The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870-1930

ENcHANTED YEARS oF THE

THE

Stage

ENcHANTED YEARS oF THE

THE

Stage

KansasCity at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870 – 1930

FELIcIA HARDISoN LoNDRÉ

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2007 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Londré, Felicia Hardison, 1941– The enchanted years of the stage : Kansas City at the crossroads of American theater, 1870–1930 / Felicia Hardison Londré. p. cm. Summary:“Drawing on the recollections of renowned theater critic David Austin Latchaw and on newspaper archives of the era, Londré chronicles the “first golden age” of Kansas City theater, from the opening of the Coates Opera House in 1870 through the gradual decline of touring productions after World War I”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-1709-7 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8262-1709-5 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Theater—Missouri—Kansas City—History—19th century. 2. Theater— Missouri—Kansas City—History—20th century. I. Latchaw, David Austin, d. 1948. II. Title. PN2277.K36L66 2007 792.09778411—dc22 2006028923 ø™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter:The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printer and binder:Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Bembo, LHF Strong Nouveau, and Rage JoiD

The University of Missouri Press offers its grateful acknowledgment to Dr. Fred D. Fowler, Kansas City, Missouri, for a generous contribution in support of the publication of this volume.

To ALL THoSE WHo HAVE cHoSEN To MAKE THEIR THEATER cAREERS IN

Kansas City.

CoNTENTS

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Introduction Prologue: Frontier Town Amusements

1 13

Chapter 1. Colonel and Mrs. Coates Bring Culture to Cow Town

32

Chapter 2. When the Stars Shone on Kansas City

63

Chapter 3. Expositions, Priests of Pallas,Variety Saloons, and Tarnished Legitimacy

107

Chapter 4. The Idealist Who Refought the Civil War and the Stock Company Revival

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Chapter 5. Our Mr. Judah, Beloved Coast to Coast

190

Chapter 6. Big-time Vaudeville and Burlesque

222

Chapter 7. Glamour’s Last Gasp

254

Appendix.The Big Hat Topics Covered in Austin Latchaw’s “The Enchanted Years of the Stage” Notes Bibliography Index

291 296 301 305 319

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AcKNoWLEDGMENTS

“The Enchanted Years of the Stage” was the title used by D. Austin Latchaw for his sixty-chapter retrospective of the theater he had seen and the stage stars he had met in Kansas City since his arrival there in 1886. Latchaw was no ordinary starstruck theatergoer, for he had been drama and music editor of the Kansas City Times (1888 –1895) and of the Kansas City Journal (1895–1902). In 1902 he became drama and music editor of the Kansas City Star, where he also served as night editor (1911–1922), as editorial writer (1922–1928), and as associate editor from 1928 until his death in 1948. His theatrical reminiscences, published by the Kansas City Star in sixty installments from 31 March to 23 June 1935, were the original impetus for this book. Such fervent appreciation and delightful observation permeated Austin Latchaw’s theater memoirs that I believed his writing merited publication as a book, and I wanted to delve into that material as an editor, to check the accuracy of his dates, to add notes on now-forgotten players, to track down the photographs that might best accompany the text. Doug Weaver, Director of Strategic Business Development at the Kansas City Star, which holds the copyright to Latchaw’s “The Enchanted Years of the Stage,” kindly put forward my proposal. Although Latchaw’s “thrilling recollections” were deemed unmarketably dense for today’s publishing realities (indeed, Latchaw’s sixty chapters plus my notes would have made a very hefty tome), permission to quote liberally from his writing was graciously granted me. And so the flavor of Austin Latchaw’s valentine to the Kansas City stage will be conveyed in this book through a sprinkling of sidebars quoting him, while I cast a wider net, drawing upon the work of many reporters, critics,

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

D.Austin Latchaw (1861–1948), the Kansas City Star’s legendary drama critic, wrote an invaluable retrospective of “the enchanted years of the stage” in Kansas City and published it in sixty installments in the Star in 1935.This portrait of him appeared in the Star with his obituary on 24 January 1948 when he died at the age of eighty-seven. Courtesy of the Kansas City Star.

and scholars, to tell the story of the theater in this great city during the enchanted years of touring star performers.Throughout this book I have used the abbreviation EY along with the chapter number to reference Latchaw’s “The Enchanted Years of the Stage.” While most of the sidebars quote from Latchaw’s EY, a few are taken from his original reviews or from writings by other Kansas City critics. The Kansas City Star has a solid history of civic involvement and service to the greater Kansas City area ever since its founding in 1880 as “A Paper for the People” by the visionary and great-hearted William Rockhill Nelson (1841–1915). Its illustrious tradition is carried on today by its immediate past president and publisher, Arthur S. Brisbane, and his successor, Mac Tully.Thus the newspaper and its staff are at the forefront of my acknowledgments for their contributions to this book. I thank Doug Weaver for his support for the project, including access to the newspaper archives. Derek Donovan, the Star’s archivist, generously aided my research there. I have also enjoyed working with the Star’s arts writers: Robert Butler, John Mark Eberhart, Steve Paul, and Robert Trussell. In Miller Nichols Library’s Special Collections at the University of Mis-

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage by Austin Latchaw The American Theater in the Period of its Greatest Glory,Abundance and Diversity, as Recalled by One Who Viewed It as Critic for Nearly a Quarter of a Century—A Stirring Pageant of Drama, Comedy, Opera, Spectacle,Vaudeville and Minstrelsy—The Days of Traveling Companies with their Brilliant Players and Luminous Stars,When Kansas City Often had as Many as Twelve to Fifteen Bills a Week, More Than Now Are Offered in a Season. (EY 1)

souri–Kansas City, Robert Ray, Bruce Sherwood, and Teresa Gipson were extremely helpful. Reference librarians Diane Hunter and Shirley Phillips aided my searches for arcane data.Also at UMKC, my work in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection was much facilitated by Cynthia Edwards. David Boutros, director of WHMC, is a fount of knowledge about regional history. Professor William Worley, UMKC Department of History, gave me an excellent foundation in Kansas City history with his summer course that involved walking the streets in various areas. At the Jackson County (Mo.) Historical Society Archives, David Jackson offered unstinting help and some good ideas about leads to pursue. Further appreciation is due to executive director Doug Tatum, former archivist Kate Egan, and Lisa Lillig at the Folly Theater; archivist Denise Morrison and archives technician Kara Kelly of the Kansas City Museum at Union Station; Crosby Kemper, director of the Kansas City Public Library; and the staff of the Missouri Valley Special Collections. At the Central Library downtown, only half a block from where the Shubert Theatre used to stand, Theresa Pacheco was unstintingly helpful during my year or so of jockeying with the capricious microfilm reader-copiers. At the Shubert Archive, a project of the Shubert Foundation, in New York City, Maryann Chach and Mark E. Swartz made my limited research time there remarkably productive. I thank them and the Shubert Foundation for the resources they made so readily available. My thanks go out also to all those at the University of Missouri Press who were so helpful to me: Beverly Jarrett, director and editor in chief; Clair Willcox, acquisitions editor; Jane Lago, managing editor. It is difficult to express adequately my appreciation to Robert and Sylvia Farnsworth for their overwhelming generosity with books that formed a

