Augsburg turned the moat below the Rotes Tor into an open-air stage by a council resolution of May 1929 and opened it that August as the summer house of the municipal theatre; the first season lost money and the format only held from 1932. Over 2,100 seats face the medieval bastion, and from mid-June to early August the theatre plays opera, operetta and musical there, with Carmina Burana a recurring fixture of the Augsburg philharmonic chorus. In February 2026 a structural report closed the stand, and a substitute venue at the old gasworks is in use.