By Matthew Deihl
This month marks 98 years since a magnificent entertainment venue opened in Springfield, Ill. – first as a home for vaudeville acts and then expanding to include talking motion pictures, too.
The New Orpheum Theater opened April 30, 1927, as a branch of the national Orpheum Circuit, which had begun in San Francisco in 1887. A rival for any of the grand theaters in major cities, Springfield’s New Orpheum shared a building with 18 stores, 15 office suites, a billiard room, bowling alley, café, and ballroom. The theater was built as vaudeville was fading and movies were growing, so it was only two years before an update allowed for talkies.
The Springfield High School Band played at RKO Orpheum on May 16, 1932.
Its creation was truly an Illinois affair. Great States Theaters Inc. of Chicago built the theater, using a contractor with offices in Springfield and Joliet. Chicago companies designed the exterior, installed the flooring and provided terra cotta for the exterior. Springfield companies designed the interior, provided stone for construction and installed the sheet metal. (The company that handled the sheet metal, Henson Robinson, is still a familiar name in Springfield.)
It featured the latest in technology at the time, from the remote-control board that worked in tandem with a pilot board to control all the theater’s lighting from one central location to the top-of-the-line heating and cooling system used in metropolitan theaters around the country to a projection booth packed with all the newest equipment.
The theater, which eventually became known as RKO Orpheum, hosted plenty of run-of-the-mill vaudeville acts that are mostly forgotten today. But it also welcomed stars such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, George Burns, and Ed Wynn.
Local talent also performed there.
During the run of the “Opportunity Revue” talent show. Photo by Herbert Georg Studio.
In July 1932, the Illinois State Register teamed up with RKO Orpheum Theater to host a local talent show at the Orpheum called “Opportunity Revue.” Singers, dancers, musicians, and other performers from Central Illinois competed for the chance to perform in NYC and subsequently travel the United States. A 16-year-old acrobatic and contortion dancer from Springfield named Mary Ellen Brown won the competition and went on to travel the country with the RKO national tour.
These Herbert Georg Studio photographs were taken in July 1932, so they might be contestants rehearsing for “Opportunity Revue."
These photos of the New Orpheum were taken by the Herbert Georg Studio and are stored in the ALPLM Audiovisual Department’s photograph collection. Georg was a highly sought-after commercial and portrait photographer local to Springfield. He came from a family of professional photographers, including his father Victor Georg, whose collection is also maintained by ALPLM. Hundreds of thousands of Herbert Georg’s negatives were lost in a fire in 1980, but the ALPLM’s predecessor, the Illinois State Historical Library, was able to salvage about 9,000 usable negatives. You can read more about Georg and the fire here. The Georg Collection includes photos of a governor, a puppeteer, the world’s tallest man, traffic accidents, the state fair, and just about anything else you could find in central Illinois in the first half of the 20th century.
Notable movies that played at the Orpheum during each decade of its existence include: “The Wizard of OZ” from 1939 starring Judy Garland, Orson Welles’s classic movie from 1941 “Citizen Kane”, “Sunset Boulevard” from 1950 starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror film “Psycho” starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh.
A program for the symphony’s performance at the New Orpheum.
On Tuesday, February 11, 1947 – the night before Lincoln’s birthday – the New Orpheum hosted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, which performed Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” and Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony Number Five.” (You can listen to Phylicia Rashad and the National Symphony Orchestra performing “Lincoln Portrait” at the Kennedy Center by clicking here.)
Springfield’s New Orpheum Theater showed its last two films on Saturday, July 31, 1965: “Walt Disney’s The Monkey’s Uncle” and “Shenandoah.” Cleveland Wrecking Company began razing the building the following Monday to make way for a bank drive-through. By Tuesday, November 16, 1965, the New Orpheum was gone. After 38 years of entertainment in a variety of forms, it was the end of an era.
Deihl is an ALPLM audiovisual librarian.