Recently, the folks at Orlando’s Plaza Live announced outdoor musical events beginning Oct. 15, in keeping with COVID-19 safety measures. They also noted that the popular concert venue had originally opened as Orlando’s first two-screen movie theater in the fall of 1963.
The Sentinel reported the event with excitement. Workers bustled with preparations for the theater’s debut on Nov. 20. With its exterior painted a “blushing pink,” the luxury theater boasted the latest equipment, including the ability to show movies in Cinerama, Todd-AO, and Panavision.
The Todd-AO process, by the way, was the creation of movie producer Mike Todd, also remembered for his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. The Todd-AO company continues to operate in the Los Angeles area.
‘Moderne’ architect
Orlando’s new home for such state-of-the-art movie processes, the Plaza, was designed by architect Robert E. Collins of Miami, who also designed the “underwater” theater at Weeki Wachee and the 1938 Cameo Theater in Miami — as a gem of Streamline Moderne style that’s now on the National Register of Historic Places.
When Collins’s Orlando creation opened in 1963 on the outskirts of the Colonial Plaza Mall, telegrams and good wishes from Hollywood luminaries, including Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn and John Wayne, were on display in the lobby.
Wayne starred in the Plaza’s first presentation: a comedy Western titled “McLintock!” that cast him in a lighthearted mode, battling with Maureen O’Hara, who went heart to heart with him on the big screen.
Modern movie palace
Wayne was a big star, and the Plaza’s arrival was a big deal in Central Florida. Orlando’s leading indoor theater, the Beacham on Orlando Avenue downtown, had been built in the 1920s. The Plaza was the area’s first “modern” movie palace, and its rooftop sign — now an official city landmark — had a space-age look to prove it.
The theater’s technological innovations were impressive, as were its two auditoriums, but its seating really captured media attention.
“A highlight of the theater is its rocking-chair seats, providing living-room comfort,” the Sentinel noted at the Plaza’s debut. It was the first rocking-chair theater not only in Florida but in the South, ads for the Plaza proclaimed. Its two theaters could seat 1,100 people — 800 in one theater, and 300 in a smaller one.
Link to national history
No one could have foreseen in November 1963 that the Plaza’s opening would be followed by a national tragedy. Its opening day, Nov. 20, was a Wednesday. Just two days later, Friday, Nov. 22, President John Kennedy lay dying in the back of a convertible in Dallas, and it felt as though the world — and the space-age spirit of progress that helped shape the Plaza — would never be quite the same.
But “the rocking-chair theater” served audiences well through the decades, first as a movie palace and now as the Plaza Live, long a popular venue for a variety of touring musical performances and shows.
When the theater began, it was seen as an adjunct to the original Colonial Plaza shopping center and mall, where the Jordan Marsh department store opened about a year before, in October 1962, bringing big-city retail glamour to Central Florida.
Now the Plaza’s location on Bumby Avenue near East Robinson Street is often described as being in the Milk District (inspired by the longtime T.G. Lee Dairy plant nearby on Bumby). Customers line up across the street from the Plaza at another survivor from the 1960s, Beefy King.
About a year ago, the city of Orlando and Orange County announced a partnership to place the performance venue in public ownership, which would pave the way to use tax money for improvements to the building. May patrons long continue to gather below its space-age sign. To learn more about the Plaza Live’s programs and to order tickets, visit visitplazaliveorlando.org.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at joydickinson@icloud.com, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave, Orlando, FL 32801.
