Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

Gloria Swanson's first talkie opened the house in 1929; My Morning Jacket reopened it eighty-one years later. The State Theatre at 609 Congress Street in downtown Portland, Maine debuted on 8 November 1929 with The Trespasser before 2,200 invited guests - architect Herbert W. Rhodes's 2,300-seat Moorish-and-Art-Deco movie palace at the corner of Congress and High. Three decades as the city's first-run picture house gave way to a stranger second act: by 1970 the State was running adult films, a fall that lasted until 1990 and left the building derelict as Portland's last surviving movie palace. A 1990s restoration brought Bob Dylan, David Byrne and Ray LaMontagne through, but operators kept failing; the theatre went dark again in 2006 until The Bowery Presents and Higher Ground's Alex Crothers signed on in 2010 and spent 1.5 million dollars bringing the room to code. The reopening on 15 October 2010 - a sold-out My Morning Jacket show - reset the venue as northern New England's essential mid-size concert hall, roughly 1,870 capacity across a sloped floor and balcony, running eighty-plus shows a year. The booking sits exactly between club and arena: national indie, rock, folk and hip-hop tours that outgrow Portland's smaller rooms play the State before graduating to Boston-scale sheds, with the Congress Street arts district around it. The Moorish plasterwork, restored marquee and original proportions survived every incarnation - a 1929 atmospheric palace whose fourth act turned out to be its longest-running success. The operators run the room alongside Thompson's Point and other Portland stages, giving the city's concert market a coherent ladder, and the State's calendar - roughly eighty shows a year across rock, folk, comedy and hip-hop - makes the 1929 marquee the most photographed strip of neon on Congress Street.