Qualla: Richmond Theatre (Richmond, Virginia)

Richmond Theatre (Richmond, Virginia): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit jeff horne from Richmond, VA, CC BY 2.0. On the night after Christmas in 1811, more than six hundred people packed the brick Richmond Theatre at Seventh and Broad streets to see a touring company perform Diderot's The Father, or Family Feuds, followed by Matthew Lewis's gothic melodrama Raymond and Agnes; or, the Bleeding Nun. The Christmas season audience included Virginia's sitting governor, George William Smith. Between acts of the second play, a stagehand raised a chandelier of lit candles toward the rafters. It swung. It caught the paper backdrop. Within ten minutes, the wooden building was a roaring oven, and three exits choked with panicked crowds were the only way out. By morning at least seventy-two people were dead, the governor among them - and the United States had a new worst urban disaster. The Richmond Theatre was the name of four theatres on or near that site. This is the story of all of them.

Image: jeff horne from Richmond, VA | CC BY 2.0

Richmond Theatre (Richmond, Virginia): Quesnay's Academy, 1786-1798

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ypsilon from Finland, CC0. The first Richmond Theatre was not originally a theatre at all. The French scholar and Revolutionary War soldier Chevalier Alexandre-Marie Quesnay de Beaurepaire came to America in 1777 to fight, then spent nearly a decade trying to found an American academy modeled on the French...

Image: Ypsilon from Finland | CC0

Richmond Theatre (Richmond, Virginia): December 26, 1811

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Crazyale, CC BY-SA 3.0. The second Richmond Theatre, built of brick and three stories tall, opened in 1806 on the same site. Chief Justice John Marshall had worked to get it built. For five financially successful years it was Richmond's main stage, drawing touring companies from Philadelphia, Charleston...

Image: Crazyale | CC BY-SA 3.0

Richmond Theatre (Richmond, Virginia): Seven Years of Silence, Then a New Theatre

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benjamin Henry Latrobe (May 1, 1764 – September 3, 1820), Public domain. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, a wave of opposition against theatres swept the country. Plays were associated with sin, frivolity, and the deaths of the prominent. Richmond, the city most directly wounded, would not authorize a new theatre for seven years. The third Rich...

Image: Benjamin Henry Latrobe (May 1, 1764 – September 3, 1820) | Public domain

Richmond Theatre (Richmond, Virginia): The Marshall Theatre, Wartime Stage

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. By 1838 the third theatre had fallen into disrepair. It was remodeled and renamed the Marshall Theatre, after the Chief Justice who had helped build the 1806 building. For two decades it slid downmarket - minstrels, variety acts, the occasional star turn from Jenny Lind, who perf...

Image: Public domain

Richmond Theatre (Richmond, Virginia): Monumental Church Still Stands

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Morgan Riley, CC BY 3.0. What remains of the original theatre is not a theatre at all. Monumental Church, designed by Robert Mills and finished in 1814, was built directly on the foundation of the 1811 building, with a crypt holding the seventy-two victims who could not be identified individually after t...

Image: Morgan Riley | CC BY 3.0