The Shubert's Next Stage

One gloomy Saturday morning in November 1986, architect and Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission member Robert Roscoe stepped inside the boarded-up Shubert at its original location on Seventh Street between Hennepin and First Avenue North.

“Rain was coming through the roof. A lot of the ornament had been stripped away or fallen off,” Roscoe recalls. “But I didn’t care. Here’s the main point: It’s the space. Theaters are space; they’re not what’s encrusted on the walls. And the Shubert’s space immediately struck me as wonderful.”

The space, in fact, is the Shubert’s signature. In addition to main-floor seating, the theater contains two balconies that curve to bring everyone in the audience close to the stage—closer, in fact, than at any other theater in town. It’s the only theater with a design of this kind in Minneapolis, and people who had attended events at the Shubert in its heyday “said the acoustics were marvelous and sightlines superb,” Roscoe says. The Shubert family, theatrical producers who also built and operated playhouses across the country in the early part of the 20th century, constructed a similar theater in downtown St. Paul. (Also called the Shubert when it opened, it has since been renamed the Fitzgerald.)

The Sam S. Shubert Theater in Minneapolis opened in 1910, and in many respects has reflected the changing fortunes of the city’s center. When the Shubert opened, more then two dozen theaters operated in central Minneapolis. Among the other vaudeville and burlesque acts, such headliners as Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Fanny Brice, and Sarah Bernhardt lit up the Shubert’s marquee. During the late 1920s, Alexander G. Bainbridge managed the Shubert and ran a resident acting company; he disbanded the troupe in 1933, when he was elected mayor of Minneapolis.

The Shubert was purchased in 1935 by William Alvin Steffes, who renamed it the Alvin. In 1940, the Alvin was repositioned as a burlesque house; 13 years later, it was rechristened the Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium. (It isn’t the only case of a theater becoming a house of worship in Minneapolis. The State Theater housed the Jesus People Church during the ’70s and ’80s.) Local movie-house magnate Ted Mann, who bought many of downtown Minneapolis’s theaters, purchased the Shubert in 1957 and renamed it the Academy. Mann cut wide notches through the famed balconies to accommodate the equipment needed to show wide-screen, 70-millimeter films, and removed the opera boxes near the stage for a 45-foot movie screen. By the early ’80s, downtown was ceasing to be a destination for moviegoers. Mann closed the Academy in 1983; three years later, the building became the city’s property.

Despite the modifications, its move to a new block, and its deterioration over time, the Shubert building remains on the National Register of Historic Places, a key reason why it was moved rather than razed. “The building itself is a noteworthy part of Minneapolis architecture,” Roscoe says. “It’s part of the urban fabric, and part of the cultural infrastructure of downtown that Minneapolis once had and should have again.”