'We’re going to tell another 120 years of stories': Babcock to reopen in October
This October, the Babcock Theatre will reopen. And for once, it’s going to stay that way.
Few buildings in Billings, maybe in the state at large, have been through as much. The theater opened as an ornate opera house right before Christmas 1907. It hosted vaudeville and then movies and then sporting events and then back to movies and then back to sporting events. Jack White played there once. William Howard Taft spoke from the stage.
It’s been burned and rebuilt, soaked in blood and sweat. It’s fallen apart and closed. It’s been repaired and reopened. It’s fallen apart again and closed again. It’s been repaired again and reopened again. The process has repeated and repeated. The Babcock giveth, the Babcock taketh away.
Right now it’s in one of those cycles. Last May, a portion of the theater’s ceiling collapsed. Nobody was hurt, but it knocked the Babcock out of commission and put a lot of focus on the aging theater’s condition.
“Return of the Jedi” was shown at the Babcock when it premiered in 1983 and again most recently August 2023, and to paraphrase Yoda, "When 120 years old you reach, look as good you will not."
But rest assured, come October, it’s going to look really, really good.
“This is the last time the Babcock will ever be reopened,” said Matt Blakeslee. “Because it’s the last time the Babcock will ever be closed.”
A bold claim, but he’d know.
Blakeslee is the founder and executive director of Art House Cinema and Pub, the nonprofit that bought the Babcock — for the grand price of $1 — from the city of Billings on June 9. That’s almost a year after the ceiling collapsed on May 28, 2025, and just over a week after June 1, when Langlas & Associates started construction on the ceiling.
Those repairs are already well on their way to being completed. Rather than a patch, Art House decided to replace the whole ceiling, first with sheet rock and then covered in Acoufelt, a sound dampening material with excellent acoustic properties. It’s a solid piece of work.
“It’s going to be up there for another 120 years,” Blakeslee said. “It’s going to look sharp and clean and new.”
But why get a construction crew together if you’re not going all in? The ceiling is just one of several projects under construction at the Babcock right now.
While the ceiling was open, they added new beams to anchor lighting, trussing and speakers. The marquee — the theater’s architectural flourish that dominates downtown Billings whenever its turned on — has already been restored. Beneath that, crews are at work redoing the entrance doors.
The seats in the balcony were ruined by the ceiling collapse, so they’re replacing those, complete with cast and molded versions of the original seat ends. With the balcony area already torn up, construction crews are redoing the floors, which were so decayed most visitors probably never even noticed they were made of wood. Also in the balcony, there will be newly widened aisles and new stairs, complete with steps that are all the same height, a luxury the old theater never had.
Up above those repairs, they've been rebuilding the cornice, replacing chunks of the blue decorative molding that frames the Babcock stage and that had fallen into disrepair.
“We’ve got a long-sighted vison of where we want to go. We’re not just gluing up a new ceiling to get it open as soon as possible,” Blakeslee said. “We are working to invest where we can in the building as a whole.”
All in, the project has a $1.2 million price tag. $100,000 of that came from the city, which helped pay the insurance deductible. That insurance money is paying for about half of the total cost, with more funding coming from donations and, per Blakeslee, “funds we’ve been able to squirrel away.”
Walk into the Babcock now and you’ll find the whole place covered in scaffolding, going from the floor to the ceiling. The screen is rolled up in the rafters on top of the stage. There’s movement and construction noises everywhere. It’d be a lousy place to take in a movie.
But just give it a few more months. Once this thing reopens in the fall, it’ll be nonstop. Brian Oestreich, Art House’s creative director, has already got some programming planned. Potential films are being held close to the vest, but they’ll be just a part of the next phase of the Babcock.
"We want to see it as a community space," Blakeslee said. "At the end of the day, the Babcock Theatre is only in Billings, Montana. It's one of the rare unique places that does and can only exist here. When you see the marquee, when you see that theater, you know that's the Babcock. You know that's Billings."
This place, with a capacity that slots right in between the Pub Station and the Alberta Bair Theater, provides something nowhere else in town can.
“It’s been and done so many things,” Blakeslee said. “That’s what this theater means to the community. For us, that’s what we want to invest in.”
Next year the theater will turn 120, and it’s as important to Billings as it has ever been.
“The Babcock is such a beautiful breath of fresh air,” Blakeslee said. “Everybody is like, ‘I love the Babcock.’ ‘I had my first date there.’ ‘My buddy and I used to throw popcorn off the balcony.’”
“There are so many different stories,” he continued. “We’re going to tell another 120 years of stories.”