The theater at 99 Monmouth Street in Red Bank opened on a November evening in 1926. A century later, the Count Basie Center for the Arts closed out its centennial on Saturday, November 14, with a night built to look and sound like that first one, and it opened the doors free to Red Bank residents.

Tickets to the Centennial Celebration Finale were priced at $19.26, a nod to the year the building opened.

The night itself

The centerpiece was a screening of The Quarterback, the silent comedy that played on the theater's opening night in 1926. The Basie said it was the first time the film had been shown there in a century. It was restored in 4K and accompanied live by silent film organist Ben Model.

Around the film, the evening was staged as a return to the 1920s: hot jazz, Gatsby-era automobiles, period fashion, a speakeasy-style setup and performers dressed as stars of vaudeville, Broadway and early Hollywood, with prizes for the best retro costume. A post-show gala next door at The Vogel, the Basie's second stage, honored state Senator Vin Gopal and Netflix.

A hundred years on Monmouth Street

The building began as Reade's Carlton theater and spent more than four decades showing films and hosting vaudeville, touring productions, local theater and concerts. By the mid-1960s it had fallen into disrepair as shopping malls, home television and multiplexes pulled audiences elsewhere.

The rescue came from the county's arts community. In 1971, funding from the Junior League of Monmouth County and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts helped create the Monmouth County Arts Council, which set out almost immediately to save the Carlton. In 1973 an anonymous foundation gift let the council buy the theater for $96,665, several hundred thousand dollars less than it had cost to build 47 years earlier, on the condition that it become an arts center for the whole county. It reopened as the Monmouth Arts Center.

Two local musicians shaped what came next. William J. Count Basie grew up on nearby Mechanic Street and became one of the defining figures of American jazz. He played a homecoming show at the Carlton in 1961, weeks after performing at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and returned in 1974 for a concert marking his 70th birthday and again in 1979 for a benefit for Shrewsbury's A.M.E. Zion Church. His last appearance there came in 1983. Six months after his death in 1984, the Monmouth Arts Center was renamed in his honor. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band took the same stage in August 1974 and came back the following year for a show billed as a homecoming.

What the Basie is now

The main theater seats 1,568 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A full interior restoration finished in 2008 returned the room to its original Spanish-influenced 1926 look, funded in part by a Springsteen and E Street Band performance, and the facade was restored two years later. A $26 million capital campaign then turned the theater into a campus: the Grunin Arts Education Building, home of the Turner Academy of the Arts, a classical music conservatory, The Vogel as a second performance space, a glass-lined lobby on the east side, the William J. and Catherine Basie Arts Plaza and the Stillwell Larkin Pavilion entrance. The Basie Center Cinema House rounds out the programming with films.

The centennial ran for 16 months. The Basie announced it on July 10, 2025, ahead of the building's 100th birthday on November 11, 2026, and its first major piece was a Count Basie Center Walk of Fame honoring area artists whose early performances on the Basie stage led to wider fame. Basie himself was among the first inductees.

If you go

The Count Basie Center for the Arts is at 99 Monmouth Street in downtown Red Bank, a short walk from the North Jersey Coast Line station. The box office is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 5 p.m., and on show days it opens 60 minutes before doors. The phone is 732-842-9000, and the season's full calendar is on the Basie's website.

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