Opened on December 4, 1929 as a 2,800-seat movie-and-vaudeville palace with a Spanish and Italian Baroque interior, the theater was rescued from decades of failed conversions in 2004 by dance teacher Rosemary Cappozalo and her daughters.
The theater stands a short uphill walk from the St. George ferry terminal, so a show here pairs naturally with the free Staten Island Ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty.
Solomon Brill built this for his Isle Theatrical Company and opened it on December 4, 1929. Eugene De Rosa designed it with the Staten Island architect James Whitford; the ornamental interior was the work of Nestor Castro. It was planned as an RKO vaudeville house, and a projection booth was improvised into the design only when the building was nearly finished — a fair summary of how quickly the ground shifted under live variety in 1929. The first film shown was So This Is College. Accounts of the original seat count run from about 2,800 to 2,876.
The auditorium is the reason to make the crossing. It carries one of the largest cantilevered balconies ever built, a proscenium rising the equivalent of six stories, gilded plaster, stained glass, ironwork and a domed ceiling, in a Spanish Baroque manner with Italian and Moorish borrowings depending on which account you read. The house seats about 1,900 now. The theater says a speaking voice carries from the stage to the upper balcony without being raised; that claim comes from the theater itself, not an acoustician.
Films ended here in the late 1970s — the theater dates it to 1977, other accounts to 1978 — and the building went through failed runs as a dinner theater, a nightclub and an antiques showroom before sitting largely dark for decades. In 2004 Rosemary Cappozalo, a dance teacher who had rented the house for her students' recitals, and her daughters Luanne Sorrentino and Doreen Cugno formed a nonprofit, put a large part of her life savings into it, and had the doors open within months. It runs today as a charitable organization staging well over a hundred events a year, and a state-funded interior restoration finished in 2023 with the lobby, plasterwork, paint and a new entrance mosaic.
It is the only venue on this list outside Manhattan, and the only one whose stage you may have seen without knowing it: the finale of School of Rock was filmed here, and Gossip Girl used it as a stand-in opera house.
35 Hyatt St, Staten Island, NY 10301 · Official site ↗
The St. George Theatre is a performing arts venue, picture palace, and office complex at 35 Hyatt Street in St. George, on the North Shore of Staten Island, New York City. The 2,800-seat St. George Theatre was built for Staten Island theater operator Solomon Brill and opened on December 4, 1929. Today, the theatre has 1,903 seats.
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