Conceived and constructed in the ornate style of the Victorian era, the Broadway Theatre was a cultural wellspring for the city of Norwich for the nearly sixty years of its existence. Public funding by the city’s citizens to the tune of ninety-one thousand dollars fueled the construction of the theater in 1890. This impressive building required over one million bricks in its entirety to create the theater’s dimensions, with a seventy-foot facade and a depth of 140 feet with an eighty-foot-high tower situated at the corner of Broadway and Willow streets.
The interior of the theater was equally impressive. Besides the luxurious carpeting and upholstery throughout the building, the theater also had a seating capacity of 1350 persons including two large balconies and twelve private viewing boxes. No expense was spared on customer safety. Automatic sprinklers were installed throughout the theater with eighteen exits that allowed theater patrons to quickly exit the building. Actors and other entertainers were privy to sixteen dressing rooms and performed on a stage sixty-five feet high and measuring forty feet wide by sixty feet in depth. Over six hundred incandescent lights were capable of completely illuminating the entire performance hall.
The Broadway Theatre’s first stage production was the play Amorita with a cast of 60 people which opened on December 6, 1890. The theater soon became a proving ground for other plays hoping to eventually open in New York City. An accepted opinion by persons in the professional theater community at that time was that if a stage production was successful in Norwich it would be successful anywhere.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the theater’s stage was graced by show business luminaries such as Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Russel, Ethel Barrymore and Lilly Langtree. The theater also embraced the advent of the silent movie era at the dawn of the twentieth century with regular screenings of the current Hollywood silent films. Likewise, with the onset of the more modern moving picture format known as the “talkies” during the 1930’s. It was during this same period of time that the Fox corporation purchased the Broadway Theatre and it became part of their consortium of movie theaters.
The theater was sold once again to the Loew-Poli movie theater chain in 1942 and continued to serve the public as an elegant venue for first-run Hollywood motion pictures for the next seven years. The Loew- Poli corporation eventually closed the theater in 1949, after building a new movie theater at the corner of Main and Cliff Street. The Broadway Theatre was torn down in October 1953.
To view images of the Broadway Theatre visit the collection of historical photographs on the Otis Library’s Flickr website.