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

On opening day the line stretched several blocks, and by noon all four thousand seats were gone. The Midland Theatre at 1228 Main Street in Kansas City opened on October 28, 1927 as Loew's Midland - a 4.5-million-dollar Thomas W. Lamb movie palace commissioned by local businessman Herbert Woolf with Marcus Loew's backing, the third-largest theatre in the United States behind only New York's Roxy and Capitol. The excess was the point: a 28-foot chandelier with 300 amber bulbs, interiors salvaged from the demolished Vanderbilt townhouse in New York, the country's first cantilevered mezzanine with no view-blocking pillars, and a building-wide climate system powerful enough for a town of 25,000. The decades brought the usual indignities - a bowling-alley experiment in 1961, a Saxon Theatre rename, an AMC-era three-screen carve-up - before movies ended in 1981 and the National Register-listed palace turned to concerts and stage shows. The definitive rescue came in 2006-2008: a 28-million-dollar renovation by the Cordish Company and AEG restored the marquee to its original face, rebuilt the interior to preservation standards and reopened the house with Melissa Etheridge as the anchor venue of the new Power and Light District. The modern room runs about 3,200 capacity with a customizable floor - general admission concerts, seated theatre, banquets and galas - operated by AEG Presents, with Arvest Bank holding naming rights from 2013 into the 2020s. The calendar covers national touring across rock, country, hip-hop, comedy and special events - the mid-size room between the clubs and the arena that Kansas City's downtown revival was built around. Nearly a century after its opening was hailed as the cultural event of the year, the Midland remains the city's working movie-palace superlative: the grandest room in town that still sells a ticket most nights of the week.