A new live music venue is opening next month in downtown Oakland near the corner of Broadway and 13th Street.
The 1,000-capacity hall, called Ceremony, will host touring acts of diverse genres — rap, R&B, punk, Latin, comedy, queer pop — alongside local acts and DJ nights.
The venue is owned and operated by the team behind Crybaby, a smaller nightclub located several blocks away.
While San Francisco has similarly sized music venues like the Regency Ballroom, August Hall and the Fillmore, Ceremony will be the only music hall of its size in Oakland.
That’s an asset owners Jesse Tittsworth and Dominic Green are banking on.
As far as the booking landscape goes, “There’s a giant queue for a small handful of 1,000-capacity venues in the city. There’s nothing in the East Bay,” Tittsworth says in a recent interview about the opening.
Additionally, certain types of shows, Tittsworth adds, just make more sense in Oakland, where there’s a more diverse audience for Latin acts, rap artists and queer dance nights.
The venue’s initial lineup in March has yet to be announced. But Tittsworth says that “there’s rave stuff on there, there’s a well-known comedian on there, there’s well-known DJs on there. There’s an extremely well-known rapper in there. All this stuff is confirming as we speak.”
Green has deep local roots — his grandfather was a mayor of Berkeley, and his father is a longtime jazz promoter. Tittsworth was a co-founder of Washington D.C.’s U Street Music Hall, an acclaimed smaller venue.
The pair opened the 400-capacity Crybaby in 2022 as a no-frills, no-bottle-service, no-VIP-area nightclub, a format quickly embraced by the Oakland music scene. The club has been profitable, Green and Tittsworth say.
But Ceremony was, in fact, the duo’s initial plan. The two first signed a lease at 1220 Broadway six years ago, in 2019, just before the pandemic halted their plans. The building’s ownership has changed hands multiple times since.
After extensive renovations, including sound installation, stage construction and other build-outs, the venue is poised to bring an injection of nightlife to the downtown core.
With a 6,013-square-foot ground floor overlooked by a second-floor wrap-around mezzanine, the venue boasts a state-of-the-art D&B Audiotechnik sound system. Two bars on either side of the dance floor and a kitchen handle food and drinks.
Key to the location, Tittsworth points out, is Ceremony’s immediate proximity to the 12th Street BART station. The venue may also pursue block parties on 13th Street between Broadway and Franklin, which could accommodate between 2,500 to 6,000 people.
The building at 1220 Broadway has a storied past. Those of a certain age will remember it as the Lux Theater, which showed movies from its glistening grand opening in 1948 to its seedier demise in 1978. More recently, from 1988 to 2019, the former theater served as a Goodwill.
When the Oakland City Council approved the opening of Goodwill in 1988, it required the charity organization to remove the Lux Theater’s majestic, protruding marquee from the building.
Green finds a certain irony in this. When he met with the city’s historic department recently, he was encouraged to add a marquee, similar to the Lux Theater’s, to the building’s facade.
Renovations of the building have uncovered the usual oddities, especially in the basement. An old steam boiler. A door leading to nothing but bricks. A hollowed-out section of a wall where someone once lived.
“Dim light, you know, they dripping pipe. It’s really like Saw V … it can be a little spooky down there,” says Green.
Tittsworth, rolling with the idea, jokes that the basement could host the world’s creepiest mini-rave.
Another point of clarification: the two did not name the venue after the Joy Division song “Ceremony,” nor the punk band Ceremony that came roaring out of the Bay Area suburb of Rohnert Park in the early 2000s, but the literal definition of a ceremony, and what it entails.
“It just hits on like every culture, right? Every culture has a ceremony, of any sort,” says Green. “For us, wanting to be a place that’s welcoming to all with diverse programming, it felt like a word that encompasses every division of culture.”
One thing that’s been elusive, as a potential driver of downtown revitalization, is bankable support from the cash-strapped city of Oakland.
In meetings with various departments, “I hear a lot of support in these rooms, all the way from D.O.T. to OPD to fellow business owners,” says Tittsworth. “It’s just the budgets don’t match the verbal support.”
Oakland has radically reviewed its operating budget in the past year, and “arts and culture has really been slashed,” adds Green. “So we’re pretty much on our own out here.”
However, for Ceremony’s unique size, format and location, the two have found support from what’s technically their competitors.
Green and Tittsworth have talked with larger live music promoters like Goldenvoice, Another Planet Entertainment and Live Nation. To hear them tell it, they see Ceremony as complementing their Bay Area bookings instead of competing.
“It’s really this idea of like, how do we work together to put Oakland on the map?” Tittsworth says.
For updates on Ceremony’s grand opening and concert schedule, visit the venue’s Instagram.
