To celebrate 100 years of movies at Liberty Hall, programmers are invoking the building’s history as an opera house with a screening of “Phantom of the Opera” featuring live piano accompaniment.
Documentation suggests that the historied building at the corner of Seventh and Mass first opened its doors as a movie theater in the 1924 to 1925 season. Earlier this year, Liberty Hall launched a new series to mark the centennial. Each month, they’ve screened a different 1925 silent movie from their collection.
October’s selection, “Phantom of the Opera” (1925), was directed by Rupert Julian and starred Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin. The black-and-white horror film will be made all the more eerie by Liberty Hall’s history as the Bowersock Opera House.
According to the Spencer Research Library, which houses the opera house’s program collection, Bowersock renovated the building in 1882 before it burned down in an electrical fire in 1911.
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“The building was completely rebuilt the following year,” the library’s blog post reads. “It became the Jayhawker Theater in the 1930s, and during the 1960s and 1970s it transformed into a night club and disco. In 1986, the building was renovated and renamed Liberty Hall.”
Kyle Naig will honor this legacy from his seat at the ivories as the live piano accompaniment. He received his bachelor’s degree in piano from KU, but during his time in Lawrence, he also became a diligent student of film.
“Living in Lawrence and going to movies at Liberty Hall made me fall in love with movies in the first place,” he said, recounting his many trips to the video rental store and days spent watching movies in his dorm.
Pop concerts with high-budget productions and full orchestras playing along to “Jurassic Park” and “The Lord of the Rings” have risen in popularity, but Naig won’t have a digital screen with automated cues and full-ensemble support. He’s relying on the hand-scribbled notations and cues from the score the movie studio sent to organists and pianists after the film’s premiere.
The musical book, arranged by Gustav Heinrichs, is a pastiche of original compositions and quotations from fellow silent film composers. Since the opera company portrayed in the film is immersed in a production of Charles Gounod’s “Faust,” pieces of that and other classic operas are interspersed throughout the scenes.
Naig thus faces the challenge of replicating a swath of tones and musical instruments from his singular bench.
“There are so many colors you can make at the piano to create different sounds to imitate string, brass, even percussion, timpani, even organ,” Naig said. “And so I, as the pianist, … have the opportunity to make that come off the page, so I would ask the audience to imagine a fuller palette of sound.”
The rumble of lower keys with some “loud whacking” will invoke a timpani and other percussion in Naig’s performance. Passages played legato, which creates a luscious sound with long, connected notes, will speak to organ cues, while the plucked strings of a harp are a clear translation to the higher notes along the keyboard.
Naig felt that live music allows the audience to be fully immersed in an on-screen story.
“The fact that it’s live as an audience member maybe prompts you to interrogate why the composer made that musical choice, where, if it’s going by on the soundtrack, it could maybe sneak by you a little more than if you hear the pianist or the organist or the orchestra change to the villain scene suddenly, or the love theme sneaks in,” he said. “Maybe you’re forced to react more viscerally to it happening in front of you.”
Ultimately, Naig said he’s stoked to join a lineage of pianists and organists who have accompanied films live, while providing an homage to a beloved repertory movie theatre.
“For the past 10 years, I guess since I graduated, every place that I’ve worked, I’ve gravitated towards these independent theaters,” Naig said.
His work takes him all over the country, but wherever he is, he carves out the time and money to visit the local independent cinema.
You can see “Phantom of the Opera” at Lawrence’s independent cinema from 7 to 9 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 19, at 644 Massachusetts St. Tickets, which cost $15 online, can be purchased here.
Learn more about Naig’s work here.
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Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.
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Note: A date and link in this post have been corrected.
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