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cornerstone of my Kansas City collection. Pat Hilburn gave me a wonderful treasure, In Memoriam: Sarah Walter Chandler Coates, autographed in 1899 by Coates’s daughter, the author, Laura Coates Reed. My daughter Georgianna Londré added substantially to my collection of Kansas City theater programs from the enchanted years.Thanks to Richard Park of Blue Nile Books, I am the proud owner of Carrie Westlake Whitney’s three-volume doré sur tranches, Kansas City, Missouri: Its History and Its People, 1808 –1908 (1908). Mrs. James K. (Dolores) Loutzenhiser generously shared resources from her late husband’s outstanding theater collection. Anne M. Baker of Springfield, Missouri, kindly sent me issues of The Independent from the 1920s. Megan Henninger gave me a copy of the centennial History of I.A.T.S.E. Local No. 31, Kansas City, Mo., Stagehands, 1895 –1995, a fascinating resource. Dan Watermeier gave me a first edition of Sarah Truax’s stage memoir, among many such treasured materials. Jim Fisher shared his knowledge of and enthusiasm for Al Jolson as well as contributing significantly to my Jolson collection. Matt Pozel of the Kauffman Foundation provided excellent materials on Kansas City philanthropy.Donald Pyle and Ray Williams, Fine Antiques, helped me to identify Priests of Pallas memorabilia for various years. It was a pleasure to meet Gene Foster and Bambi Shen, current occupants of the house where Latchaw lived for thirty years; Gene and Bambi’s warm hospitality and readiness to show me the historic home meant a lot to me. Harry Haskell generously shared his research and gave me some valuable leads in the course of his own work on William Rockhill Nelson. Dall Wilson shared his findings on singer Alice Nielsen. Among the many others who encouraged my work in various ways, I should like to thank particularly Sandra Bartlett, Joan Dean, Col. William Eckhardt, John Ezell, Gene Friedman, Suzanne Leighton, Bruce Levitt,Tristan Londré, Jennifer Martin, Kristi McKee, Donna Miller, Cindy Stofiel, Victor Tan,Teresa Taylor, and Spencer Musser. Others who helped me include members of both the office staff and grounds crew at Mount Washington Forever Cemetery, and Willie Shannon at Forest Hill/Calvary Cemetery.Above all, I am grateful to Venne-Richard Londré, who read the entire manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions. Indeed, the possible cross-influence between L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz and the Priests of Pallas was one of his superb insights. A $3,000 grant from the University of Missouri Research Board provided teaching replacement for one course, which freed up a bit of time to work on this book during spring semester 2004.At the University of Missouri–Kansas City, Bryan LeBeau, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences,

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and Tom Mardikes, chair of the Department of Theatre, strongly supported my work, and I especially appreciate their finding space for my burgeoning collection of Kansas City–related books, papers, and memorabilia, which are now collected at UMKC as part of the Patricia McIlrath Center for Mid-American Theatre. The work of many historians ardently devoted to Kansas City has been a source of inspiration to me. These include Dory De Angelo, George Ehrlich, Lew Larkin, Wilda Sandy, Sherry Lamb Schirmer, and the late beloved “preservation curmudgeon” Jane Flynn. My bibliography lists the work of scholars whose important work on Kansas City and regional history greatly facilitated my own.To all of them, I am deeply grateful. However, I should like to signal the two yeoman research efforts upon which theater historians have hitherto relied. Phoebe Peck’s “The Theater in Kansas City” is a Master of Arts thesis (1940) in History and Political Science at the University of Kansas City. Peck’s archival research was supplemented by her invaluable interviews with David Austin Latchaw as well as many others who had connections with early Kansas City theater.The other seminal work is Louise Jean Rietz’s monumental three-volume “History of the Theatre of Kansas City, Missouri, from the Beginnings until 1900,” a doctoral dissertation (1939) in the Department of Speech at the State University of Iowa.Without Rietz’s virtually comprehensive indexing of playhouses,productions,artists,and dates,the present work could well have been a work in progress for several more years. Nevertheless, it should be noted for the record that both Peck’s and Rietz’s works contain errors. Astute readers who note discrepancies between their pages and mine may rest assured that I have done my best to set the record straight by filling in some of Rietz’s lacunae and correcting Peck’s typos in dates and names. Oddly, for example, both works change the name of the rather well-known actress Mary Gladstane (verifiable in numerous primary sources and theatrical reference works) to Gladstone. To those future historians of the theater in Kansas City who will find errors in my own work, I welcome your corrections. If this book can stimulate greater accuracy in local writing and historical displays, that will be very gratifying. For example, a photo exhibit in the lobby of the Poindexter Building claims that there was a tunnel between Coates Opera House and Coates House hotel. No, the tunnel connected Willis Wood Theater and Hotel Baltimore. An article in Kansas City Stages that pops up through many web links glosses the famous tale of the Warder Grand’s roofless opening and states that the opening-night play was Ham-

