The Last Grand Room Standing: Inside the Imperial Theatre

Walk down Broad Street and you'll pass a lot of ghosts — old marquees, dead box offices, the outlines of theaters that didn't make it. Then you hit the Imperial, and the ghost is still breathing. This is Augusta's only operating historic theater, 853 seats deep, and it has been putting bodies in those seats since the Wilson administration.

Here's the origin story, and it's a good one. The building opened February 18, 1918 as the "Wells Theatre," a vaudeville house built for the then-eye-watering sum of $47,792. That number is worth sitting with. In 1918 you could put up a full-blown entertainment palace for less than the price of a modern pickup truck, and Augusta did it, and it's still here. Try that with anything built last year.

The Imperial has the kind of résumé that makes newer rooms look like they're still filling out the application. Charlie Chaplin played the house in 1918 — the actual Chaplin, at the actual peak of his fame. The Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova danced on that stage. Vaudeville's biggest names rolled through when this was one of the stops that mattered. Then, almost immediately, history threw its first punch: the 1918 flu pandemic forced the place to briefly go dark in its opening year. It reopened. It always reopens.

In 1929 the theater got the Art Deco makeover that gives it the bones you see today — the geometry, the lines, the swagger of a room that knew exactly how glamorous it was supposed to be. That's the era this building wears best.

What matters now is that the Imperial isn't a museum piece charging admission to look at itself. It's a working venue, and its "Southern Soul and Song" series has become one of the more reliable reasons to buy a ticket in this town. In a city that gave the world the hardest-working man in show business, a series built on soul and song isn't decoration — it's a mission statement.

Which brings us to Friday, August 14. Ronnie McDowell brings his "Red White and Blue Tour" to the Imperial at 7pm, and this is exactly the kind of booking the room was built to hold. McDowell is a bona fide voice — the man has spent a career being the guy other singers quietly admire — and an 853-seat historic house is the correct scale for him. Not a shed. Not an arena. A room where you can actually hear a singer decide how long to hold a note, and where the plaster overhead has been listening to professionals do exactly that for over a century.

That's the case for the Imperial in a single Friday night. Augusta has bigger rooms coming and smaller rooms thriving, but it has exactly one that connects Chaplin and Pavlova to a 2026 tour date without missing a beat. When you sit down in there, you're not just catching a show. You're taking a seat that Augusta has refused to tear out for 108 years, through a pandemic, through the decline of vaudeville, through every reason a downtown theater usually has to die.

It didn't die. It's got a McDowell show Friday and a soul series carrying its name forward. Buy the ticket. Sit in the last grand room standing, and understand that keeping a place like this alive is its own kind of performance — one Augusta has been nailing since 1918.

Sources: Imperial Theatre (Augusta, Georgia)); Augusta Music Itinerary; Imperial Theatre