The Muny
open-air theater in St. Louis, Missouri
The St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre (commonly known as The Muny) is an amphitheater located in St. Louis, Missouri. The theatre seats 11,000 people with about 1,500 free seats in the last nine rows that are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
The Muny season runs every year from mid-June to mid-August. It is run by a nonprofit organization. The current president and chief executive is Kwofe Coleman. The current artistic director and executive producer is Mike Isaacson.
History
In 1914, Luther Ely Smith began staging pageant-masques on Art Hill in Forest Park. In 1916, a grassy area between two oak trees on the present site of The Muny was chosen for a production of As You Like It produced by Margaret Anglin and starring Sydney Greenstreet with a local cast of "1,000 St.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Muny” is open-air theater in St. Louis, Missouri. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Muny, open-air and theater, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “open-air theater in St. Louis, Missouri” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7752644. VIAF identifies the subject as 130421826. The Library of Congress control number is n2010001862. Authority coordinates are 38.640, -90.280. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914 and 1916.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The Muny”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The Muny primary sources, The Muny archive and Muny research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Muny”?
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- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The Muny” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.