Touring Broadway musicals now fill Shea's Performing Arts Center, the Buffalo theater you have reached. Originally called Shea's Buffalo, it opened in 1926 to show silent movies, and it took one year to build the entire theatre. Step inside this flagship designed by Rapp and Rapp of Chicago, modeled in a combination of Spanish and French Baroque and Rococo styles to resemble the opera houses and palaces of Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The interior was designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and most of his elements remain today. When it first opened it seated nearly 4,000 people; several hundred seats were removed in the 1930s to make the orchestra more comfortable, and there are now 3,019 seats. Many furnishings and fixtures were supplied by Marshall Field's in Chicago, including immense Czechoslovak crystal chandeliers of the finest quality.
Shea's also boasts one of the few theater organs in the U.S. that is still in operation in the theater for which it was designed. Listen for the echo of those silent-movie days and imagine over one acre of seating beneath you. Picture Louis Comfort Tiffany's interior touches beneath the immense Czechoslovak chandeliers of this 1926 theatre.