 and then closed everything back up. The State Theater first opened in November of 1949 and was a show palace with over 1,000 seats. In the 1970s, it was divided into a triplex, and it was kind of downhill from there. Its movie-playing days ended in the 1990s, and late in the decade, a theater company known as Harlequin Productions bought the space and converted it into a live performance venue.