Boch Center - Wang Theatre

This guide to the Boch Center - Wang Theatre in Boston starts on opening night in October 1925, when four thousand four hundred seats sold out and twenty thousand people still packed Tremont Street trying to get in. You'll hear about architect Clarence Blackall's outsized lobby, built nearly four times the size Massachusetts law required, and about the theater's brush with collapse decades later when its roof failed and debts piled up. It traces how a movie palace built to overwhelm one crowd nearly lost its doors to another era entirely.