Temple of Music and Art, Arizona Theatre Company
Tucson, Arizona
Because of its enduring, elegant Spanish Colonial architecture so common among older buildings in the West, Tucson’s Temple of Music and Art is hard to place. It looks like it could have been built 200 years ago or yesterday.
When it opened in 1927 thanks to the dedicated efforts of a passionate group of music-loving women called the Saturday Morning Music Club, it used the classic Colonial style to give an aura of timelessness to what was one of the first cultural institutions in both Tucson and greater Arizona and specialized in bringing touring classical musicians and opera singers to town.
The Arizona Theatre Company began to use the space as one of its permanent homes in 1990 and now splits its time between Tucson and Phoenix, running each production in theaters in both cities. In the upcoming season, the company is featuring a slate of shows appropriate for the groundbreaking theater, including the new musical “Snapshots: A Musical Scrapbook” from Stephen Schwartz, the creator of “Wicked” and “Godspell.”
Lederer Theater Center, Trinity Repertory Company
Providence, Rhode Island
When it was initially built as a vaudeville theater in 1916, the Emery Majestic Theatre cost upward of $500,000. The ornate facade featured a mix of Renaissance and Beaux Arts styles, rendered in terra-cotta and stucco covered with reliefs, neoclassical pediments and diamond-shaped ceramic detail. The interior was decked out in Italian and Turkish marble, silk tapestries, gilt and velvet.
Its vaudeville days were short-lived, however, and as the Great Depression descended, the theater found a new life when a new set of owners struck a deal with Warner Brothers to turn it into a movie theater, though this purpose was also abandoned after a few decades. In 1970, the artistic director of Trinity Square Theater revitalized the abandoned historic space to serve as the new home for its company.
As it approaches its 100th anniversary, the Lederer Theatre Center, also known as the Trinity Square Repertory Theatre and the Majestic Theater, has become the linchpin of the local theater scene, staging classic productions like Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and “Oklahoma,” coming up in the 2015-2016 season.
Historic Dock Street Theatre, Charleston Stage at the Dock
Charleston, South Carolina
Though the shape of Charleston has changed literally — through prodigious landfilling — and figuratively — after it was sieged for nearly two years during the Civil War — theater has always played a crucial role in the city.
An institution known as Dock Street Theatre first operated on the site of the current theater building in 1736, when it was the first structure in America built expressly to house theatrical productions. The early theater, like so many others, was destroyed in a fire, and a hotel rose from its ashes. But when the hotel fell into disrepair in the early 1900s, citizens urged developers to transform it into a theater once again.
Though the house and stage were redesigned to mimic an 18th-century London playhouse and, thus, the form it may have taken in its early days, the theater area was built into what was once an open courtyard in the former hotel for its grand reopening in 1937. Fresh from a $19 million renovation, the 2015-2016 season includes “The Producers” and “Mary Poppins.”
