Stage Treasures or Live Treasures where theaters like the Wilbur and Shubert could be listed.

The operator of the Orpheum, Live Nation, will reportedly soon start booking music acts into the reopened Wilbur Theatre several blocks to the south (next to the Wang Theatre). The Wilbur, a small legit house nearly 100 years old, will be the new home of the recently closed Comedy club in the Fanieul Hall marketplace downtown.

The photo posted above by Lost Memory on March 25 shows the Hamilton Place entrance. Note the new doors and the generally well-maintained look of the facade. Unfortunate that the interior is such a dump. The building on the left with the big cornice “looks old” but was actually constructed by Suffolk University in recent years.

The MGM Theatre Photograph and Report form for the Orpheum in Boston has an exterior photo taken in 1941. It was Loew’s Orpheum at that time. The photo shows the Washington St. entrance. Attractions on the compact marquee, in white letters on a dark background, are: Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in “Penny Serenade” plus “The Trial of Mary Dugan”. The underside of the marquee is studded with bulbs and just above the doors is an additional board with 2 lines of white letters on a dark background with the titles of the movies posted. The Report states that the theatre has been presenting MGM product for 25 years, that it’s in Good condition; and has 1659 orchestra seats; 1048 balcony seats, and 220 seats in the loges; total: 2,927 seats.

Back in the 1980s, the Orpheum interior was somewhat shabby in a quaintly funky sort of way which suited its role as a Rock concert hall. Today the place is a total dump inside – badly in need of some basic rehab work.

Thank you both very much. I think I have already seen the Norton book. If I remember correctly, the map does refer to plays, not movie theatres. Incidentally, I remember seeing Shirley Bassey at the Orpheum in the late ‘60s. I was more interested in her than the theatre at the time, but I do remember being impressed with the interior.

Elliot Norton reviewed for the Record-American/ Herald. And before that, for decades at the old Boston Post. He was considered a “Show Doctor” and his advice was valued by those “trying out” a new show in Boston. He tried to be positive and helpful, instead of nasty and negative like Frank Rich of the NY Times was.

To Mitchell D.: There is a fold-out map of downtown Boston and the Back Bay inside the 1978 book “Broadway Down East” by Elliot Norton, published by the Boston Public Library. Theatres are noted on it with numbers, a key to which is in the margin of the map. The accent is on stage theatres. Unfortunately, there are errors on this map !Elliot Norton was a famous Boston newspaper drama critic for many years (he died about 3 years ago at the age of 100). His is the only theatre map of Boston that I know of.

correction to the above: the 1895 map has west at the top. The 1928 map has north at the top.

I recently re-read parts of a 1978 paper entitled “The Boston Rialto”. It was written by Douglass Shand Tucci and was intended as a guidebook for walking tours in Boston’s theatre district. The paper was published by the City Conservation League and sold for $2. This paper was the basis for Chapter 9 of the author’s book “Built in Boston – City and Suburb” published by the New York Graphic Society in 1978. In the source notes at the end of the paper, the author mentions that he found City of Boston building permit # 2333 issued on 1 June 1915, a permit for “alterations” at the Orpheum Theatre, estimated to cost $100,000. This was the permit for the work supervised by Thomas Lamb. Even in 1916 dollars, $100K was not a lot of money for construction work. He mentions that other remodeling work was performed in 1900 and 1904/5. The work done in the summer of 1900 converted the building from a concert hall into a vaudeville theatre and was well documented by a long and detailed article in one of the Boston newspapers when the house reopened in early September 1900. The work in 1904 was supervised by architect Arthur Vinal and it’s unclear to me exactly what was accomplished. Following this work, Vinal designed the new Washington Street entrance and staircase in 1905. That entrance lasted until the Aquarius Theatre days in the 1970s. I wonder if some of the work which I attribute to Thomas Lamb in 1915 may have been accomplished by Arthur Vinal in 1904-5.

With the inception of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881, the need for more stage space in the Music Hall brought about the removal of the great organ, now in Methuen, in 1883. In 1900, it was Henry Lee Higginson’s intent to maintain Boston Music Hall as the name for the new building, since there were plans to demolish the old one to make way for a road. Since this didn’t happen, Higginson avoided confusion by naming the new venue Symphony Hall; however, if you look at the ends of the stair handrails in the Mass. Avenue lobby, you’ll notice silver plates engraved with the initials “BMH”.

The old building served the city well, and acoustics were reportedly excellent. Architect George Snell’s efforts were concentrated on the interior, and since the building was surrounded by other structures, the exterior was kept rather plain. The great fire of 1872, sparing
the Hall by one block, brought to attention a stark reality. With 3000 people involved, limited egress could have turned a fire emergency into an unimaginable disaster, especially with gas lighting used until the end of the nineteenth century. Under subsequent and present ownership, stringent city fire codes have certainly made this problem a thing of the past.
egress from the building could

Here is a summary of the changes made to the building in 1900 and 1915. The auditorium was similar to that of Symphony Hall- a rectangle with 2 balconies each with long side galleries, with half-circle clerestory windows high above. There was a hip roof and on the west side a 3-story wing. The south end of this wing contained the Hamilton Place entrance. During the summer of 1900 the Hall was converted into a vaudeville theatre. The 2 balconies were removed and replaced by a proscenium stage. The concert platform was replaced by 2 new balconies. The side galleries were converted into loges. The rear of the orchestra floor under the 2 new balconies was stepped or sloped. The ceiling remained the same. The lobbies and lounges were all redecorated. After Marcus Loew took over, he hired Thomas Lamb to completely rebuild the Orpheum. Lamb removed the hip roof and built a new, higher roof with an elevated stage-house. He demolished the old west wing and built a new west wall on the outer edge of the property line. The Orpheum today has an auditorium which is higher and wider than the original. He designed a new entrance at Hamilton Place which is in the same location as the old entrance in the old west wing. After he got through in early-1916, there was not much left of the old interior except maybe for some spaces in the basement ?? If you go down the alleys off Bromfield Street and look at the north wall, you can see the 3 clerestory windows high above (which are bricked-up) and the remaining section of the cornice which ran around the north, west and east walls in 1852. There was once a pedestrian way which ran from Tremont to Washington streets and ran right along the north wall of the Boston Music Hall. That was in the 19th Century, long before Loew’s Orpheum.