Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:29:00

Oklahoma City solved an impossible renovation with a trick of engineering: it built an entirely new theater inside the shell of the old one. The Thelma Gaylord Performing Arts Theatre is the centerpiece of the Civic Center Music Hall at 201 North Walker Avenue - a building within a building standing inside the 1937 Municipal Auditorium. The original six-storey structure, designed by Hawk and Parr with neoclassical and Art Deco lines, was a Public Works Administration project budgeted at 1.25 million dollars, seating 6,200 when Rhapsodic Rhythms opened the hall on October 4, 1937. A 1966 remodel shrank the room toward the performing arts and renamed the building the Civic Center Music Hall - the era whose visiting acts included a 1976 Kiss stop on the Alive! tour that entered local legend. The transformation came with the original MAPS program: a 53 million dollar renovation completed in 2001 demolished and rebuilt roughly 90 percent of the interior, creating a 2,477-seat acoustically engineered theater with multi-story atrium, box seats, suites and a hydraulic orchestra pit, named for philanthropist Thelma Gaylord. The hall anchors Oklahoma City's performing-arts calendar as home to the OKC Philharmonic, OKC Broadway touring engagements, Oklahoma City Ballet and Painted Sky Opera, alongside comedy, concerts and graduations. The wider building adds the Freede Little Theatre, CitySpace black box, Meinders Hall of Mirrors and the Joel Levine Rehearsal Hall, and the complex joined the National Register in 2014. The result honors both eras at once: a Depression-era civic monument on the outside, and one of the region's best-sounding modern theaters within. The building-within-a-building solution preserved the National Register-listed 1937 exterior while giving performers a modern house, and the hydraulic pit and fly system let the hall flip between a Broadway load-in, a symphony shell and a comedy one-nighter inside the same week.