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let. No, the canceled opening was to have been Julius Caesar, and the actual opening the following night was Othello.When Missouri Repertory Theatre’s name was changed to Kansas City Repertory Theatre beginning in the fall of 2004, many people bizarrely attempted to alter the past by claiming in their program credits and elsewhere that they had acted in shows at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, even though that name had not existed at the time of the productions they listed (shows that, of course, can be proved through countless print sources to have been produced by Missouri Repertory Theatre). What a mess they are creating for the historian of the next century! The main point of all this is that secondary sources cry out for corroborating data whenever possible. And even primary sources—like those theater programs with false actor bios—should be regarded with some skepticism.Yet, I must concede, if this book contained only what could be absolutely verified, there might not be enough for a book. My journeys into the past lasted sometimes whole days without interruption at the microfilm readers in various libraries. I know there will come a time in the future when everything will be digitized and when—by simply entering key words such as “theater,”“stage,” and “amusements”—one will be able to call up all the relevant material quite readily, thus avoiding the endless, eye-straining hours of scrolling through many pages of filmed newsprint to find the occasional theater nugget. Of course, there was great value in doing it my way, which gave me a feel for the life of the city as a context for theatrical events at any given time. It is sad that there are so many gaps in the record of newspapers, sometimes only a day or two,sometimes many months,as in the case of the Kansas City Daily Mail (sometimes titled Evening Mail), which has nothing on microfilm between March 1876 and September 1877 or between October 1881 and July 1892! Given those unfortunate lacunae, it is outrageous that the existing newspapers were too often shoddily photographed.It happened a number of times that the review I wanted could actually be found on microfilm but was completely illegible because that part of the page had not been properly focused or was washed out by a lighting glare.Apparently the company that did the microfilming did not bother to check the quality of the print before the original newspapers were discarded. As I made several thousand photocopies (a conservative estimate) from microfilm, I could only be grateful for this technology, which spared my having to hand-copy the information onto index cards, as we did in my undergraduate days. Nevertheless, I want to use this opportunity to call for funding to maintain and upgrade the microfilm reader-copier machines in

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libraries everywhere. It is scandalous that such low-tech pieces of equipment are in poor operating condition. Some machines don’t scroll smoothly, some don’t focus sharply, some print pages with streaks on them, some are prone to paper jams, some spit out the dime a dozen times before finally accepting it and printing the page. It is wrong to handicap scholars this way. Despite the fact that newspapers are an imperfect record of the past, they are all we have for certain periods, and so we need to cherish that resource. As a postscript, it is gratifying to report that Crosby Kemper recognizes the needs of the scholar among the myriad competing functions of a public library.When I returned to the newspapers on microfilm at Kansas City Public Library to follow up on a few loose ends after this manuscript had rested for several months, some fine new microfilm readers had been installed. The dozens of different long-ago newspapers upon which I drew so heavily constitute a complex record. Some of the leading Kansas City newspapers underwent changes of name, and I have, when warranted, used the simplified version of the name for consistency: Journal, Star, Times, Mail, News,World, Globe, Call. In all instances, the material is retrievable on Kansas City newspaper microfilms under the name I cite.The Kansas City Journal, for example, was at various times the Western Journal of Commerce, Daily Journal of Commerce, and Journal-Post. The Kansas City Star began publishing as the Evening Star. Other editorial decisions on my part involve variable spellings. For example, Gilliss Opera House is correctly spelled with the double s to end Gilliss, which I use in my own writing. However, Gillis is the spelling found in many sources, and I retain it when it appears thus in quotations. Similarly, I have tried to be scrupulous about the alternate spelling of “theater” in accordance with sources or specific usages; for example, Folly Theater, but Shubert Theatre. Privileging accuracy over consistency, I quote verbatim an 1872 news story in which “theatre” and “theaters” appear in two consecutive sentences! It is uncanny how frequently the past mirrors the present. Mistakes that are made today in the development of downtown Kansas City are much like mistakes that were made before.There have always been greedy people who put their own interests ahead of those of the city. Fortunately, the reverse is also true.There are and always have been people like Col. Kersey Coates, Melville H. Hudson, Abraham Judah, William Rockhill Nelson, Col. George W. Warder, Martin Lehman, Georgia Brown, William Volker, George Kessler,August Meyer, L. P. Cookingham, Ilus Davis, Joan Kent Dillon, Jane Flynn, Ewing Marion Kauffman, Muriel McBrien Kauffman,

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Julia Irene Kauffman, Barnett and Shirley Helzberg, Alvin Brooks, Mary Kay McPhee, Richard Carruthers, Dennis Hennessey, Crosby Kemper III, Jonathan Kemper, Bruce Rigby, Sue Hendon, Carol Grimaldi, Dr. Patricia McIlrath, and a host of unsung heroes who dedicate their lives to making their city a better place for everyone.

Kansas City can not always be depended upon to boom the legitimate drama, but when it comes to spectacle and melodrama, she looms up strong; our wild western appetite craves something bracing in the theatrical line. Kansas City Evening Star, 15 December 1883

ENcHANTED YEARS oF THE

THE

Stage

INTRoDUCTIoN

The history of Kansas City theater during the era covered by this book is very much the history of American theater anywhere outside New York City. Each town that boasts a surviving nineteenth-century opera house has its own ghosts and local anecdotes, but the big picture that encompasses those opera houses is remarkably coherent. As a railway hub in the heart of America, Kansas City certainly stood at the geographical crossroads of American theater in the heyday of trouping. Yet “crossroads” can also be understood figuratively as a place where people and practices from all across the nation intersected.The same managerial issues applied in Kansas City as elsewhere, and the shows—the plays, performers, and production values —were the very same ones seen by American theatergoers from coast to coast.This history then is emblematic of a larger history of American theater during the era when the brightest stars of the stage played the road and when theater was integral to the life of a community at all social and economic levels. This book covers “the first golden age”of Kansas City theater,the decades between the opening of Coates Opera House in 1870 and the nationwide decline of touring productions on the road in the late 1910s.The “second golden age” did not begin until the 1960s, a decade that saw tremendous growth in the arts nationwide with the rise of regional resident not-forprofit professional theaters such as the Missouri Repertory Theatre (1964– 2004).Thus, in terms of chronology as well as geography, the development of theater in Kansas City exactly parallels that of the American theater as a whole.

