Historical Tours
The Music Hall will open its doors every month for guided tours, taking visitors behind the scenes and through the restorations, renovations and history of the celebrated 1878 theater, designated An American Treasure by the U.S. Senate.
History of The Music Hall
In 1878 a group of Seacoast residents, including a banker, a railroad executive, a lawyer, a house wife, and a clergyman, all members of the prominent Peirce family, joined together to rebuild Portsmouth’s only venue for entertainment, which had burned to the ground the year before. “The Temple,” as the theater was called, had once been a Baptist Meeting House and, before that, the site of the country’s first Alms House as well as a prison. The land surrounding the charred lot was owned by the family.
Following the fire on Christmas Eve of 1876, the Peirces knew what we still hold to be true, “a community is known to some extent by the character and place of its amusements,” a sentiment echoed on the opening night in a speech by Sen. W.H.Y Hackett. The opening celebration on January 30, 1878, was followed by the sold-out performance of two well-known British farces, Caste and John Wopps, brought up from Boston.
For the next few decades The Music Hall brought the community opera, drama, dance and traditional vaudeville fare from as far away as Europe and as close as our own community players. The Famed D’oyley Carte Company (Gilbert & Sullivan) performed Pirates of Penzance within weeks of its US premiere, and countless Shakespearean actors known around the world graced The Music Hall stage, including Margaret Mather, Thomas W Keene and John Drew. Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show performed their smaller indoor show numerous times, and Portsmouth saw its very first moving pictures on Edison’s Graphophone here in 1898.
Broadway was well represented, with performances of Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz and No, No, Nanette among many other shows that came to the theater within the first weeks of leaving “the great white way” in New York City. As is true today, The Music Hall was also dedicated to providing support for local organizations to raise money and awareness through the arts. Groups such as The Masons, the Portsmouth Athletic Club and The Chase Home for Children produced local benefits to raise money for their various causes.
In 1901 The Music Hall’s new owner, the politician-brewer-railroad baron Frank Jones, envisioned and executed its first renovation. The theater, now endowed with a proscenium arch and stage house, remained a central feature of the downtown area through the mid 1920’s.
Between the World Wars The Music Hall remained the home of community events and High School graduations, but fewer traveling shows were presented. Moving pictures became the primary entertainment draw for residents of Portsmouth. Though adapted for film showing, the theater could not compete with the three venues created in the teens expressly for that purpose, and went through a period of partial closings that lasted until a Kittery man purchased the building in 1945 at auction and renamed the hall “The Civic.”
For almost four decades audiences watched the stars of the screen ranging from John Wayne to John Barrymore and were able to catch up on the latest newsreels or episodes of their favorite serial. By the mid-1960s, the Hall had been leased to movie palace mogul E.M. Loew and operated in tandem with his other theatre, The Colonial, in Market Square. Though relegated to showing some of the less popular film titles, The Civic remained a favored venue for the Portsmouth community until it was sold to a holding company in the early 1980’s when it was considered “too old” to be of any use to Loew.
After another brief period of closure and trip to the auction block, The Music Hall was once again re-opened. Thanks to the generosity, hard work and foresight of a group of concerned residents known as The Friends of The Music Hall, who followed in the footsteps of the Peirce Family of more than a century before, the theater emerged as non-profit center for the performing arts.
Now the only remaining venue of its kind in Portsmouth, The Music Hall operates as it did in 1878, bringing the region world class entertainment, both live and on film, and providing a meeting place for members of the community to laugh and cry, learn about the world around them and teach their children. In recent years the theater has welcomed such bright stars as Wynton Marsalis, Alan Alda, Patti LuPone, John Updike and Crosby & Nash. Grammy, Tony and Pulitzer Prize winners have graced the stage in performances unique to the region. As it has for five generations, The Music Hall continues to serve the greatest variety of audiences, cultural and not-profit partners. With this year’s restoration of the theater’s interior and plans for future rehabilitation we hope to maintain this treasured space for generations to come and enhance its service as a cultural anchor for all the community.
The “Save an American Treasure” Project
September 2007 - Welcome to the newly restored, late 19th Century interior of The Music Hall. What you see all around is the return of extraordinary decorative artistry that had been covered over and forgotten for decades – the work of original owners of The Music Hall and artisans from 1878 to 1901.
A few short years ago The Music Hall’s interior finishes were white, gummed with layers of paint and plaster. Since 1987 the Seacoast community has made heroic, successful efforts to save the theater as a not-for-profit presenting house, yet, until recently, little study had been made of its architectural past.
Then in 2006 the Music Hall commissioned EverGreene Painting Studios of New York to conduct a historic finishes analysis which revealed the existence of a flamboyant decorative scheme from the theater’s earliest days. Work began on the ornate proscenium arch and, in summer 2006, a surprise discovery was made of a mural high above the stage. The gilded arch and its mural, featuring ribbon-bearing cherubs and an arrow-pierced moon, was restored to its full, fanciful appearance and revealed to the community in September, 2006.
Months later, in February 2007, the architectural conservators were surprised again. In the process of removing layer-by-layer four coats of paint, they exposed ceiling artwork from the turn of the century. Originally created by W.S. Henay and Son of Concord, the design features grisaille Neo-classical imagery of the Greek goddess of wisdom, music, and war, Athena, within the trompe l’oeil quatrefoil panelization executed in an autumnal, Victorian color palette.
“We’ve worked in over 200 theaters, and this artwork was more exuberant than anything we’ve uncovered before,” said EverGreene’s President Jeff Greene. “In projects such as The Music Hall, sometimes the discovery is so dramatic it takes your breath away.”
Through the summer of 2007, EverGreene combined traditional artistry with modern technology to recreate the Music Hall’s decorative scheme that so beautifully reclaims the lost artistry and recaptures the fantastical ambience original to the space. The restored artwork, along with the coordinated work of stenciling, gilding, glazing and polychroming throughout the auditorium, brings the entire room back in harmony with itself, as originally intended.
In September 2007, audiences celebrated the restored theater interior in a gala opening night. With such significant and exciting work behind us, we’re on our way to restoring this treasured space for generations to come.
With this interior restoration completed the “Save an American Treasure” Project concludes…
In 2003 our treasured theater earned the honor of being named an American Treasure and received a $400,000 grant from the National Park Service and The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the federal “Save America’s Treasures Program.” The historic 900-seat theater built in 1878 is the oldest theater in New Hampshire, second oldest in New England and one of only fifteen theaters built in the 1800’s that are still operating in the U.S.
This season we celebrate the conclusion of our Save America's Treasure project as part of The Music Hall’s restoration. Since the theater was federally designated an “American Treasure” in 2003, great things have been accomplished. We gained a new roof and reinforced stair systems. The proscenium arch and historic 1878 decorative finishes of the theater’s interior have been restored, including the glorious ceiling dome.
READ More about the February 2007 discovery of the decorative paintings in the auditorium
