The Marx Brothers Slept Here: Miller Symphony Hall's Improbable Life
Every city has a grand old room, but few have one with a résumé as gloriously chaotic as Miller Symphony Hall in downtown Allentown. Home today to the Allentown Symphony Orchestra and seating roughly 1,100, the hall wears its tuxedo well — chandeliers, orchestra, the whole civilized package. But scratch the elegant surface and you find a building that has been, over 130 years, a farmers' market, a vaudeville house, a burlesque stage, and the launchpad for one of the most famous comedy acts in American history. This room contains centuries.
The origin story alone is a plot twist. The building opened in 1896 as a Central Market — produce and butchers, not Beethoven — before reinventing itself as the Lyric Theatre in 1899. From there the greats started rolling through. Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated stage actress on the planet, performed here in 1910. And in 1923, four brothers from New York debuted a revue called I'll Say She Is on this stage — the Marx Brothers, taking one of their first big swings in Allentown before they conquered Broadway and then Hollywood. Groucho's mustache got an early workout right here on Sixth Street.
My favorite detail, and the one that tells you this was never a stuffy room, comes courtesy of a Philadelphia Inquirer note observing that the hall was at points "partly supported by burlesque." Let that sit. The dignified home of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra once kept its lights on, in part, with burlesque revenue. There is no more honest history of American entertainment than that — high art and low art sharing a marquee and a cash drawer, decade after decade.
That lineage matters when you sit down for a show now. When the Allentown Symphony Orchestra takes the stage for something like its "Dancing Queen — The Music of ABBA" program on July 18 (with matinee and evening performances at 2:00 and 7:30 p.m.), you're hearing a full orchestra reinterpret pop in a room that has been reinventing what belongs on its stage since the McKinley administration. An orchestra playing ABBA in a former farmers' market that once hosted the Marx Brothers and burlesque dancers? The building has done stranger things. It was practically built for the swerve.
Here's why Miller Symphony Hall is essential to the Valley's ecosystem: it's the region's proof that "serious" music and popular joy were never actually enemies. The venue's whole existence argues that a great room adapts — market to theater to symphony hall — and that the audiences follow if you keep giving them a reason to show up. In a summer dominated by SteelStacks and Musikfest across the river in Bethlehem, Allentown's grand hall holds down the other end of the Valley with 130 years of institutional memory and a season that treats a Swedish pop catalog with the same craft it brings to the classical canon.
So the next time someone tells you Allentown doesn't have culture, send them to Sixth Street. Tell them Sarah Bernhardt played there, the Marx Brothers broke there, and the lights once stayed on thanks to burlesque. Then buy them a ticket to whatever the symphony is doing next. The chandeliers have seen everything. They can handle one more skeptic.
Sources: Miller Symphony Hall (Wikipedia); Miller Symphony Hall performance hall; Miller Symphony Hall concerts (ConcertFix)