Ginger Rogers Theater

Frank C. Clark's Spanish Colonial theatre opened in Medford on 20 October 1924 with a play and a Wurlitzer organ. Among the young performers who appeared there in the vaudeville years was Ginger Rogers, then a dancer, whose name the restored house later carried. Films followed vaudeville, multiplexes and television followed films, and by the mid-1980s the building had been given away. A company formed to rescue it raised $5.2 million from more than six hundred donors and reopened the 750-seat theatre in March 1997; it works today as the Craterian Theater at the Collier Center, the principal stage of southern Oregon.