Fire considerations aside, the theater had a large auditorium that contained 850 orchestra seats, 600 balcony seats, and additional gallery and box seats. The interior of the theater was quite ornate with gilded mosaics, a great many paintings by Virgilio Tojetti, and statues. When the Folly Theater opened on October 14, 1901, Hyde scheduled daily afternoon and evening vaudeville performances which were held Monday through Saturday. Sunday evening was reserved for sacred concerts. The initial price of orchestra seats -- the best seats in the house -- were fifty cents per ticket. The Folly held a wide variety of performances during its first eight years. While some of these performances included gender-bending acts such as Lottie Williams’s 1906 turn in “My Tom Boy Girl,” the acts also included racist depictions of people of color. Within the first month of the Folly’s opening, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted on October 29, 1901 a headliner performance by Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Drew in a one act play titled “With Padded Gloves'' in which the play depicts “the deceit of the Chinese in their native place.”

In 1909 management of the Folly Theatre changed when the William Fox Amusement Company signed a ten-year lease and renamed it Fox’s Folly Theater. While the theater’s new manager, Martin Leo, continued to book vaudeville performances, he made the decision to add motion picture screenings to the theater’s schedule. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle remarked that Leo decided that “the prices of admission will be 10 and 15 cents in the orchestra, 10 cents in the balcony and 5 cents in the gallery.” During 1930 the Folly Theater returned to its original name when it was remodeled and reopened under the management of M.A. Shea. The Folly Theater was closed in 1939 and remained unused until it was demolished in 1949.