Theatre Gallery

The Theatre Gallery at 2808 Commerce Street was an influential live music venue, art gallery, and live theatre performance space in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, Texas during the mid-to-late 80's. The venue was important because of one thing: up until the time it opened, Dallas was a city where bad "copy" bands were the order of the day. There simply weren't any clubs in town that booked original young artists. By initiating a policy of ONLY booking original artists, it promptly set itself apart from everything else happening in town - and it eventually set the tone for what would become a thriving Deep Ellum music scene. However it wasn't just the opening of the club that set all this into motion. It was a perfect storm of sorts; "alternative" music was finally ushering Classic Rock out the door, the Arts Magnet High School was starting to groom an amazing batch of creative young musicians, the local music writers in town didn't have anything interesting to write about, Ecstasy was still legal (so everyone got along really well), and underage teenage kids from Highland Park and Richardson were looking for a place where they could go to escape the rigid mentality of their upbringing. That, combined with the fact that a batch of original bands from Austin had forever been waiting for an appropriate venue in Dallas, all came together at exactly the same time. Theatre Gallery provided safe haven from that same conservative mindset which had helped to bring the 1984 Republican National Convention to the city. Mind you, there certainly was an original punk rock scene in Dallas prior to TG, with clubs like the Hot Klub, DJ's, Twilite Room, Ground Zero and Metamorphisis Concert Hall, with bands like the Assassins, Nervebreakers, NCM, Superman's Girlfriend, Stickmen With Rayguns, the Doo and Telephones, etc., yet the bands who played at Theatre Gallery had all aspired to reach a larger and broader audience without selling out. They used George Gimarc's "Rock and Roll Alternative" on KZEW and Shaggy's show on KNON to reach out to more than just the punk rock crowd. Of course there were hard punk rock or metal shows at Theatre Gallery, but those of us who worked there came to a collective decision to showcase anything and everything - that meant anything from the techno of T-4-2, the reggae of Da Nu Man, the blistering speed metal of Rigor Mortis, the alt prog-rock of End Over End, the performance art of Karen Finley to the abstract hip-hop of DDT. If something was interesting but didn't quite fit in the mainstream then it was right at home at Theatre Gallery. The art that we displayed in the gallery space was every bit as subversive and real: Bill Haveron, Ron English, Jeff Robinson, Matt Miller and Richard Hoefle all had amazing openings at Theatre Gallery. There were also a number of interesting theatre performances as well.