The Embassy as a stage: vaudeville, the rescue, and the Broadway tours

Opened 1928 as the Emboyd

The palace years: The Embassy opened on May 14, 1928, as the Emboyd Theatre — a movie palace and vaudeville house built by theatre operator W. Clyde Quimby at a cost of $1.5 million, attached to the 250-room Indiana Hotel, with the Grande Page theatre pipe organ for the silent films. For twenty-five years it hosted the brightest names of stage and screen: Bob Hope, who made his first emcee appearance in Fort Wayne there, Doris Day, Lawrence Welk, Victor Borge, Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Perry Como and Red Skelton among them. In 1952 the theatre and hotel were sold to the Alliance Amusement Corporation and the name changed to the Embassy. The building itself is carried in Architecture and Famous Landmarks; what belongs here is its second life as the city's big stage.

The rescue: The Indiana Hotel closed in 1971 and the theatre went dark. Faced with demolition in 1972, a handful of community leaders and volunteers, led by Robert Goldstine, formed the nonprofit Embassy Theatre Foundation; the "Save the Embassy" campaign raised the $250,000 needed to buy the building with just two days to spare, and volunteers afterward fed coal bought with their own money into the furnaces to keep the pipes from freezing. The Embassy was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and reopened as a performing arts center; its Festival of Trees began in 1985. A 1995 renovation expanded the stage to the standards of large-scale touring companies, and a $10 million renovation in 2016 reopened the former hotel floors, closed for nearly forty years. Today, seating just under 2,500, the Embassy is the city's touring house — home to the Broadway at the Embassy series (its named tours include Les Misérables, The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton), national concerts, film, and the Philharmonic concerts carried in the Music History leg.

Sources:

1. The Embassy Theatre, "Our History" (fwembassytheatre.org) — the May 14, 1928 Emboyd opening, the 1952 sale and renaming, the 1972 foundation and Goldstine, the $250,000 with two days to spare, the 1975 Register listing, the 1995 stage expansion, the 2016 renovation.
2. Historic Theatre Photos, Embassy Theatre, Fort Wayne — the Quimby building, the November 1952 Embassy reopening, seats just under 2,500; Visit Fort Wayne — the $1.5 million cost, the star list, Festival of Trees (1985 per the Embassy information site).