Marquee Evening ...

“Follow the yellow brick road

Follow the yellow brick road

Follow, follow, follow follow

Follow the yellow brick road

Follow the rainbow over the stream

Follow the fellow who follows a dream

Follow, follow, follow, follow

Follow the yellow brick road

We’re off to see the Wizard

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

We hear he is a whiz of a wiz

If ever a wiz there was

If ever, oh ever a wiz there was

The Wizard of Oz is one because

Because, because, because, because, because

Because of the wonderful things he does

We’re off to see the Wizard

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz …”

           ~ “We’re Off To See The Wizard”

       ~ from the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz”

The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Widely regarded to be one of the greatest films in cinema history, it is the best-known and most commercially successful adaptation of L. Frank Baum's 1900 children’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Follow the yellow brick road – or in this case Nineteenth Street in Allentown, Pennsylvania – and you’ll see “The Wizard of Oz” is the star on the marquee of The Nineteenth Street Theatre on a late summer evening.

The Nineteenth Street/Civic Theatre is an historic community center that hosts theatre, arts education and film. It is the oldest cinema in Allentown, opening Sept. 17, 1928. In July 1957, the property was purchased by Allentown’s Civic Little Theatre. It is located in the heart of the quaint West End Theatre District.

State Of The Evening ...

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

                   ~ Oscar Wilde  

                                  ~1854-1900

 The State Theatre sparkles like a jewel in downtown Easton, Pennsylvania on a chilly November evening on Northampton Street.

State Theatre, originally known as Neumeyers Vaudeville House and now the State Theatre Center for the Arts, is an historic theatre. The building began to take its present form in 1910, when modified from a bank building to a vaudeville house. The building was extensively modified in 1926, to include a larger auditorium, balcony and lush decorations. At that time it was renamed “The State.” The building is asymmetrical with a cut stone Beaux-Arts style façade and large overhanging marquee.

Beaux-Arts Architecture is a very rich, lavish and heavily ornamented classical style taught at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in the 19th century. The term “Beaux Arts” is the approximate English equivalent of  “Fine Arts.”

State Theatre was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.