The Lyric Theater, demolished in 1963, once stood on the site of today’s Virginia General Assembly Building at Ninth and Broad streets. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
During 50 years of this century, the Lyric Theater at the southeast corner of East Broad and Ninth streets provided Richmond with a venue for a variety of entertainment and theater. The Virginia General Assembly building, now on the site, is the current setting for a peculiar form of community theater.
The Lyric opened in 1913, when many of the city’s 34 public auditoriums shared live acts with newfangled movies. Richmond’s main theater, the elegant Academy of Music, on Eighth Street between Grace and Franklin, booked regional and national performances. Richmond needed another stage for traveling shows and vaudeville.
The Joseph Bryan estate provided the $145,000 to build the Lyric Theater and an unremarkable office building alongside it. The theater section stood three stories, with auditorium seats for 1,200 people.
The Lyric Theater exterior (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
“It was very much like a New York theater,” Robert Watkins remembers. The long-time Richmond impresario assisted with managing the Lyric during its waning days in the early 1960s. “The way you entered into a small lobby, the seating. There was always a floral shop operating on the corner and a confectioner — which came in handy for opening nights.”
The Lyric featured a wide, proscenium stage, and a spacious auditorium with orchestra and box seating. A small Marr and Colton pipe organ accompanied silent films during the 1920s.
Audiences entered the gallery from the street by a long, steep staircase. Theater aficionado Miles Rudisill wrote, “Once you made that climb, you never forgot it.” Several doors opened directly from the orchestra level to Capitol Square and made the house easy to clear, an important feature with several shows performing daily.
An elephant-riding Lady Godiva opened the Lyric’s stage. Godiva, without her animal, then dived into a leaky tank of cold water. A troupe billed as Singers Midgets managed one night to tramp on with six elephants. Later, magician Harry Houdini amazed Richmond audiences there.
The Lyric’s dressing rooms, where the soul of a theater dwells, were Spartan, small and occasionally damp. The busy downtown corner’s noises could steal focus from action on stage. During a 1940s run of “Private Lives,” Talullah Bankhead timed her lines to wait out the bells of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. DeVeaux Riddick, a veteran stage designer, saw many plays there. “But I don’t remember it being particularly noisy,” he says. “The acoustics of the hall were perfect.”
Through the 1930s, the Lyric stage featured Lunt and Fontanne and a young Montgomery Clift in “There Shall Be No Night,” Boris Karloff and Josephine Hull with the original cast of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” Katherine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story,” Alla Nazimova in “Hedda Gabler,” and Jackie Coogan in “What a Life.”
Throughout the war period and after, famous plays and players came to the Lyric. Ethel Barrymore, Zazu Pitts, Tallulah Bankhead and Audrey Hepburn, in the stage version of “Gigi.” Camp Lee soldiers performed in high fashion as females in a version of “The Women.” Piano comedian Victor Borge came through on his first tour as did Vaughn Monroe. Duke Ellington and his orchestra contributed their sophistication to the old stage.
By 1948, the Lyric became the WRVA Theater, where Sunshine Sue hosted the Old Dominion Barn Dance. A 20-year-old, rollicking Elvis Presley played a two-show, one-night stand at the WRVA Theater on Sept. 20, 1955.
The Life Insurance Company of Virginia next door had owned the theater and office building alongside since 1922. The firm struck an agreement in 1961 with the Old Lyric Theater Corporation, comprised of several Richmond performing groups. Its director was George W. Anderson, a partner in the securities firm of Anderson and Strudwick.
“Basically, Life of Virginia told us the building was slated for demolition,” Anderson recalls, “but they’d rent it to us, month-to-month, for a moderate fee and we couldn’t come back and say, ‘You’re demolishing our theater!’ We were glad to have it for as long as we did.”
Watkins, then of the Ballet Impromptu, raised money to have the theater repainted; installed drapes and curtains. A series of musicals and ballets were performed, children’s shows and plays by the Richmond Theater Guild. Some of these involved national talent. Among the final shows were “Showboat,” “A Time And A Season” “Annie Get Your Gun,” and the last curtain fell on “Kismet.”
A News Leader editorial on July 31, 1963, stated that the energies devoted to a “Save The Lyric” campaign would arise out of foolish sentimentality when the city center needed a contemporary professional theater facility. The building that replaced the Lyric first housed offices for IBM and C&P Telephone, then the General Assembly.
The Marr and Colton organ console was found in mint condition underneath the stage during the theater’s 1963 demolition. It was swaddled in blankets like an orphaned child. Talking pictures forced the organ’s retirement. It was then bundled, forgotten, and its pipes, its voice, were removed. The console went to a North Side home.