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Every American city and nearly every considerable town shared generously in the offerings of the old stage. Each place has its own records, its own memories. Kansas City was especially fortunate, for it was included in nearly all the bookings made in the middle West, and virtually all that extended to the Pacific Coast.The local stage then represented in large measure the national theater, for it was “on the road” that most of the profits were made. Contemplation of that time, even in the most cursory fashion, brings thrilling recollections. (EY 1)

In the course of my research, I came to realize how very “New York– centric” is the published history of American theater. For most traditional historians of American dramatic art, if it didn’t happen in Gotham, it was not worth mentioning. Yet the story of “the road” is remarkably rich, colorful, and complex. It is a story that should be told repeatedly in all its regional variations. Here then is one piece—a key piece, I believe—in a huge mosaic.The local is indeed the universal. David Austin Latchaw recalled in the first installment of his “Enchanted Years of the Stage” that there were only two theaters in Kansas City in 1886, when he arrived on business for a Philadelphia publishing house and decided to stay. Latchaw saw ten theaters built during the peak years, which he defined as between the mid-1880s and 1912.The glory days had their origin in the 1870s with the proliferation of touring troupes, with or without stars, playing cities and small towns on the railroad lines. The relative ease of train transportation for whole companies of players with their costumes, props, and some scenic elements accounts for the way the touring system so rapidly overtook and replaced the earlier system of local stock companies that had to rehearse and present a new play every few days, occasionally graced by a star who traveled overland or by riverboat to perform a brief engagement with them. The road remained vibrant in the 1890s, but the system was evolving from companies put together by stars who would perform a repertoire of romantic dramas and classic plays to the more efficient “combinations” created by New York producers to tour a single production with all of its components assembled expressly to feature a contemporary play. Yet, as Latchaw explained in chapter 36 of his retrospective “Enchanted Years of the Stage,”

Introduction

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the public’s unabated appetite for the classics brought about a mini-revival of local stock companies in that decade. Latchaw’s reminiscences touch only lightly on the “syndicate wars” that occurred at the turn of the century when powerful New York–based business interests—Klaw and Erlanger and their upstart rivals, the Shuberts—gained control over the nation’s theater facilities, booking agents, and advertising. Kansas City certainly felt the repercussions, but Latchaw kept his focus on the artistic product and on his beloved players. In his second chapter, Latchaw reflected on his formation as a theatergoer. Having grown up in rural Pennsylvania, he did not see a professional performance until he went to Philadelphia as a young man. Soon the theater was for him a three-nights-a-week habit. His meager salary at the publishing house meant that he usually took a low-priced gallery seat. Yet he relished the experience of being part of what we might pejoratively call a lowbrow audience for highbrow theater. Actors dreaded the judgment of “the gallery gods”in those days and often played to them.Latchaw expressed nostalgia for “the old gallery,” which declined when the entertainmenthungry masses were lured away to vaudeville and popular-price theaters. Latchaw’s interests centered upon the legitimate drama, and thus his retrospective only occasionally discusses popular fare (the cyclorama, the dime museums,minstrels,cheap melodramas at the Gilliss,vaudeville).Still it must be remembered that shining stars presenting classy plays are not the whole story. Indeed, Kansas City was the virtual headquarters for vaudeville’s Orpheum circuit in the 1920s. I have tried to fill in some sense of the wealth of theatrical activity at theaters to which Latchaw devoted less attention. Fond as he was of the past,Austin Latchaw must be credited as the trailblazer who changed Kansas City audience behavior in a way that was quickly emulated in theaters nationwide. At the height of the 1890s fashion for enormous “millinery creations,” Latchaw proposed to Mel Hudson, manager of Coates Opera House, that he print a notice in the theater program politely suggesting that women remove their hats during the performance. Hudson categorically refused, knowing how entrenched was the custom for women to wear their hats indoors, as this spared them the embarrassment of revealing hair that might not have been properly dressed. Latchaw realized that the opening night for Francis Wilson’s upcoming run of The Devil’s Deputy (4– 9 March 1895) would be a society event attended by the city’s fashion leaders, and so he took his proposal to the society columnists and fellow drama critics at all the newspapers.They cooperated in publicizing the idea.With the press campaign for the removal of hats in full sway, Hud-

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

This 1908 postcard lampoons the wide-brimmed picture hats that had already been in vogue for more than ten years. In 1895 Latchaw launched a campaign against ladies’ large hats in the theater, but the epithet Merry Widow hat refers to the Léhar musical that premiered in Vienna in 1905 and in New York in 1907. From the author’s collection.

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son agreed to print Latchaw’s suggestion in the Coates Opera House program. In fact, an attention-getting black border surrounded the innocuously worded notice: “TO OUR PATRONS. In deference to the expressed wishes of many of the regular patrons of the Coates Opera House, including both men and women, the management respectfully asks that ladies remove their hats during performances in this theater.This request is not made in the spirit of a ruling, but as a favor, which, if granted, will bring equal benefits to all.” Latchaw noted with satisfaction that when the curtain rose, “every hat in the theater came off, never to be restored as obstructions to our vision” (EY 6). His front-page story in the next day’s Star is long, but so charming that I have included the entire piece as an appendix. The enchanted years were an era of bendable rules and elastic truth, as anecdotes in this book will show. Nobody raised concerns about conflict of interest when drama critics socialized with the performers they reviewed. Furthermore, Latchaw seems to have had considerable freedom of access to backstage areas even when a play was in performance.Certainly,he reviewed opening nights from a seat in the auditorium. But if he liked a show enough to see it again during the same run or if he wanted to learn more about its production secrets, he sometimes stood in the wings, as he did on 19 November 1887, at Coates Opera House during a matinee performance of The Merchant of Venice, when the role of Shylock was played by George C. Miln, a Chicago preacher who had formed his own company in which to star. From his spot in the wings Latchaw made a couple of interesting observations, which are quoted in the sidebar. If Latchaw loved actors, they loved him in return. Once when the Star sent a younger reporter to interview Otis Skinner during a Kansas City engagement, the star actor exclaimed loftily:“Has Otis Skinner fallen to such estate he does not warrant an interview from Austin Latchaw?” Latchaw promptly paid his respects, after which Latchaw and Skinner dined together—with the young reporter as a third party.The renowned Richard Mansfield invited Latchaw to dinner in his private railway car on every one of his Kansas City engagements. Other stars with whom Latchaw developed warm friendships included Maude Adams, Margaret Anglin, John Drew, Mrs. John Drew, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Julia Marlowe, E. H. Sothern, and Robert Mantell. It was reported by a Kansas Citian visiting New York—who dropped into the Knickerbocker Hotel bar, where actors used to hang out—that each actor to whom he was introduced as a visitor from Kansas City would invariably ask,“How is D. Austin Latchaw?” And the actors would declare

