For one night each October, the Akron Civic Theatre stops being a concert hall and becomes Prince Prospero's abbey. The Masque, the city's premier Poe-inspired Halloween party for adults, returns to the historic theater at 182 S. Main St. on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at 8 p.m. It is a 21-and-over evening of cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, live music, dancing and what the organizers describe as "unexpected artistic happenings" unfolding around every corner.
The premise is drawn loosely from Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story "The Masque of the Red Death," in which a prince seals himself and a thousand nobles inside a walled abbey and throws a masked ball while a plague rages outside. The Civic's version keeps the gilded revelry and leaves the plague at the door. What remains is the story's central image: hundreds of guests in disguise, moving through ornate rooms under colored light, never quite sure who is behind the mask beside them.
The evening is structured as a slow reveal. It begins at 8 p.m. in the Grand Lobby with cocktails, light appetizers and live music from Justo Saborit and the Havana Nights, as the costumed guests arrive. At 9 p.m. the auditorium opens for dancing, and the party spreads through the building, including the mezzanine level, which in past years has hosted a "gypsy trail" of fortune tellers and other diversions. Admission includes three drink tickets, and the dress code is not casual: elegant dress is required, with costumes, masques and dramatic attire all part of the spectacle. The organizers invite guests to arrive mysterious, glamorous, gothic or enchanting, and to consider themselves part of the scene rather than spectators of it.
The choice of venue does much of the atmospheric work. The Civic opened on April 20, 1929, as the Loew's Theatre, the last remaining theater of eleven opened by Marcus Loew, founder of the Loew's chain. It was designed by the Viennese-born architect John Eberson in the "atmospheric" style that made him famous, in which an auditorium is dressed to resemble an outdoor courtyard under an open sky. The Civic's ceiling was painted to look like a night sky, and it is one of the few theater ceilings in the country that can still rotate, so that clouds appear to drift and stars to shift overhead during a performance. It is one of only five remaining atmospheric theaters designed by Eberson in the United States, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. A renovation in 2001 and 2002 restored much of its original Mediterranean and Italian Renaissance detail.
The building also carries a local reputation as one of Ohio's most haunted theaters, a claim the event's own listing winks at by calling the Civic "rumored-to-be-haunted." According to local lore collected over the years, at least three spirits are said to linger: a longtime janitor named Fred, who is said to have died during a work shift and who supposedly keeps watch over the building; a well-dressed man seen sitting alone in the balcony; and a weeping young woman said to walk the old Ohio and Erie Canal behind the theater before vanishing beneath it. Whether or not one credits the stories, they suit a masquerade built on Poe, where the boundary between the performance and the audience is deliberately blurred.
The Masque has been a fixture of Akron's Halloween calendar for years, growing out of the theater's earlier Masque of the Red Death balls, which by the mid-2010s were drawing hundreds of costumed guests and were covered by Cleveland-area press as the city's most theatrical costume party. Over time the name shortened to The Masque and the Poe framing loosened, but the format held: a ticketed, general-admission party rather than a seated show, with the theater itself as the set. The 2026 edition continues that run.
For anyone planning to go, the practical details matter as much as the theme. The event is 21 and over only, and admission is general admission rather than reserved seating, so the experience is meant to be wandered rather than watched. Tickets include the three drink tickets and the light hors d'oeuvres, and organizers have urged guests to reserve early. Costumes are encouraged but must read as elegant; the point is disguise, not novelty. The clock strikes eight in the Grand Lobby, and the dancing begins an hour later under Eberson's painted sky.