The Palace That Previewed Gone With the Wind Hosts a Different Kind of Epic

On September 9, 1939, a Riverside audience filed into the Fox Theatre on Mission Inn Avenue not knowing they were about to sit through one of the most famous sneak previews in Hollywood history: a rough cut of Gone with the Wind, screened before the world had any idea what it was watching. Eighty-seven years later, the Fox Performing Arts Center is still standing, still gorgeous, and this Saturday, August 1, it hosts an epic of an entirely different tempo — Concrete & Jerry Garcia (18+).

First, the room, because the room is the point. The Fox opened in 1929 as a Spanish Colonial/Churrigueresque movie palace, seats roughly 1,600, and after a major restoration it reopened as downtown Riverside's flagship performing-arts house. This is not a converted warehouse or a repurposed ballroom — it's a purpose-built palace from the age when going to a show meant dressing for it. The Gone with the Wind preview is the headline in its history, but the deeper truth is that Riverside has been a legitimate stop on the national entertainment map for nearly a century.

The August 1 bill lands in the jam-and-groove lane the Fox has increasingly leaned into — an 18+ show built for a crowd that wants to move rather than sit politely. It caps a big stretch for the venue: Calle 24 played the night before, July 31, and the room's late-summer calendar runs from a Little Shop of Horrors 40th-anniversary screening (August 14) to Los Yónics Zamacona (August 15), which tells you everything about the Fox's refusal to specialize.

Why it matters: the IE's live-music economy needs its palaces as much as its pits. A restored 1,600-seat house that can book a groove act on Saturday and a Spanish-language legend two weeks later is a room doing real work — keeping downtown Riverside a destination after dark, and proving the region can sustain a venue at that scale without importing it from the coast.

Kicker: The theater that showed Scarlett O'Hara before the world was ready is still, gloriously, not done throwing a party.

Sources: Concrete & Jerry Garcia (18+), Aug 1 2026 — Ticketmaster; Fox Performing Arts Center — Wikipedia; Fox Performing Arts Center — Songkick