Arts & Culture in Omaha

When it was originally built as the Riviera in 1927, The Rose Theater played host to vaudeville skits, stage acts, and feature films in opulent surroundings of murals, oriental rugs, and a ceiling decorated with electric stars and clouds. However, the stock-market crash of 1929 forced the theater’s sale, bouncing it from owner to owner until Rose Blumkin and her family saved it from a giant wielding a wrecking ball as a mace. Renovated to its former glory, the theater is now a place where professional stage productions and drama courses give children the chance to enjoy and participate in the arts of the stage.

Since 1925, the Dundee Theatre’s gold curtains have been parting for generations of rapt audiences. Originally a vaudeville theater, the venue was transformed into a movie house during the Great Depression as a cost-cutting measure. For the next half century it traded hands, sometimes screening art films, sometimes featuring family fare, and once showing a 118-week run of The Sound of Music, which was eventually halted by a town statute banning raindrops on roses.

In 1980, current owner Denny Moran stepped in and renovated the theater to recapture some of the splendor of its early days. The old vaudevillian stage and dressing rooms still lurk behind the silver screen, counterbalanced by a state-of-the-art Dolby Digital EX sound system and Cyrano de Bergerac smell system. Under Moran's watch, the Dundee Theatre now screens an eclectic mix of art and independent films, cinema classics, and cult favorites.