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Coordinates: 43°4′33.0″N 70°45′34.1″W / 43.075833°N 70.759472°W The Music Hall is a 895-seat theater located at 28 Chestnut Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the United States. Built in 1878, The Music Hall claims to be the oldest operating theater in New Hampshire and the 14th oldest in the United States. An independent venue that offers music, readings, dance, and cinema, The Music Hall brings in 90,000 visitors a year. In the past it has hosted musicians like Suzanne Vega and authors like Dan Brown.
In 1878 a group of Seacoast residents, including a banker, a railroad executive, a lawyer, a housewife, and a clergyman, all members of the prominent Peirce family, joined together to rebuild Portsmouth’s only venue for entertainment, which had burned to the ground the year before. “The Temple”, as the theater was called, had once been a Baptist meetinghouse and, before that, the site of the country’s first almshouse, as well as a prison. The land surrounding the charred lot was owned by the family.
Following the fire on Christmas Eve of 1876, the Peirces knew what we still hold to be true, “a community is known to some extent by the character and place of its amusements,” a sentiment echoed on the opening night in a speech by Sen. W.H.Y. Hackett. The opening celebration on January 30, 1878, was followed by the sold-out performance of two well-known British farces, Caste and John Wopps, brought up from Boston.
For the next few decades The Music Hall brought the community opera, drama, dance and traditional vaudeville fare from as far away as Europe and as close as Portsmouth's own community players. The famed D'Oyly Carte Opera Company (Gilbert and Sullivan) performed The Pirates of Penzance within weeks of its US premiere, and countless Shakespearean actors known around the world graced The Music Hall stage, including Margaret Mather, Thomas W. Keene and John Drew. Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show performed their smaller indoor show numerous times, and Portsmouth saw its very first moving pictures on Edison’s Graphophone here in 1898.
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