The first thing you notice in the restored Orpheum is the ceiling, because everyone else is looking at it too. Four hundred people filed in on Friday for the theater’s first public screening since 2019, and for a full minute before the lights went down, the room was silent and craning upward.
The ceiling is the work of a volunteer crew of nine, led by retired scenic painter Elena Marsh, who spent most of two winters on scaffolding re-stenciling a pattern they reconstructed from a single 1931 photograph. “We argued about the gold for a year,” Marsh said. “It turns out the original was cheaper than what we picked.”
The money
The Friends of the Orpheum raised $2.4 million over six years through a combination of grants, a state historic tax credit and what their treasurer describes, without irony, as “an unreasonable number of pies.” The city contributed the building, which it had owned since a tax foreclosure in 2004.
Programming for the first season is a mix of repertory film, three touring musicians and a Saturday morning cartoon block that sold out in a day. The seats are new, the popcorn machine is not, and the balcony reopens in the spring once the fire marshal signs off.
