Historic Crighton Theatre renovates with new seating

THE WOODLANDS, TX – The Crighton Theatre was built by former Conroe Mayor Harry M. Crighton more than 90 years ago as a gift to the community after striking oil. He built the theater in Italian Renaissance style, featuring local fossilized limestone as a community amenity, and opened the building November 26, 1935, with its opening production of Stars Over Broadway.

Back then, the lush structure served as a popular movie house – particularly famous over the summers for its early usage of air conditioning – and vaudeville theatre, until the advent of multiplex cinemas led to its closing in the mid-1960s.

For around 15 years, the ‘Crown Jewel of Downtown Conroe’ sat derelict before a major community restoration and grand reopening in 1979, as a result of the fighting of the building to the Montgomery County Foundation for Performing Arts by the Crighton family. Currently, the historic Crighton is the home of Stage Right of Texas and Christian Youth Theatre (CYT); it additionally hosts the Sounds of Texas Music Series and attracts major musical, theatrical, comedy, and variety acts from all over the globe.

A new, expanded lobby was added to the Crighton during a major renovation project that began in early 2020, adding 10,000 square feet of the lobby by extending it into the adjacent Muse Building and adding a dozen new downstairs restrooms. While this was the first major renovation since the theatre was reopened in 1979, the improvements were limited to the lobby.

In November of 2024, Melody Montez, executive director of the Crighton, commenced fundraising efforts to replace the seats and flooring that had been sat and trod upon by countless thousands of audience members over the decades.

“The second round of original seating from 1979 were breaking down, and the carpet and tiling in the auditorium were more than 25 years old,” Montez told Woodlands Online. “I designed a new seat design and picked out carpet and flooring to complement the historic aesthetic of the building.”

Facing a total cost of approximately $410,000 for the project, Montez opted to sell seat sponsorships as a fundraiser. Seat removal and flooring replacement commenced on December 22 over the holiday break, and the project is slated to be completed by the end of January for the theatre’s first slate of shows of the calendar year, including Stage Right of Texas’ Of Mice and Men and Buddy Holly tribute show, both running in February.

“We still have seats available for sponsorships; you can have your name or business put on a plate on the back of the chair you sponsor,” Montez told Woodlands Online. “We took the old plates off of the original chairs and are having them put into a large plaque for our lobby to honor the original 1979 chair donors.”

To sponsor a chair or learn more, call the Crighton Box office at 936-441-7469 for details.

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