The first Volos Municipal Theatre was a project of the Constantinopolitan architects Konstantinos and Nikolaos Dimadis. It was founded in 1894 under the mayoralty of Alexandros Topalis and inaugurated in 1897 under the mayoralty of Ioannis Hatzargyris. Although it was a prestigious work of the time of the then Municipality of Pagasae, the theatre had nothing special in terms of its form and decoration. Only its Neo-Renaissance façade, with details of traditional German architecture, gave it a monumental style. Built near the present Volos Town Hall, in a central area, it was the smallest and simplest theatre in the country, with a French-style hall, a combination of boxes and an amphitheatre balcony, and a capacity of 400-500 spectators. Immediately after its inauguration, Volos fell under Turkish occupation, and as a result the theatre was converted into a military warehouse and suffered great damage. It is worth noting that from 1880 a summer theatre and the «concert cafes» were open on the beach of Volos, while in the early 1890s the city hosted two open-air theatres, Orpheus and Olympia. In 1926, the theatre’s stage was lifted, but due to its limited depth it still couldn’t host operas and operettas with success. In 1940, with the migration of the Pontic refugees who were hosted in the theatre, the 1937 study of the Pagasae engineering project for its radical modernization was partially implemented. However, the period from 1940 to 1953 was inglorious and fateful for the theater. It was misused and the devastating earthquake of 1953 was its final blow. Despite its poverty, the first Municipal Theatre was a cultural cell for more than thirty years, hosting performances by hundreds of groups that introduced the inhabitants to tragedy, melodrama, comedy and operetta, making Volos the artistic capital of Thessaly and one of the most important cultural centers of interwar Greece.

In 1988 the building of the new Municipal Theatre was inaugurated in Rigas Feraiou Square with two stages, of one thousand and one thousand eight hundred seats. It was designed by the architect Panos Tsolakis, as the axis of an integrated cultural center surrounded by the square, the Conservatory, the Visual Arts Centre and the Town Hall. The new era of the theater was further framed by the creation of the Municipal Symphony Orchestra in 1992, and by the establishment of the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Volos in 1994.

Under the mayor Achilleas Beos, in the summer of 2023, the opening of the renovated Volos Municipal Theatre, named after the internationally recognized Vangelis Papathanasiou, took place.