Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:34:00

Memphis replaced the hall where Elvis played with a room tuned note by note. The Cannon Center for the Performing Arts at 255 North Main Street opened in January 2003 on the site of the Ellis Auditorium, the 1924 civic hall that hosted Elvis Presley, Baryshnikov and seventy years of Memphis gatherings before closing in 1996 and falling to the wreckers in 1999 - though dozens of Ellis seats and its terra cotta medallions were salvaged into the new building's east concourse. Named for the Bob and Kitty Cannon family, the venue rose as part of the convention center complex now branded the Renasant Convention Center. The design brief put acoustics first: Seattle's LMN Architects and the acousticians Jaffe Holden shaped a horseshoe auditorium wrapped in warm acacia wood and burgundy, seating 2,072, that engineers literally tuned during a hard-hat concert before opening. The stage is Broadway-sized - 45 feet deep under a 55-foot proscenium - backed by fourteen dressing rooms, a double-bay loading dock and push-to-stage access that make the room as production-friendly as it is pretty. U2's Bono, accepting the National Civil Rights Museum's Freedom Award there in 2004, called it an amazingly beautiful theater. The Memphis Symphony Orchestra makes the Cannon Center its home, anchoring a calendar that ranges across opera, ballet, touring theatre, gospel, comedy, rock and R and B bookings, children's productions from local companies like the New Ballet Ensemble, and general sessions for conventions next door - the multipurpose brief the building was engineered to serve without acoustic compromise. The downtown location ties the hall into the Main Street trolley line, the 600-room Sheraton adjacent, and 750 covered parking spaces, a few blocks from the Pinch District and the river. In a city whose musical shrines skew vernacular - Sun, Stax, Beale Street - the Cannon Center is Memphis's formal concert room, built to give the symphony and the songbook the same respect.