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

The Met came from New York to sing Aida for opening night in 1934; then the building spent twenty years locked while the city argued about it. The Stifel Theatre at 1400 Market Street opened on 21 April 1934 as the Municipal Opera House, half of the LaBeaume and Klein-designed Municipal Auditorium complex whose 322-foot marble facade anchors St. Louis's grandest run of civic buildings. Renamed the Kiel Opera House in 1943 for Mayor Henry Kiel, the 3,100-seat hall hosted everything the century offered - Met tours, the Rat Pack, the Rolling Stones, Harry Truman - its back-to-back stage sharing a wall with the 9,300-seat Kiel Auditorium behind. The 1991 closure was supposed to be temporary: the auditorium was demolished for the arena now called Enterprise Center, and successive Blues owners promised to restore the opera house - promises that sat unkept while the marble lobby gathered dust for two decades. The 79-million-dollar restoration finally landed in 2011, reopening the hall on 1 October with Jay Leno, Aretha Franklin and Chuck Berry - as the Peabody Opera House, renamed Stifel Theatre in 2018 for the hometown financial firm. The building's two-story Tennessee and Ste. Genevieve marble lobby, gilded auditorium and National Register listing survived the dormancy intact, and four 700-seat side halls give the complex flexibility beyond the main room. The theatre now runs concerts, comedy, Broadway engagements and civic events beside its arena sibling - the surviving half of a 1934 complex that finally got the second act the city owed it. The theatre's exposition hall, basement bar and dressing-room warren extend deep under Market Street, and the Civic Center MetroLink stop across the street ties the hall into the region's transit grid - practicalities that help the 1934 room compete for tours against newer sheds across the river.