Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

Vince Gill's first big stage came here by accident - his band Mountain Smoke was the emergency opener called in when Kiss's support act missed the 1976 show. The Civic Center Music Hall, at 201 North Walker Avenue in Oklahoma City - home stage of Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma's biggest productions - opened on 4 October 1937 as the Municipal Auditorium. The building is New Deal monument: Roosevelt's Public Works Administration funded 55 percent of the six-storey Art Deco-and-neoclassical hall designed by Hawk and Parr, which opened with a 6,200-seat main auditorium and spent its first decades hosting everything from opera to conventions before a 1966 remodel shrank the hall for the performing arts and renamed the complex. The MAPS renovation rebuilt it from the inside: Oklahoma City's landmark sales-tax program funded a 53-million-dollar transformation completed in 2001, erecting the Thelma Gaylord Performing Arts Theatre - a roughly 2,500-seat European-style hall, acoustically isolated, standing as a building within the original 1937 shell - alongside the Freede Little Theatre, the CitySpace black box and the Meinders Hall of Mirrors. The tenants define Oklahoma's performing arts: Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma - the state's leading professional musical theatre company - stages its big summer productions in the Thelma Gaylord, sharing the hall with the OKC Philharmonic, OKC Ballet, Painted Sky Opera and the Broadway touring circuit, while comedy and concert bookings fill the remaining dates. The history holds its anecdotes: the hall' s stage has carried everyone from the touring giants of the big-band era through that Kiss Alive! tour night, and its National Register listing in 2014 recognised a building that has anchored the city's Arts District - beside City Hall and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art - for nearly ninety years. Practical notes: the Arts District garage sits across Colcord Drive and the downtown streetcar's Library stop is two blocks east; the Thelma Gaylord's boxes and grand tier are the acoustic sweet spots, the Hall of Mirrors hosts pre-show receptions worth the upgrade, and Broadway tour weeks sell the house out - midweek dates breathe easier.