San Diego’s historic Balboa Theatre is celebrating the present by bringing back the past. Get ready for Silent Movie Mondays.
The downtown theater (Fourth Avenue & E Street) is saluting its 100th anniversary this year. Harkening back to the 1920s, an ongoing centennial celebration will allow audiences to watch silent films accompanied by one of five original Wonder Morton organs.
Built for five bygone New York City movie theaters, the Wonder Mortons have a 100-year-old history. Today, assisted by a computer program, the organ can emulate a wide variety of musical instruments and tones.
“There’s an authenticity about presenting a silent film in a great movie palace with a great pipe organ,” Balboa Theatre Organist Ken Double says. “People who have seen silent films on Turner classic movies – they have not experienced a silent film.”
Silent Movie Mondays will run every other month from October 2024 to June 2025. There will be five shows featuring silent movies accompanied by the Wonder Morton.
The first show is Monday, October 28, with organist Russ Peck performing an original score of The Phantom of the Opera. Guests will also get to check out a display of 1920s automobiles presented by the Model T Ford Club of San Diego.
Vice President of San Diego Theatres Abigail Buell says she and Double have been planning Silent Movie Mondays for a little over a year, and have high hopes the retro-experience will gain an audience.
“When we hit the 100 years, we were–as a staff, as a company, committed to reprogramming and reactivating this instrument,” Buell says.
She saw the ability of the organ to enamor audiences back in March during a centennial kickoff event: “Toons & Tunes: A Morning of Family Fun,” a riff on Saturday morning cartoons, also featuring the organ.
“Just seeing the kids–even my niece and nephew were there, and they were just–my nephew was completely engrossed,” Buell says.
Double was the composer for “Toons & Tunes.”
“We’re going to see if we can use the Wonder Morton a lot more to establish its own great identity in the theater,” he says.
For more information about Silent Movie Mondays, go to: San Diego Theatres. SDSun