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I recall a certain Miln matinee at the Coates theater. The play was “The Merchant of Venice.” There were not more than fifty people in the house. Yet the performance was given precisely as if the theater had been filled, except for an incident at the end of the trial scene. As Miln, in the role of Shylock, made his dramatic exit, taunted by the heartless Gratiano in the person of Willard Newell, he came to a dead stop, confronted his tormentor, drew his knife, emitted a piercing falsetto squeal that must have bored a hole in the ceiling, and made a dash at Newell.This actor, wholly unprepared for this new “business,” fell back into the arms of Bassanio, then slid to the floor. As Miln for a moment maintained a rigid attitude, Newell had the presence of mind also to “hold the picture.” Then Miln slowly drew himself to his full height, sniffed contemptuously, and stalked off the stage.The little audience responded enthusiastically, accepting the spontaneous and daring byplay as a new and very exciting Shylock exit. In the wings I stood beside Miln, watching the conclusion of the trial scene. An old actor named Harry Brown was playing the duke and was seated on an impressively elevated ducal chair. He was chewing tobacco. Between his speeches he would turn his head and surreptitiously expectorate over his shoulder.When Miln noticed this unseemly indulgence, he completely forgot his clerical background. More to himself than to me, he said in the hollow tones of utter disgust:“Look at that damned duke chew tobacco!” (EY 33)

Latchaw to be “the most human and kindest critic of the drama in the United States.” The consensus was that “he can pan a bum play in a way that almost makes the actors feel good.”1 Latchaw’s ongoing friendly relations with many actors must be understood in the light of such well-known close friendships as that of critic William Winter and actor Edwin Booth. Indeed, Winter and the great Joseph Jefferson III even named their sons after each other: Joseph Jefferson Winter and William Winter Jefferson.2 Despite such interactions, Austin Latchaw was a man of strong principles. His willingness to expose in print an instance of plagiarism condoned by David Belasco is a case in point. Belasco had chosen The Ugly Duckling to showcase the talents of his protégée Mrs. Leslie Carter, and she performed it at the Coates Opera House (12–

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14 March 1891) in the same season as her 1890 New York debut. As Latchaw listened to the play, he noted its uncanny resemblance to a midnineteenth-century drama, Retribution, by Tom Taylor.The program’s only indication of the play’s source was a mention of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Latchaw felt that the “noteworthy English dramatist” deserved more respect, and so he pointed out the similarities of structure, and he quoted passages of dialogue to show what had been lifted from Taylor. Although The Ugly Duckling had played New York and various other cities, the Kansas City critic was apparently the first to uncover the literary theft. David Austin Latchaw was born on 2 January 1861, on a farm in Venango County, Pennsylvania, the seventh of nine children born to Jacob S. Latchaw (1821–1900) and Mary Stauffer Latchaw (1821–1903).The original German family name, Lötscher, had been modified over the generations in America to Lotscher, Lotschar, Latschar, Latchar, and, finally, Latchaw. As a small boy, David Austin Latchaw “helped” to build the two village churches in Barkeyville (a half-mile from the family farm) by carrying water for his father and the other workmen. From the cornfield, young Latchaw loved to gaze across the valley at the little white Amish church in the distance and would sometimes pause in his hoeing to contemplate “the pretty scene.” For a trip to market in Franklin, the county seat, his father would load the wagon the night before, in preparation for departure at four in the morning. Returning from the fifteen-mile journey, they would arrive home at around eight in the evening. At his death seven decades later, Latchaw left $2,000 to the Evangelical church in Barkeyville in memory of his parents. He also made bequests of $500 to each of his twenty-five nephews and nieces, sixteen of whom still lived in Pennsylvania. Latchaw maintained continuing interest in all of their activities. Sixty years after leaving home, Latchaw returned to northwestern Pennsylvania with his daughter, Hortense, to visit the scenes of his youth. In his account of that trip published in the Star on 16 November 1941, he expressed sadness that the Barkeyville general store and post office stood empty: “This not only was the trading center of the community, but also, in a way, its gossip corner and political forum. Its fate was like that of many other country stores; it was left behind with the advent of motor cars and concrete highways.” Latchaw and his daughter also visited Grove City, seven miles from the family farm, where Latchaw had attended the academy that later became Grove City College. He had also taught two terms in the Venango County public schools before going on to the National School of

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage

Before the week was over I chanced to meet Belasco, who was staying at the Coates House for the Carter week. He made light of the matter. “Of course, he said,“of course. You are quite right, if it is worth mentioning. But few plays, or novels for that matter, have been wholly original; even Shakespeare did not give credit for the many traceable sources of his dramas.” It has been my observation since then that almost invariably when someone is brought up for literary appropriation, he links himself with Mr. Shakespeare, perhaps his only possible way of establishing common ground. (EY 13)

Elocution and Oratory in Philadelphia, from which he graduated in 1885. It was his work for a Philadelphia publishing company that brought him to Kansas City in 1886. Upon arrival at the old Union Depot in the West Bottoms, David Austin Latchaw checked in at a hotel on Eighth Street.There he met another young man who was new to the city, Arba S.Van Valkenburgh. A lifelong friendship developed between Latchaw and the young lawyer who eventually became a circuit court judge. Indeed, a map of the Rockhill neighborhood published in the Star on 6 February 1904 shows that Van Valkenburgh lived only four houses east of the Latchaw home on Forty-seventh Street. In 1886 Kansas City was experiencing a phenomenal boom in real estate, which peaked in 1887. Latchaw spent a year selling real estate and attending the theater.The city directory for 1886 lists him as manager of Hubbard Brothers and that for 1887 as in the real estate partnership of Alger and Latchaw. He became friendly with the drama editor of the Kansas City Times, Roswell M. Field (brother of the poet Eugene Field), and did some writing for the Times.When Field left the Times for the Star, Latchaw moved into the position of drama and music editor,working for the respected Times editor Dr. Morrison Munford. Clearly Latchaw had found his calling. He revealed his pride in being a drama editor by having his name listed in boldface in the 1890 city directory and for a few years thereafter. Because of the similarity of his name to that of another local newspaperman (Donald A. Latshaw), David Austin Latchaw chose to stress his middle name, Austin. When he did get a byline, he often used D. Austin Latchaw, but “The Enchanted Years of the Stage” is signed simply Austin Latchaw. Latchaw’s passion for the theater extended to considerable involvement in amateur theatricals. When the English actor Stanislaus Stange put to-

