History

Miami (pronounced locally as MY-am-uh) sits in the far northeastern corner of Oklahoma, in the Tri-State Mining District where Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri converge. The district’s lead and zinc deposits, discovered in the late nineteenth century, generated extraordinary wealth that transformed a frontier settlement into a prosperous small city by the 1920s. George Coleman Sr., whose mining interests had made him one of the district’s wealthiest men, decided in the late 1920s to invest that wealth in a civic monument that would signal Miami’s ambitions: a theater built to a standard that smaller cities typically did not attempt.

Coleman commissioned a design of deliberate theatrical spectacle. The exterior presents a Mission Revival facade of glazed white terracotta, its ornamental vocabulary drawn from the Spanish Colonial architecture then fashionable for civic and commercial buildings across the American Southwest. The interior pushed further still: an auditorium decorated with gilded ornamental work, hand-painted murals, and the elaborate plasterwork that theater designers of the era — drawing on the Baroque tradition and the French Louis XV style that the major Hollywood theater chains were deploying nationally — used to surround audiences with an atmosphere of dream-world magnificence. The 1929 opening coincided with the height of the silent film era’s transition to sound, placing the Coleman at the forefront of the new entertainment medium in its region.

The theater weathered the Depression, the postwar shift to television, and the broader decline of downtown commercial districts to emerge as a landmark of northeastern Oklahoma. Restoration work beginning in the late twentieth century stabilized and rehabilitated the building, returning its decorative program to something close to its original splendor. Today the Coleman operates as a community theater presenting live performances, films, and educational programming for the Miami and Tulsa regions.