Teatr Muzyczny Capitol, Wrocław

Teatr Muzyczny Capitol is Wrocław’s municipal musical theatre in a 1929 former cinema-theatre. Enlarged dramatically between 2011 and 2013, it combines a restored historic section with a new building. The institution continues a musical-theatre tradition at this address dating from 1955 and produces the Actor Song Review.

Teatr Muzyczny Capitol is Wrocław’s city-run musical theatre, occupying a former cinema-theatre built in 1929. Its name preserves that earlier Capitol cinema, which once stood on Gartenstrasse in the city then called Breslau. The original complex, designed by Berlin architect Friedrich Lipp, combined an auditorium for twelve hundred people with a hotel and administrative wing.

During the Second World War, the front section lost several storeys, while the foyer, auditorium and stage escaped major damage. On the first day of 1946, the building reopened as the Śląsk cinema, Poland’s largest cinema at the time. Theatre returned here in 1964, when the Wrocław Operetta moved in and shared the auditorium with that cinema.

The present Capitol was created in 2004, continuing a sequence of musical-theatre and operetta companies that had worked at this address since 1955. The building you see now reflects a major enlargement completed between 2011 and 2013: the theatre grew from four thousand to eighteen thousand square metres. The historic section was renovated, while a new theatre building was added.

Capitol returned with a production of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita on the twenty-eighth of September 2013. Since 2006, it has also produced Wrocław’s Actor Song Review.