Introduction

9

gether a local production of Richard III, with himself in the title role, in order to demonstrate the Delsarte acting technique, he cast Latchaw as both Buckingham and Richmond, and the group played to a nearly full house at Coates Opera House on 25 March 1887. By 1888 Latchaw was manager of the Delsarte Dramatic Club and performed the leading role in Love’s Sacrifice for one night, 16 March 1888, at the Warder Grand Opera House. Latchaw subsequently performed with the Lawrence Barrett Dramatic Club and even enjoyed a brief stint with a professional company. Those anecdotes are included in chapter 2. Latchaw married Mary Aloise Filler (1858 –1940) on 17 August 1896. She had come to Kansas City after the Civil War with her parents, Major and Mrs. Thomas M. Howrigan. Her father was a Union cavalry officer, who became superintendent of the old Union depot. She had two children by a previous marriage, Francis and Hortense, both of whom Latchaw formally adopted. Latchaw had met Mrs. Filler when she joined the Times staff as society editor in 1890. A few years later, she was hired by publisher William Rockhill Nelson as the Star’s first society editor. Her Sunday column soon expanded to a daily, and then to both morning and evening editions. She was described as “a woman of unusual beauty,” and many theatergoers made a point of attending opening nights just to see the attractive Mr. and Mrs. Latchaw walk to their third-row-on-the-aisle critic’s seats. One such admirer, the future wife of the great Kansas newspaperman William Allen White, recalled her “thrill” at “seeing London and Paris come in, in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Latchaw.” The lovely Mrs. Latchaw made good use of the era’s long intermissions for social interaction. According to an editorial in the same issue of the Star as her obituary, 31 December 1940, she “gave beauty and distinction to her work, and how proud Mr. Nelson was of her!” In 1902, the year Latchaw moved to the Star, Mrs. Latchaw resigned her position “to devote herself to the home at 4701 Rockhill road.” The house, which the Latchaws rented from Nelson for thirty years, was the first one in the Rockhill district just south of William Rockhill Nelson’s own home, Oak Hall. Although Oak Hall is long gone, replaced by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the house at Forty-seventh and Rockhill still stands. It was constructed by the careful joining of two suburban farmhouses. It was on that porch, as we shall see in chapter 7, that tiny Minnie Maddern Fiske sat in the porch swing with the weighty Mr. Nelson. In later years, Latchaw’s daughter, Hortense (1884 –1952), often accompanied him to the theater. In 1932 the Latchaws bought their own house at 4637 Charlotte, only two blocks from their previous home.When Austin Latchaw settled down to write about the “enchanted years” for the Star, he

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage

To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

This side view from Rockhill Road shows where two farmhouses were joined to form the house in which the Latchaw family lived from 1902 to 1932. On the left is the front porch with the swing; it now faces Cleaver II Boulevard (formerly Brush Creek).The Rockhill district was platted in 1905. Photograph by the author.

was much aided by the twenty-four clip volumes of his own reviews “compiled and completely indexed by my play-loving daughter, Hortense Latchaw, through my years as critic” (EY 60). How I would love to track down those clip volumes wherever they may be lurking! Perhaps, after Hortense’s death in 1952, they went to her brother’s family in Long Beach, California. Austin Latchaw now seems like a close friend to me. I would love to have attended the theater with him and regret that I missed him by scarcely a generation, for I was six years old when he died.The personality that shines through his writing was both professionally serious and playful. He must have had a spirit of adventure to keep him in the muddy, roughneck cow town that was Kansas City when he first saw it in 1886, when he might have returned to a steady job in Philadelphia with all its cultural amenities. He was passionate about the theater, a keen observer of the big picture as well as the nuances, and skilled at communicating his insights in lively prose. He did not hesitate to inject himself into the story when warranted and would occasionally belabor a moral. He became a markedly better writer over the years, progressing from overblown wordiness to easygoing witti-

Introduction

11

To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Kansas City’s preeminent drama critic of the enchanted years of the stage is buried at Mount Washington Cemetery alongside his wife and daughter.The inscriptions on the three stones are: David Austin Latchaw 1861–1948, Mary Aloise Latchaw 1858– 1940, and Hortense Alice Latchaw 1884–1952. Photograph by the author.

cisms. Although no byline identifies most of his writing, his views are notable for their generosity of spirit suffused by his passion for the theater and its people. For the reader who brings to Latchaw’s writing some knowledge of the names and customs of the theater of those decades,“The Enchanted Years of the Stage” is enticing, evocative, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. For all of his contributions to the American theater in his own day, for his devotion to the artists who made it great, and for the written record that now stands as his legacy, Austin Latchaw might well deserve a place in the pantheon of American drama critics along with the better-remembered New York critics of the era such as William Winter, J. Ranken Towse,Walter Prichard Eaton, and Alan Dale.The power of the drama critic to shape public opinion—which in turn shapes the very theater we get—is a huge responsibility. Latchaw understood both the power and the responsibility, and he used them well.

PRoLoGUE

FRONTIER TOWN AMUSEMENTS

Before there was theater in Kansas City—indeed, before there was a Kansas City—there must have been performative entertainments.The Osage and the Kansa tribes that dominated the region had ceremonies for all sorts of occasions. The French who ventured into the area certainly enjoyed fiddling and dancing and, far from the eye of sober-minded church authorities, possibly also indulged in amateur theatricals. But without documentation, the theater historian must skip lightly over the first century and a half of European presence on the land that would become a major jumping-off point of the Santa Fe Trail and later the “city of fountains.” Even after Chouteau’s Landing evolved into Town of Kansas (pejoratively dismissed as Westport Landing by those who saw it as little more than a boat dock for overland access to the more important town of Westport), then City of Kansas, and finally Kansas City, business interests so dominated the lives of those who settled the area that the arts could be regarded only as an afterthought or as a luxury that presented itself fortuitously at odd intervals. Commerce has always driven the wheels of progress in Kansas City, a circumstance that might be attributed partially to geography. Just where the Missouri River changes its southward course to flow east (across today’s state of Missouri) and join the mighty Mississippi near St. Louis, the faster-flowing Kansas—sometimes called Kaw—River pours its waters into the “Big Muddy” Missouri.The confluence of rivers created a natural crossroads in the days when rivers served as highways through the wilderness. The rivers brought French explorers and traders upstream and into con-

