After the Final Curtain: The Orpheum Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri opened on September 3, 1917. The Southern Real Estate and Financial Company hired G. Albert Lansberg to design the building. Lansberg designed many theaters for the San Francisco-based Orpheum Theatre Circuit. The 2,300-seat Beaux arts theater cost $500,000 ($9.6 million with inflation) to build. Unlike many other theaters, the Orpheum did not have a formal opening with special guests and speeches.
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It’s interesting to me how much that one theatre has gone through, I think of myself as a theatre artist mostly in terms of institutions. My highschool, which I worked at for five years and now here where I am beginning my time at the CMU drama program. Its a reminder that any group I am part of is likely not going to last forever, that a lot of the work is done by drifting around different institutions and being adaptable to new situations and to new types of work. But not only do the people go and find new jobs and new paths but the buildings need to go somewhere. This isn’t something that I had really thought about much before, because the only places I have worked, here and highschool, is simply a time gated community, you have a set amount of linear time to work there and they, supported by the state, are definitely more resilient.
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