page_title: Regina's historic buildings and precincts
section_title: Theatres and concert halls
hierarchical_section_title: Regina's historic buildings and precincts / Education and culture / Theatres and concert halls
context_page_description: Many historically significant buildings in Regina, Saskatchewan were lost during the period 1945 through approximately 1970 when the urge to "modernize" overtook developers' and city planners' sense of history and heritage. The old warehouse district to the north of the old CPR tracks was Regina's original commercial raison d'être once Lieutenant-Governor Edgar Dewdney had established the site of his considerable landholdings as the Territorial Capital. With the significant conversion of shipping of commercial goods from train to truck and cancellation of passenger service on the railway, the Warehouse District immediately adjacent to the train line has ceased to be exclusively industrial in character. Some areas of the Warehouse District have been transformed into a shopping, entertainment and residential precinct.
context_section_description: Darke Hall, a civic theatre and concert hall adjacent to Regina College, was donated by Francis Nicholson Darke. In the pre-television era Regina, like other comparably sized cities throughout North America, was served by legitimate theatre buildings where both touring professional productions and local amateur productions were staged as well as by numerous movie houses: such public entertainments were offered in an abundance that seems astonishing in the 21st century city which is several times larger. The 1908 City Hall, as was customary at the time, and as with the obviously substantially larger (and surviving) Town Halls of London, New York City, Sydney and Brisbane, contained a large central theatre and concert hall-cum-ballroom. Mr Darke also donated the carillon of chimes to the then-Methodist, now United Church of Canada Metropolitan Church in downtown Regina which is still heard. Darke Hall opened in 1929. From 1929 until 1970 on the opening of the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts (now officially the Conexus Arts Centre) it was the concert hall of the Regina Symphony Orchestra.
  It remains the recital and concert hall for the Regina Conservatory of Music and the University of Regina's Department of Music as well as the venue for amateur theatricals and public lectures. Darke Hall was for many years Regina’s principal concert hall and theatre, particularly after:
  By the 1980s, Famous Players, which had acquired the Capitol, by then the last historic stage-theatre and cinema remaining in the central business district, was in financial trouble and desperately divided the Cap in half to make a poor-man's multiplex; ultimately the Cap itself was closed. By the time of its demolition in 1992 it was the last of many downtown movie theatres which had once thrived — the Regina Theatre, the Rex, the Grand, the Unique, the Roseland, the Elite, the Princess, the Lux, the Gaiety, the Broadway, the Roxy,
  (a) The destruction by fire in 1939 of the 800-seat Regina Theatre on the corner of 12th Avenue and Hamilton (now the site of the old Hudson's Bay Company department store building). It was home from 1910 to the Regina Operatic Society, the Regina Orchestral Society and travelling vaudeville and stage plays. The Regina Theatre doubled as a cinema and a legitimate theatre; famous travelling troupes which crossed Canada on the CPR before cinema and television performed there. One was being performed in by "Boris Karloff", when the "Regina Cyclone" struck in 1912; he famously took part in the exercise of helping out immediately afterwards. And
  (b) The demolition of Old City Hall in 1965, whose ballroom had provided a multi-purpose space used for civic receptions, concerts, theatre, balls and indeed boxing.
  The Army & Navy across 11th Avenue is also now long-closed and demolished, despite having been renovated and doubled in size in 1969.]]
  Downtown cinemas included the Regina, the Grand and, both on Broad Street, the 1000-seat Metropolitan and the Broadway Theatres. The Broadway was Regina's first "all-talkie" movie theatre, built by theatre owner and manager Harry Bercovich. Styled in the "Spanish villa" theme inside and outside, it opened on January 1, 1930. However, the theatre was closed little more than a year later because of the Great Depression. It would remain closed until it finally reopened in 1941. 
  "Bercovich ... , however ... managed the Rex Theatre and made use of his canny entrepreneurial skills to attract business even in the midst of the Depression. He held "Bank Nights" weekly at the Rex, giving away door prizes to attract business. He gave away silverware and dishes as well, patrons having to return each week in order to collect the complete set of dishes or silverware." The theatre was sold to the Famous Players theatre chain in 1969. It stayed open until 1981, when it closed permanently. The building was demolished in the early 1990s. The largest of all, the 1500-seat Capitol Theatre, built in 1921, doubled as a movie house and live stage venue and after the Regina Theatre burned to the ground the Capitol was
caption: Interior of Darke Hall. It remains the principal concert and lecture venue on the Old Campus of the University of Regina. Note organ pipes on auditorium side of the stage wings.
exif: {}