13

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage

tact with the Pawnee, with the Kansa people who had a village near Kawsmouth, with the exceptionally tall and bellicose Osage whose homeland lay just south of the Kaw on a tributary later called Marais des Cygnes, and with the Missouris who would be absorbed into other tribes within a century after the arrival of those first white men in the area. As early as the 1690s,French coureurs des bois were coming to Kawsmouth, the land alongside the mouth of the Kaw, and they came on business. Most were not trappers, for they respected the native peoples’ prior tenure and implicit rights to the fruit of the land.They were traders who brought glass beads and bottles, knives and other metal objects, and manufactured cloth to exchange for the dense, glossy beaver pelts so prized by Europeans.These traders would come upriver in the fall, for beavers were best taken before hibernation but after the first frost had thickened their fur. Spending the winter with the Indians who did the trapping for them, the French learned tribal customs and native languages. As soon as the river ice thawed in the spring, the entrepreneurs would load their pirogues with up to fifteen tons of pelts and journey downstream to St. Louis. It has been claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by St. Louis during the first seventy-five years after its founding in 1764 was entirely owed to the bounty of the land that is now Kansas City.1 St. Louis in turn gave Kansas City its de facto founder, for it was François Gesseau Chouteau, grandson of Pierre Laclède and half-brother of Auguste Pierre Chouteau of the Gateway City’s founding dynasty,who came in 1821 with his eighteen-year-old wife, Bérénice, to build the first permanent furtrading post on the north shore of the Missouri, two or three miles downstream of the mouth of the Kaw. A few independent French woodsmen with their Indian wives and “half-breed” children already inhabited the low area that would be known as the “French bottoms”—until their cabins were swept away in the flood of 1844. After the flood of 1826, François and Bérénice Chouteau rebuilt their warehouse and home on higher ground on the south bank of the Missouri.The little settlement of the 1820s, which Chouteau called Chez les Canses (Home of the Kansa), comprised fifteen to twenty families. By 1838, the year François Chouteau died, Chouteau’s Landing—according to Roy Ellis’s history—“consisted of one saloon, one store, and some shanties.”2 Bérénice Chouteau gave birth to nine children, outlived her husband by fifty years, and created a lively social ambience among the Creoles (as American-born French were called) and their families. During the winter, when the fur-trading business remained dormant, the French would hold week-

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ly dances at different homes.The hospitality always included servings of a thick, nourishing bouillon “composed of chickens, wild fowl, venison, and sometimes slices of buffalo meat, to all of which were added a few handfuls of corn meal, with seasoning of small pepper, etc.,” according to Father Bernard Donnelly, who became the town’s priest in 1857.3 Bérénice loved music, and it is said that she had the first spinet brought into the area, transported from St. Louis by keelboat. Most often the dancing was accompanied by violin. Joseph and Pierre Rivard, brothers who ran a ferry across the river, were much in demand for their fiddling. On many an evening in the 1820s and 1830s, one could stand on the bluff above the French Bottoms and hear lively French tunes emanating from the cabins. It was only a generation earlier that Private Pierre Cruzatte had similarly enlivened the spirits of his comrades in the evening when he played the violin he brought along on the great journey of discovery led by captains Lewis and Clark. With the arrival of more and more settlers in the 1840s,Town of Kansas began to lose its distinctively French flavor, although Bérénice Chouteau lived until 1888, always a gracious and outspoken grande dame. Most entertainments of the 1840s were still homegrown amusements created by amateurs: literary societies, singing societies, debating clubs, balls, and band concerts. The decade did bring various kinds of traveling shows to small communities west of the Mississippi, but St. Joseph boasts more documented performances than Town of Kansas in those days, even though St. Joseph lies farther upstream on the Missouri.With the end of the Mexican War in 1848, increasing trade on the Santa Fe Trail out of nearby Westport, and sales of lots in the newly platted town (for which Possom Trot was one of the proposed names), the Town of Kansas population soared to seven hundred.4 This should have been enough to draw traveling players in search of audiences—like the troupe that presented Shakespeare plays in Palmyra and Fayette in 1840—but we have no documentation of such visits to Missouri’s western border area. It is possible that the small companies that played rural Missouri in the 1840s were simply daunted by the rough-and-tumble nature of life in a town where steady upriver and downriver traffic meant that unsavory strangers were constantly passing through. Furthermore, the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1851 reduced the city’s population to three hundred. Some idea of the rawness of the place may be gleaned from newspaper commentaries: The Daily Journal of Commerce for 6 August 1859 called attention to “improper drainage of the cellar of the building known as the Planters’ House. The drain, instead of being conducted under ground to the river, is allowed

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage

to empty its contents into the street opposite the Exchange, thus keeping a constant mud hole and hog wallow in the principal street of the city. It should be attended to.” Yet the problems persisted as late as the 1860s:“Onethird of the people of Kansas City have to wade through a mud-hole to get to their business. There is not a town of five hundred inhabitants in any Christian country would tolerate such a nuisance for ten days; yet here is Kansas City. . . . Such a place in the heart of a city is enough to damn it in the eyes of any decent stranger” ( Journal, 29 July 1865).“Look at our own streets and alleys, back yards and cess pools; look along Main street, between any two buildings on it, and you will be surprised at its filthy condition. Nothing has saved us this season from bilious dysenteries and diseases of that class but the continuance of rains” ( Journal, 22 August 1865).“We learn that an immense number of condemned Government mules, in the corrals at Leavenworth, are infected with the glanders, and are dying or being killed at the rate of thirty to fifty per day.The military authorities are disposing of the putrid carcasses by throwing them in the river. We are informed that the banks and sandbars from Wyandotte to Leavenworth are lined with the loathsome and pestilential masses of corruption. It is an outrage upon the health and safety of the inhabitants along this river, that almost exceeds belief, and the people should demand its suppression.The hides of these dead mules ought to be stuffed with the carcasses of the infernal scoundrels who could thus imperil the lives of a whole community” ( Journal, 26 September 1865). “Somebody undertook, yesterday, to run a ferry-boat, in the shape of a dry-goods box, across Main near Fifth street.Very few wanted to cross at that point” ( Journal, 22 December 1866). Somehow the community coped with adversity, little by little managing to overtake and surpass Westport and Leavenworth both commercially and culturally. The number of balls and civic events increased throughout the 1850s. Groups such as the Shamrock Benevolent Society raised money by charging as much as $1.50 admission to a charity ball. Some of these were masquerade balls. Milton J. Payne, mayor from 1855 to 1860, encouraged citizens to “go in character, as several of the young men are anxious to have a Fancy Dress Ball.”5 During the 1858 –1859 social season, bandleader Daniel W. Bantie hosted twice-weekly dances at which he instructed “devotees of the light fantastic toe” in “all the most fashionable dances of the day.”6 Civic leaders reciprocated by holding a grand fancy dress ball at the Court House on 26 January 1859 as a benefit for Professor Bantie (bandleaders were traditionally addressed as “professor”).The decks of steamboats docked at Westport Landing also attracted dancers in the summer, for the steamboat cap-

