Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

A movie palace built as a memorial to the father of vaudeville became Boston's grandest surviving theatre. The Citizens Bank Opera House at 539 Washington Street opened on 29 October 1928 as the B.F. Keith Memorial Theatre, commissioned by Edward Albee as a tribute to his late business partner Benjamin Franklin Keith and designed by Thomas W. Lamb, the leading theatre architect of the age, in a lavish blend of French and Italian styles finished in Carrara marble, gold leaf and silk. Days before the doors opened, Joseph P. Kennedy's newly formed Radio-Keith-Orpheum took ownership, and the gala opening drew Al Jolson and George M. Cohan to a site already rich in stage history - the block had held the Boston Theatre, the largest playhouse in the country when it opened in 1852. Vaudeville was dying even as the curtain rose, and by 1929 the house ran films only, reigning for decades as the RKO Keith's, one of downtown's premier movie showcases. In 1978 Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston bought the building and rededicated it as the Opera House in 1980, staging her celebrated productions there until the company's finances collapsed. The theatre went dark in 1991, deteriorated badly, and landed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Eleven Most Endangered list in 1995. Salvation came as a 54-million-dollar restoration begun in 2002: some 30,000 hours of craft work returned the auditorium to its 1928 finish while everything behind the proscenium was demolished and rebuilt as a modern stage house sized for touring Broadway musicals. The house reopened on 16 July 2004 with a six-month run of The Lion King, its capacity now about 2,600 seats, restored to the exacting standards of the National Park Service and the Boston Landmarks Commission. Local businessmen Don Law and David Mugar returned the theatre to Boston ownership in 2009 through Boston Opera House Ventures, and in the same year it became the permanent home of Boston Ballet, whose Nutcracker has filled the hall every holiday season since 2005. With Broadway Across America tours anchoring the calendar alongside ballet, concerts and comedy, the renamed Citizens Bank Opera House - the title arrived in 2019 - is once again the flagship of the Washington Street Theatre District.