The Shubert brothers' first theatre outside New York sat dark for twenty years in downtown New Orleans before a whitewash brought it back to life. The Civic Theatre at 510 O'Keefe Avenue opened in 1906 as the Shubert Theatre, designed by local architect Sam Stone in the Beaux-Arts style as one of the city's first fireproof theatres, built of masonry and steel when its rivals were still timber. The house is the oldest performance theatre in New Orleans and carries a deep vaudeville-era resume: Cecil B. DeMille staged a production here, Mae West worked the boards, and at one point the room was billed as the largest cinema in the world while most movie houses were nickelodeon-sized. The names rolled with the decades - the Star, the Lafayette, the Poche and finally the Civic - before the theatre closed in the early 1990s and sat unused, a buried gem in a cluster of Central Business District buildings. Developers Brian Gibbs and Bryan Bailey delivered the resurrection: a roughly 10 million dollar renovation with architects EskewDumezRipple that stabilised and whitewashed the original plasterwork - embracing the imperfect rather than replicating the gilded past - and installed a hydraulic modular floor that raises and lowers to reconfigure the room. Reopened in September 2013, the Civic seats about 700 for plays and seated concerts and expands past 1,100 standing when the floor drops, deliberately filling the gap between Le Petit Theatre's 365 seats and the 2,100-seat Mahalia Jackson Theater. The calendar since has mixed national touring bands, comedians, corporate events and private parties under the marble bar and retro-chic Civic sign on O'Keefe Avenue - a working room again after two decades as the CBD's best-kept architectural secret. The renovation deliberately left the room's age legible - watermarks, chipped plaster reliefs and a century of scars showing through the soft matte whitewash - so a modern rig and marble bar sit inside a shell that never pretends to be new, which has made the Civic one of the most photographed interiors in the Central Business District.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 510 OKeefe Street, New Orleans, United States, 70113

Website: https://civicnola.com

Cover Charge: 1

Capacity: 1200

Opening Date: 01/01/1906

Accessible