When the Opera Theatre moved to Vilnius, the capital, in 1948, the Theatre Palace housed the Kaunas State Music Theatre, which had started operating on 27th November 1940. The latter company has been the only one in Lithuania producing operetta and showing the best works of the genre to its audience since the Soviet period. But when the Opera Theatre moved to Vilnius and left Kaunas, which used to be the cradle of professional Lithuanian opera without any opera, Kaunas Music Theatre sought to enrich its repertoire with this most important genre of the music stage.

Today Kaunas Music Theatre is the second largest theatre in Lithuania. Its repertoire includes all musical stage genres. Local people and visitors can see the most popular operas by Mozart, Gounod, Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti and von Flotow, operettas by J. Strauss, Lehar, Offenbach, Kalman, Abraham, and musicals by Loewe, Leigh and Bernstein. The theatre also arranges concerts.

The company is proud of its soloists, who have won international vocal competitions.

The company stages more than 200 performances and 3-4 premiéres annually, shown from September to June.

Kaunas Musical Theatre co-operates successfully with foreign artists. The theatre repertoire has benefited from the works of a number of German, Austrian, and Hungarian stage masters.