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

Ginger Rogers commandeered the star dressing room here in 1925, and her mother made sure she kept it. The Rialto Theatre at 318 East Congress Street in downtown Tucson opened on 29 August 1920 with the William S. Hart western The Toll Gate, built by William Curlett and Son jointly with the Hotel Congress across the street as one of the city's first movie houses and its leading vaudeville stage. The original room held about 1,000 across floor, mezzanine and balcony, with a 7,500-dollar Kilgen pipe organ for silent accompaniment; Wednesday vaudeville bills ran five acts, and the guest ledger of the era included Anna Pavlova and the Hungarian National Chorus. The building survived every fate that kills old theatres - decades as a film house under Paramount and AP Theatres, a stint renamed The Palace for the 1984 film Desert Bloom, years of dark - until KXCI co-founder Paul Bear and promoter Jeb Schoonover revived it for concerts in 1995 and presented hundreds of shows. Debt forced a sale to the City of Tucson in 2004 for 1.54 million dollars under the Rio Nuevo redevelopment, which created the nonprofit Rialto Theatre Foundation to operate the hall; the foundation weathered a near-eviction in 2010, posted record years by 2014 - more than 200 shows and up to 150,000 guests - and bought the building outright in 2015. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 1,400-capacity room programs the breadth of the touring market - rock, hip-hop, comedy, drag and the occasional film - alongside its sister club 191 Toole, run by the same foundation. The Congress Street block it shares with Hotel Congress remains downtown Tucson's entertainment nucleus, with the theatre's blade sign the neighbourhood's night-time landmark. The foundation's stewardship keeps the room busy well past music - drag showcases, speaker series and community events fill the gaps between tours, sustaining the building the way vaudeville once did.