Weybosset Street was alive with excitement as nearly 14,000 people attended the opening of the new 3,100 seat Loew’s State Movie Palace on October 6, 1928 to see the movie “Excess Baggage” on the big screen. Those lucky enough to have seats to the show were led by their usher, past talking parrots, into the opulent theater. People in Providence enjoyed the last days of the fabulous Roaring Twenties with no idea that in a little over a year the Jazz Decade would end, and the city built on industry would succumb to the Great Depression.

Since 1978, the Theatre has been on the National Register of Historic Places and has undergone extensive (historically accurate) renovations, becoming a world-class venue. Launching 14 national tours since 2008, the PPAC presents a major roster of Broadway touring theatricals annually. A broad range of concerts, dance, comedy, family shows and much more bring hundreds of thousands of people into Providence each year to experience the magic of live performance in what has been called “the jewel of Weybosset Street.”

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No organization embodies Providence’s moniker, “The Creative Capital”, more than AS220. Founded in 1985, this organization supports artists by providing housing, studio, exhibit, and performance space in downtown Providence. AS220 began in one room above the Providence Performing Arts Center at 220 Weybosset Street, when Umberto Crenca and friends decided Providence needed a space dedicated to supporting artists and artistic expression. “AS” stands for artists space or alternative space and 220 honors the room at PPAC where it all began.

Today, AS220 houses four rotating gallery spaces, a performance stage, a black box theater, a print shop, a darkroom and media arts lab, a fabrication and electronics lab, a dance studio, a youth program, 47 affordable live/work studios for artists, a bar and restaurant, and is a destination for over 51,000 people each year.

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Few theaters can say they’ve housed the evolution of American entertainment like this one. Now home to the Tony Award-winning Trinity Repertory Company, this space has vaudeville roots, showed blockbuster hits, and now wows audiences with live theatrical productions. The former Emery Majestic Theater was opened by local vaudevillians, the Emery Brothers, in 1917. Seating around 3,000 people, it was the largest theater in Providence at the time. When vaudeville was replaced by movies as America's favorite form of entertainment, the Majestic became downtown Providence’s premiere movie theater, showing first runs of Warner Brothers and 21st Century Fox films. However, the growth of movie theaters in the suburbs with ample parking slowed business for the Majestic, and it closed its doors in the mid-20th century.

Fortunately, the doors were not closed for long. The Majestic’s history of live performance meant the building was a natural fit to house Providence’s newly formed Trinity Repertory Company. Founded in 1963 in Upper South Providence, Trinity Rep was, and remains, a major part of Providence’s flourishing art scene. Considered “one of the most respected regional theatres in the country,” Trinity Rep is notable for having one of the last resident acting companies in the United States. The Company produces a variety of contemporary and classical plays and musicals, including an annual production of A Christmas Carol, a Rhode Island holiday tradition.

When you visit, be sure to examine the building's facade! With the exception of the iconic “Majestic” marquee, the facade retains its original elegance.

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At its opening in 1926, the Columbus Theater was touted as “a testimonial to the Italian people.” The late Beaux-Arts theater was built, designed and decorated by Italians: owner Domenic Annotti, architect Oresto DiSaia, and muralist George DeFelice (whose work can also bee seen at Holy Ghost Church and the Rhode Island Statehouse). The theater, of course, is named for the famous Italian explorer and has 1,492 seats inside, where elaborate plasterwork and DeFelice’s murals (“The Music Sensation”, “The Echo of Music”) make this a rare and virtually intact showplace. The theater was equipped for movies and vaudeville at its opening, but followed a twisted path like the neighborhood. Arthouse after World War II became pornography by the 70s. The theater was the focal point of lawsuits, complaints, and multiple revitalization efforts until in 2009 it was closed for fire code violations. In 2012, a group of local musicians worked with owner Jon Berberian to re-open the space as a music co-operative that has become one of the hottest live-music venues in town.

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This site, the former Whitridge Hall, served as the launching pad for a memorable show business career. In the 1950s, a summer theater troupe called this building home. The troupe hired an 18-year-old actor named Charles Nelson Reilly, who made his professional debut here as the detective in a play called “Broken Dishes.” Reilly became a show business star who regularly appeared on TV in the 1960s and 70s, but he never forgot his acting debut at Whitridge Hall.

In the 1870s, a group of Tiverton residents chartered Whitridge Hall “for the purposes of religious, charitable and literary culture, and the promotion of liberal religious thought.” According to an anonymous writer in 1884, “The hall is of unusual beauty and capacity for the purpose for which it is intended and used, viz., lectures, concerts, social parties, &c., and has a fine piano.”

