The Palace is home to the Florence Gould Theater, an ornate 333-seat jewel box auditorium designed by museum architect George Applegarth. Opened in 1924 as the Little Theater, the venue hosts a regular calendar of concerts, lectures and theater performances.
The theater’s massive columns, rounded walls, and domed ceilings create a breathtaking environment, as well as some legendary challenging acoustics. “The room has no acoustic treatment whatsoever, and an abundance of hard surfaces,” offers Joe Orlando of Atwater, CA-based Commercial Media Systems. “It’s highly reverberant, and spoken word intelligibility is pretty much non-existent.” Commercial Media created the system design and assisted the Museum’s production department with the installation.
