Hershey Theatre

Hershey Theatre is a 1,904-seat historic venue in downtown Hershey, Pennsylvania, conceived by Milton S. Hershey and dedicated in September 1933 as the star occupant of the town's Community Center Building. Lancaster architect C. Emlen Urban drew the plans in a lavish Venetian style: a Grand Lobby floored in polished Italian lava rock and walled in four kinds of marble, an inner foyer under a gold-tiled 'canopy of gold' ceiling patterned after St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, and a winged lion mounted above the stage. The auditorium sits beneath an atmospheric 'stars-and-clouds' ceiling whose colored lights shift from sunset to dawn. The room is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and its 2020s renovation added self-rising seats, additional wheelchair transfer locations and balcony handrails. Today it is Central Pennsylvania's main touring stage, carrying a Broadway Series alongside concerts, dance and national standup headliners - Kathleen Madigan, Steve Martin & Martin Short, Jeff Dunham, Derrick Stroup, Taylor Tomlinson and Colin Mochrie & Brad Sherwood all play the room. It is an unusually intimate house for its size: the front row is about 15 feet from the stage and the last balcony row only 125 feet back. Doors open roughly 60 minutes before showtime; the venue is cashless and every patron, whatever their age, needs a ticket.