Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:32:00

When it opened it was the biggest theatre in Canada, and locals still call it the Grand Old Lady of Granville. The Orpheum in downtown Vancouver - main entrance at 884 Granville Street, with the auditorium itself sitting on the cheaper land behind, facing Seymour and Smithe - opened on 8 November 1927 as a 3,000-seat vaudeville palace of the Chicago-based Orpheum Circuit. The architect was B. Marcus Priteca, the Scottish-born master of West Coast movie palaces, who delivered a Second Renaissance interior of gilt plaster, murals and a vast dome for 1.25 million dollars - the most extravagant theatre on the Pacific Coast at the time. The rescue is a landmark of Canadian heritage politics: when owner Famous Players announced plans in 1973 to gut the auditorium into a multiplex, a public Save the Orpheum campaign pushed the City of Vancouver to buy the building; it closed on 23 November 1975, was restored and reopened on 2 April 1977 as a civic concert hall, and was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1979. The room today seats 2,672 and serves as the permanent home of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra - the largest performing arts organization in Western Canada - alongside choirs, touring artists and film shoots; its ornate interior stood in for the heavenly opera house in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The building is one of four Vancouver Civic Theatres venues with the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver Playhouse and the Annex, and its Granville Street frontage - a narrow terra-cotta entrance leading back to the main hall - anchors the Granville Entertainment District. Practical notes: the Smithe Street doors at 601 Smithe handle most event entry, Granville and Vancouver City Centre stations are both within a few blocks, and the VSO season plus steady touring bookings mean the hall is lit most nights of the week from September through June.