One Hundred Years On Main Street: The Egyptian Hosts a Four-Night Soul Revival
Walk up Main Street past the T-shirt shops and the après bars and you'll hit a building that has outlasted every trend Park City has ever chased. The Egyptian Theatre opened in 1926 on the site of the old Dewey, which the winter snows had literally caved in, and this year it turns 100 — the "Jewel of Main Street," still gilded, still improbably small, still booking real shows into 266 seats.
The centennial gets an appropriately grand houseguest this week. Beginning July 15 and running four nights through Saturday, July 18, Russell Thompkins Jr. and The New Stylistics take the stage. Thompkins was the impossibly sweet falsetto at the front of The Stylistics, the Philadelphia soul group that stacked up a run of Top 10 R&B singles in the early 1970s — "Betcha By Golly Wow," "You Are Everything," "You Make Me Feel Brand New." He is the real article, and a room this size means you'll hear that voice the way it was meant to land: unamplified-close, no jumbotron, no nosebleeds.
There is a particular pleasure in seeing an act of this stature in a house this intimate. Thompkins has sung these songs in arenas; the Egyptian gives them back their human scale. When that falsetto floats up "You Are Everything" in a hundred-year-old vaudeville house, the acoustics do half the emotional work for him.
That the Egyptian is even here to host it is the deeper story. This is a theater that has been a movie house, a playhouse, and very nearly a teardown; it survives now as a nonprofit-run community theater programming everything from tribute acts to touring folk to the odd magician. The 100th-anniversary calendar leans into that scrappy range on purpose — the point being that a small room's superpower is that it can say yes to almost anything.
Why does one soul revue in a small theater matter to the health of a scene? Because Main Street's identity is under constant pressure from money — from the boutiques and the short-term rentals and everything that would rather the Egyptian be retail. Every sold-out night in that 266-seat room is an argument that live music still belongs downtown, not just on the resort lawns. A century in, the Egyptian is still making that argument the only way that counts: by selling tickets.
Four nights, one legend, a hundred candles on the marquee. Get there early enough to look up at the ceiling.
Sources: Events celebrate Egyptian Theatre's 100th anniversary (Park Record); Scene Happenings: July 18 and beyond (Park Record); Russell Thompkins Jr. and The New Stylistics (Egyptian Theatre / parkcityshows.com)