The Capitol Theatre turns 100 and the Port Chester venue answers with a five-hour concert

The Capitol Theatre turned 100 on 18 August 2026, and just over a month later the Port Chester venue put 1,800 people in front of a concert that ran past five hours. JamBase reports that the night was built around Pink Talking Fish, rebranded for the evening as the Centennial Band, with 13 guest musicians, a three-piece horn section and a stand-up comedian working through a repertoire drawn entirely from acts that had played the room.

The building's history explains the format. It opened in 1926 as a movie theatre, showing Sea Wolf while a 10-piece orchestra played The Star-Spangled Banner to the audience. Concerts took over by 1970 and stayed until the 1990s, when the room became a catering hall running private events. Pete Shapiro, who had previously run Wetlands Preserve and later Brooklyn Bowl, reopened it for music in 2012 and it has not stopped since.

The Star-Spangled Banner opened the Centennial Band's set for that reason, at the request of the theatre's own family, and bassist Eric Gould explained afterwards that it was the first piece of music ever performed in the room. What followed was a seven-minute medley of I've Seen All Good People, Funk #49, 25 or 6 to 4 and Lola, none of them played whole, all of them by bands that had been on that stage.

The Grateful Dead thread runs through everything here. The Dead played 18 shows at the Capitol across 1970 and 1971, Phil Lesh went on to play more than 100, and Joe Russo's Almost Dead have logged 35 in Port Chester since 2013. That is why BERTHA: Grateful Drag opened the night with an 82-minute set, and why Shapiro introduced them by saying they had taken the music that has been in that room so many times and done it in a new way.

Shapiro also brought out Marvin Ravikoff, who bought the theatre in 1984 when it had a hole in the ceiling and birds living inside it. Ravikoff, in a suit, bow tie and top hat, told the crowd it took 25 years to rebuild the place, and thanked them for proving wrong everybody who thought it could not come back. Shapiro noted, from the same stage, that the Fillmore East, Winterland and the Capitol Theater in Passaic are all gone and this one is not.

The guest list was drawn from the jam circuit's working musicians rather than its headliners. Andy Frasco sang Rock And Roll All Nite into Never Been to Spain with the lyrics changed to name the theatre. Kanika Moore took White Rabbit and later carried Merry Clayton's part on Gimme Shelter. Sammi Garett stood alone on an emptied stage to tell the crowd that Janis Joplin wrote Mercedes-Benz a few hours before performing it there on 8 August 1970, then sang it.

moe.'s Al Schnier and Umphrey's McGee's Brendan Bayliss both turned up, as did moe. drummer Vinnie Amico, Goose's Cotter Ellis, Pigeons Playing Ping Pong's Greg Ormont and Alex Petropulos, the Disco Biscuits' Marc Brownstein and Karina Rykman. Umphrey's McGee have never covered My Morning Jacket in 28 years and nearly 3,000 shows; Bayliss sang I'm Amazed here. The same two bands shared a stage in Grand Rapids earlier this year, which is how this circuit works.

Bob Dylan was the first act Shapiro booked into the reopened theatre, on 4 September 2012, so Like a Rolling Stone went into the second half with Cal Kehoe singing and playing harmonica. Kehoe also took the night's quietest turn, alone with an acoustic guitar on Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, after explaining that he only joined Pink Talking Fish because the band caught his set at the adjacent Garcia's and ended up in the green room playing Mario Kart with him.

The main set ran from 9:17pm to 12:16am and the encore from 12:20 to 12:30am, closing with Traffic's Dear Mr. Fantasy into the chorus of Hey Jude under a balloon drop, with everyone from the evening and part of BERTHA on stage. No Grateful Dead song was played all night, which for a room this tied to that band was its own kind of joke. Joe Russo's Almost Dead close out their own year on the east coast, and the questions about who carries that music forward are live elsewhere too, with John Mayer talking about stepping back from it while grieving Bob Weir. The rock hub has the rest of the week.