A Century On, The National Is Still the Room Everyone Wants

Walk east on Broad Street and you'll pass it before you clock how old it is: the sandstone-brick façade of The National, terracotta trim, a marquee that has advertised silent films and screamo with equal conviction. This year the building turns 103, and it remains the single most useful barometer of whether a touring act takes Richmond seriously. If you're playing The National, you've made it here.

The origin story is grander than the current mosh pits suggest. The National opened November 11, 1923 as a movie palace, and opening night was a civic occasion: a reported crowd of 2,000 — including the governor of Virginia and the mayor of Richmond — turned out to watch Thomas Ince's film Her Reputation. The house sat around 1,300, and its orchestra pit, big enough for two dozen musicians, was said to be the largest in the state. This was a building meant to make a mid-Atlantic city feel like a capital.

Then came the long middle. Like most American movie palaces, The National slid through decades of decline and disuse. What saved it was a roughly $15 million renovation that reopened the theater in 2008 — not as a cinema, but as a standing-room concert hall holding about 1,500. The bones stayed; the seats came out. The Renaissance Revival detailing that once framed a screen now frames a stage, which is a very Richmond kind of second act: keep the shell, gut-renovate the purpose.

What that renovation bought the city is a room with almost no bad spots. The floor slopes, the balcony hangs close, and the sound system was built for a hall this exact size rather than inherited from a bigger one. It's the venue where a band on the way up plays the show that decides whether they'll headline arenas or plateau — intimate enough to feel like a favor, large enough to signal arrival.

The 2026 calendar bears that out. The next marquee night on the books is Tuesday, August 11, when Florida rapper Loe Shimmy headlines with Lakeyah, followed Friday, August 14 by country-pop act Niko Moon. It's a genuinely Richmond spread — rap one night, radio country three days later, same historic room — and it's exactly the range The National has always insisted on. A palace that shows movies to governors one century can hold a rap show the next; the trick is surviving long enough to do both.

Here's the thing people miss about The National: its value isn't nostalgia. Plenty of cities let their movie palaces rot or turned them into parking. Richmond spent real money to keep one alive as a working music venue, and the payoff is that national tours route through here instead of skipping to D.C. or Charlotte. Every time a band loads in on Broad Street, that 2008 gamble pays another dividend.

So when someone tells you Richmond is too small to matter musically, point at the marquee. It has been lit, on and off, since Calvin Coolidge was president. It is lit again this August. The governor probably won't come this time — but the city still will.

Sources: The National (theater) — Wikipedia); The National — Richmond, Songkick calendar; The National — JamBase venue schedule