Ritz Theatre

rivest266 on November 13, 2024 at 12:47 am

Reopened as Ritz on March 9th, 1926. Grand opening ad posted.

Hibi on November 5, 2020 at 9:23 pm

Surprised no one has mentioned this theater appeared as a location in the film, Far from Heaven. (interior and exterior).

Michael R. Rambo Jr. on January 24, 2015 at 4:01 am

The British rock group Def Leppard filmed the music video for their song “Foolin'” here at the Ritz Theatre in the summer of 1983 during their “Pyromania” tour

spectrum on January 3, 2015 at 9:11 pm

Looks like they are under new management – the new website (http://www.ritztheatre.net/) says upcoming event info is on its way. There were three events in November 2014. The gallery has a lot of great interior photos.

markp on March 6, 2012 at 4:16 pm

Still waiting, still hoping this place can get into the hands of someone who can really bring it back to life. Concerts, Broadway shows, movies, opera. I know this place can do well. People said the same thing about New Brunswick and Newark, and look at the venues they now have.

RoadsideArchitecture.com on March 22, 2011 at 12:32 am

The theatre is open (their website shows upcoming entertainment & movies). Here’s a photo I took this past weekend:
http://agilitynut.com/11/3/ritz.jpg

kencmcintyre on April 10, 2009 at 4:44 am

This site has a 1981 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/df9c8w

markp on October 9, 2008 at 4:18 pm

Any news on the sale? I may be going there in 2 weeks, to check on things. In the meantime if anyone knows anything about the impending sale, please post. Thank You

kencmcintyre on July 14, 2008 at 6:28 pm

For sale on loopnet. No price listed, though:
http://tinyurl.com/6ldgbf

frankie on December 27, 2007 at 8:45 pm

At the beginning of her unique career, the one and only ETHEL MERMAN appeared here !!!

teecee on May 25, 2006 at 11:04 pm

Before it disappears:
Multiculturalism in a palatial venue
Sunday, May 21, 2006

By JIM BECKERMAN

Last September, some 2,000 people waited in line at the historic Ritz Theatre in Elizabeth for a live appearance by one of the biggest names in America.

Beyonce? 50 Cent? Paris Hilton?

Actually, it was Alvaro Uribe, president of Colombia.

Hey, we didn’t say which America.

“He was answering questions from the audience,” says Carolina Gil, the house manager and executive director for the Ritz Theatre.

“They were asking about the legalization for Colombians living in this country, about the violence in the country that’s making people leave,” she says.

That’s one of the more unusual events sponsored by the Ritz, one of New Jersey’s most unusual performing arts centers.

It’s not so unusual because of its large size (2,700 seats), or the lavishness of its interior (marble, gold leaf, Ionic columns and murals), its acoustics (voted the best in the area in a number of polls), or an old-fashioned marquee that was striking enough to be featured in a Woody Allen movie, “Sweet and Lowdown.”

Nor is it unusual because it is a former vaudeville and movie palace converted into a performing arts center. That’s the story of many Jersey venues, including the State Theatre in New Brunswick, the Union County Arts Center in Rahway, the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank and bergenPAC in Englewood.

What’s unusual is the audience.

“This is like a multicultural theater,” Gil says. “We get events that are different from NJPAC or PNC Bank Arts Center or the State Theatre.”

The Ritz Theatre caters to an area of central Jersey that is notable for its large emigre population: not only Colombians, Cubans, Dominicans, Peruvians, and other Latin groups, but also Indians and Pakistanis.

It follows that the headliners who sell out the theater — there have been lines around the block on a number of occasions — are not necessarily the ones that play other theaters in New Jersey.

Rosio Durcal, Paulina Rubio and the late Celia Cruz are some of the top-drawing stars who have brought out droves of people dressed, as per Latin etiquette, in their Sunday best.

“No sneakers, no jeans,” Gil says. “They come very nice, dress up for the event.”

When Julio Iglesias, long in semi-retirement, looked for a venue to stage his sole North American appearance in 2004, he chose the Ritz Theatre. Needless to say, it sold out. “We had 300 people outside without tickets,” Gil says.

Nor are Latin audiences the only ones served. A “Tribute to Bollywood” event in April, one of six or so a year that cater to the area’s burgeoning Indian population, brought a capacity audience. “It’s very exciting when you have an Indian event and you see 2,700 Indians coming from Edison, North Bergen, places like that,” Gil says.

If the season schedule didn’t tip you off that the Ritz was catering to a specialized audience, there are other giveaways.

The murals running along the proscenium arch, for one thing — part of a $3 million restoration project, between 1994 and 2005, that has brought the theater back to something like its splendor during the 1920s and ‘30s, when Cab Calloway and the Marx Brothers used to make personal appearances.

“Art, a Vision of Paradise” is the name of the murals, painted by Colombian-born artist Jorge Posada, that turn the interior of the theater into a faux-Renaissance palace, with winged angels descending from on high to hobnob with pipe-playing, lute-strumming musicians.

“It looks very nice, and it goes with the decor of the theater,” Gil says.

Then, too, the promotional strategy is very different from, say, New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.

Most of the advertising budget for Ritz shows is spent not on radio, TV or Web advertising, but on old-fashioned posters.

For a big show, $5,000 or more goes into the colorful posters, stapled to utility poles, and billboards, that trumpet to the Spanish-speaking world: “Ritz Theatre presenta. … ”

“The marketing is a very different formula,” Gil says. “At NJPAC, they don’t put posters out on the street. For Spanish audiences, you have to do the posters. In New Jersey, you have towns like Elizabeth and Perth Amboy where the Latin community lives, where these kinds of people concentrate and have businesses. They don’t have time for radio and TV. So posters and fliers is where the promotional money goes to.”

The 146-year-old Ritz has been through many changes since its first flowering as an opera house in post-Civil War Elizabeth.

It was a vaudeville theater for many years, then a movie palace, then a Spanish Pentecostal church. In the 1970s and ‘80s it became a more conventional performing arts venue where Tom Jones, Styx and Frank Sinatra played to largely English-speaking audiences.

It began its new lease on life when George Castro, originally from Colombia, came to Elizabeth in 1985, got a real estate license and made the proverbial killing in the growing Latino market (half of Elizabeth’s population of 125,000 is Spanish-speaking). In 1994, he and his brother Maurice bought the dilapidated theater and began the long process of restoration.

Gil, only 22 and herself a Colombia native, has seen her fortunes rise along with the theater — she worked her way up from box office attendant to executive director in only three years.

What impresses her most, she says, is the diversity of the Ritz audience: a forecast, perhaps, of a new and more multicultural America that is just around the corner.

“Even when we had an Indian event, we had Latin people coming to see it,” she says.

On the Web:

ritztheatre.net

E-mail:

kencmcintyre on March 16, 2006 at 6:19 pm

Here is a photo of the marquee:
http://tinyurl.com/hx36u

Thanks to lostmemory for the link – there are 94,000 theater photos on this site. Good for browsing.

teecee on March 2, 2006 at 9:58 am

Listed as part of RKO-Stanley Warner Theatres, Inc. in the 1976 International Motion Picture Almanac.