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

San Antonio's golden jewel spent a quarter-century dark before a million-dollar gift relit it. The Charline McCombs Empire Theatre at 226 North St. Mary's Street opened on 14 December 1914 inside the eight-story Brady Building, built by developer Thomas Brady on a site associated with the arts since Turner Hall in 1879. St. Louis architects Mauran, Russell and Crowe designed it as a European-style palazzo opera house in Renaissance Revival dress - electric fans, opera boxes at two levels, a copper eagle in full flight over the marquee - and it opened as the largest and most modern theatre in the city, seating 1,766 in its original configuration. The building's history reads like the city's: the catastrophic 1921 flood put more than nine feet of water through the auditorium, destroying swaths of plasterwork - the owners cleaned up and simply painted the whole interior white rather than restore the gilding. Vaudeville gave way to movies, movies drifted to B-pictures and adult features, and the Empire shuttered in 1978, sitting derelict until the City of San Antonio bought it in 1987 and the Las Casas Foundation took the master lease to lead its revival. The 5.5-million-dollar restoration recovered the original autumnal colour scheme, regilded the repaired plasterwork - the proscenium's plaster goddesses shimmer again under warm light - restored the mahogany woodwork and added modern staging platforms, sound, lighting, HVAC and an elevator. Renamed for civic leader Charline McCombs after her family's million-dollar gift, the theatre reopened in April 1998 with Kenny Rogers on stage and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. Now an 857-seat companion to the Majestic Theatre next door under the Majestic Empire Foundation, the Empire hosts concerts, musicals, comedy, children's theatre, cabaret-style shows and banquets a block from the River Walk - the intimate half of San Antonio's great restored-theatre pair.