The Newton Fox Theatre was built in 1914 and once showcased vaudeville acts. It had a full pit for an orchestra and coal shoots for heating furnaces in the basement. It was known as the Royal Theater until 1921, when it was renamed the Regent and revamped for staging vaudeville acts. In the 1920s it started showing silent films and in the 1930s the theater was fitted with its first sound system.
When 21st Century Fox bought the theater in 1955, workers tore into the stage, putting up a large canvas screen and cutting away at the arch above. After that, not much changed inside the building up to its final show in 1999. Behind the screen there are still upstairs dressing rooms for actors and a pulley system for stage scenery. A huge second-floor loft might have been a ballroom that still has antique stenciling on the ceiling.
The theater’s 440 seats are new, and the paint on the walls is just a few years old, but the place retains a lot of its 1950s character and today hosts speakers and conventions, and stages plays and musicals.
