Houston's opera house came in early and under budget - a Texas brag in marble and steel. The Brown Theater is the grand hall of the Wortham Theater Center at 501 Texas Avenue, the 437,000-square-foot downtown arts complex whose 90-foot Romanesque arch and vaulted foyer - adorned with thirty tons of Albert Paley steel sculpture - opened in 1987 four months ahead of schedule and 5 million dollars under its roughly 70-million-dollar budget, financed almost entirely by private donations during Houston's oil-bust years. The gala opening of Houston Grand Opera's Aida that October, elephants included, announced the city's new operatic home. The larger and grander of the center's two halls, the Brown seats about 2,400 in ornate boxes, balconies and loges facing a tall conventional proscenium, under a ceiling that climbs to a burgundy sky etched with rows of blinking Texas stars. Its design brief was unapologetically traditional - a proper horseshoe opera house at a scale generous by European standards - and it serves as the principal stage of both Houston Grand Opera and Houston Ballet, two of the country's major resident companies, whose seasons fill most of the calendar. The building has weathered Houston's dramas alongside its own: Tropical Storm Allison flooded the basements in 2001, and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 put twelve feet of water in the Wortham's lower levels, closing the center for over a year of repairs - the companies returned in 2018 to a rebuilt plant behind the unchanged facade. The Theater District location groups the Wortham with Jones Hall, the Alley Theatre and the Hobby Center in a nine-block downtown campus second only to New York's in resident-company density, with the Buffalo Bayou promenade at the center's back door - a fitting frame for the hall where Houston does its grandest nights.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 501 Texas Avenue, Houston, TX, United States, 77002

Website: https://www.houstonfirsttheaters.com/wortham-center

Capacity: 2405

Opening Date: 09/05/1987

Accessible