The hall drew its name from philanthropist Thomas Whitridge, who grew up in the William Whitridge Estate, a 1770s house that still stands on Stone Church Road in Tiverton.

Whitridge’s father served as town doctor, and three of his brothers followed their father into medicine. Thomas moved to Baltimore, where he built a fleet of ships and became one of the nation’s largest importers of coffee, amassing the fortune that he used to endow Whitridge Hall in his hometown.

Three denominations used the hall’s Bowen Chapel for services. Episcopalians and Catholics used it as temporary space while building nearby churches, and Unitarians regularly held services here into the early 1900s.

Two famous New Englanders delivered sermons here: Julia Ward Howe and Edward Everett Hale. Howe, on a visit to Washington, D.C., woke on a gray November morning in 1861 and quickly scratched out the words that were forming in her head, and earned instant fame as the lyricist for the Civil War standard, “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Hale, a prominent Unitarian minister and theologian, is best known today for his 1863 short story, “The Man Without a Country,” whose protagonist is sentenced to lifetime exile aboard U.S. naval vessels for shouting, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" during the treason trial of Aaron Burr. Hale’s story was adapted to film several times, most recently as a 1973 made-for-TV movie. Hale’s Matunuck, Rhode Island, home is now a museum.

The town’s first public library blossomed inside Whitridge Hall, growing in just 20 years from a few donated books in 1881 to 4,000 volumes. Local service groups such as the Grange and the nascent Tiverton Historical Society met often in Whitridge Hall, and the building briefly became a dance hall in the 1960s.

Eventually, many of the groups and churches Whitridge Hall once hosted found space of their own. The library moved to a fieldstone building on Highland Avenue bequeathed by a former school teacher, Lydia Essex; and the Historical Society moved its headquarters to the 1730s Chase-Cory House, freeing Whitridge Hall for conversion into the apartment house you see today.

The pulse of Tiverton beat through this building for nearly 90 years, and the town still struggles to replace its function as a center for the community.

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As patrons poured into the Orpheum Theater on opening night, April 15, 1912, the celebration may have been muted by news of the sinking of the Titanic early that morning. However, these were good times for New Bedford. The city’s economy thrived on its foundation of textile production and immigrant labor, and a performance by the Five Musical Durands was soon to inaugurate a spectacular new theater in a prime location between shops and restaurants on busy Water Street in the South End.

Although known today as the Orpheum Theater, the French Sharpshooter’s Club of New Bedford—Le Club des Francs-Tireurs—constructed this building to serve as its headquarters. Formed by French-Canadian immigrants, the Sharpshooters Club was a social and paternal organization focused on competitive shooting, military-style drill teams, and marching bands.  The club hired Fall River architect and French-Canadian immigrant Louis Destremps to design the building. Destremps was familiar with the city, having worked on Saint Anthony of Padua Church (1912) in the North End and the New Bedford Car Barn (1910). Sharpshooters Hall featured a shooting range, grand ballroom, gymnasium, retail storefront at street level, and a 1,500-seat Vaudeville theater.  Destremps created a masterpiece of French Renaissance design. Enormous carved heads, representing the Greek Muses of arts and sciences, adorned the façade, along with complex bas relief detail cast in porcelain over a terra cotta base, the same technique that Destremps later used on the Star Store (1916) on Union Street in New Bedford. Above the four lower muses were ornate copper torches, which have since disappeared. Construction began in 1910 and was completed in 1912 at a cost of $110,000, about $2.7 million in 2016. The Sharpshooters didn’t operate the theater in their building, but leased it to the Orpheum chain, a booking agency that provided acts to theaters around the country. Sharpshooters Hall is the second oldest Orpheum Theater, after the Palace Theater in Los Angeles. Orpheum acts included Harry Houdini, actress Lily Langtry, and the Marx Brothers, along with jugglers, dancers, and other Vaudeville-style entertainers. With the advent of motion pictures, Sharpshooters Hall installed a projection system and treated its patrons to films like King Kong and Citizen Kane. During the Second World War, the shooting range was used to train soldiers, while the theater kept patrons distracted and informed with movies, short cartoons, and news reels. The theater itself was part of the show. The vast auditorium contained 1,500 seats and a wrap-around balcony. It was decorated with complex moldings, painted scenes on the ceiling, and intricate murals on the walls. The theater continued to operate sporadically throughout the 1950s, but closed in 1962 when the French Sharpshooter’s Club sold the entire building. A tobacco company used the building as a warehouse, and a market operated out of the back for a number of years. The theater was abandoned to face the ravages of time and neglect. Today, Sharpshooters Hall and the Orpheum are privately owned, and the building remains in disrepair. 

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