The Golden Gate Theatre sits at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street, at the edge of the Tenderloin. When it opened in 1922, vaudeville was the dominant form of popular entertainment, and the theater was designed to accommodate both live performances and the films that were rapidly gaining audience share. The building's ornate interior reflected the era's conviction that entertainment venues should be palaces -- places where ordinary people could spend an evening surrounded by architectural grandeur that their homes and workplaces could never match.

The Golden Gate Theatre's descent through the mid-20th century tracked the decline of its neighborhood and the disruption of the entertainment industry. Television killed vaudeville, suburban multiplexes drew audiences from downtown movie palaces, and the Tenderloin's increasing poverty made the theater a less appealing destination for middle-class patrons. By the early 1970s, the theater was screening exploitation films for shrinking audiences. Its revival came through the Broadway touring circuit, which discovered that ornate early-20th-century theaters, built for live performance, were ideal venues for the large-scale musicals that dominated commercial theater from the 1980s onward.

Today the Golden Gate Theatre is part of the Shorenstein Hays Nederlander circuit, hosting national tours of Broadway shows that bring productions from New York to San Francisco audiences. The theater's 2,300-seat capacity and period architecture make it well-suited to the touring model, where shows designed for Broadway's large houses need equivalently sized venues on the road. The building that once hosted vaudeville acts and screened kung fu movies now presents the same shows that play the Majestic and the Gershwin in New York, completing a century-long circle from live performance to film and back to live performance.