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tains liked to show off their orchestras free of charge and sometimes even provided a midnight supper for the local merrymakers. Outdoor gatherings on the Fourth of July and other occasions brought lively social interactions.Three thousand people came out to McGee’s Addition to celebrate the Fourth in 1858. Bantie’s Band, also known as Banta’s Band, played throughout the day and evening, and Col. James A. McGee contributed a buffalo to be barbecued. Perhaps intuiting its fate, the beast escaped and had to be chased for a mile by a number of citizens. A similar mishap occurred out there in 1871, during Kansas City’s first Industrial Exposition, when a “huge porker” escaped its pen and ran into a lady’s voluminous skirt.The terrified woman was carried fifteen or twenty yards!7 McGee’s farmland, at Sixteenth Street south of the river, was the city’s first addition. By the late 1850s, Metropolitan Hall in McGee’s Addition was a site for balls, surpassed in the 1860s by Thatcher House. For a quadrille party there, it was announced in the Journal on 10 January 1866, “the Thatcher House hack” was available to “carry guests out free.” A ten-pin bowling alley, shooting gallery, and billiard hall opened across from Thatcher House in 1865, and there the “well known caterer” Philip Kenerieum attended to “the dispensing of the best of fluids.”“Old Milt McGee,” eccentric mayor for one year (1870), loved to welcome folks out to the beer gardens that clustered in McGee’s Addition. Popular amusements were all very well, but a chartered municipality (the city was officially chartered in 1850, and again, with corrected paperwork, in 1853) needed something more than homegrown fare.The earliest professional touring performance on record for Kansas City—advertised in the Kansas City Enterprise—was the Badger Circus on 26 April 1856. Subsequent notices that year tell us that “Mabie’s Menagerie / Stone’s Circus / Tyler’s Indian Exhibition” appeared on 23 June.8 Ed and Jerry Mabie were brothers from Wisconsin who transported their exhibits by wagon and had played nearby Parkville and Westport the year before. The Indian Exhibition featured in their 1856 tour presented scenes of Native American life, rather incongruously showing the rescue of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas and a great plains buffalo hunt on the same program. Thirty-eight different circuses came to Kansas City between 1856 and 1880, according to Louise Jean Rietz, and these included, on 12 May 1857, Herr Driesbach and Company, noted for “A Full Menagerie Embracing all that is Rare and Instructive in the Animal World.” In addition to Hannibal the mammoth elephant and “the largest pair of Asiatic Lions ever exhibited in any country,” Driesbach boasted “The Giraffe!” His advertisement in the Kansas City

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage

Enterprise on 2 May 1857 described the giraffe as “the greatest Natural Curiosity ever with a traveling Exhibition—now attached to this mammoth enterprise.” It added that the animal “is the Only One Living in America, and may be seen without extra charge.”9 Spalding and Rodgers Circus (2 August 1859), Dan Castello’s Great Show (1–2 May 1866), George W. DeHaven and Company Circus (2 July 1866), the New York Champs Elysées Circus (25 July 1866), and others preceded their visits with similarly extravagant newspaper advertising. Minstrels also appear among the earliest known professional entertainments in Kansas City. A group advertising itself as “Christy’s Minstrels” is listed for 7 April 1857, though the original Christy’s Minstrels had disbanded in 1854. Similarly, an ersatz “Campbell’s Minstrels” played Kansas City in 1858. Rietz counted eighty different minstrel companies playing 161 engagements in Kansas City between 1856 and 1900. Some early minstrel groups were attached to circuses; others operated independently, some performing on steamboats. The steamer Banjo docked at Kansas City for matinee and evening performances on both 6 and 7 September 1860 by the World Star Minstrels; admission was fifty cents, twenty-five cents for “children and servants.” Minstrelsy before the Civil War was performed by white men wearing blackface makeup, who presented musical numbers and comic patter interspersed with specialty numbers. African American minstrel troupes proliferated in the latter half of the century, as we will note in Latchaw’s recollections on popular entertainments. Musical groups occasionally advertised brief visits. The earliest was the Aleghanians (spelled Alleghenians in their Chicago newspaper advertisements), comprising a basso, soprano, two tenors, and a pianist-violinist, who performed at the Methodist Church one evening in 1857. The following year brought the Ancient Druid Ox Horn Players to Theill’s building, and in March 1860 came the Peak Family vocalists and bell ringers to Lockridge Hall. The Peak Family returned periodically, though apparently not to universal appreciation. A notice in the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce on 23 February 1866 declared: “To All Whom It May Concern.— This is to notify the public that I have no connection with the Peak Family, styling themselves Swiss Bell Ringers, and hereby caution anyone from crediting the said Peak Family on my account, as I will pay no debt contracted by them. Jim Peake. At Snell’s Saloon.” At long last, legitimate theater companies began to play Kansas City.The earliest on record is the D. L. Scott Theatrical Troupe, which performed in April 1858 and again in June of that year.Tegder and Morrison quickly fol-

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lowed (18 –26 June 1858) with an impressive engagement, for—counting both full-length plays and short afterpieces—the troupe presented seventeen different works on eight evenings, each program including a dance by Mademoiselle Aubrey. A year later there was the Cleveland Family Comedy (3–7 June 1859), followed by J. S. Langrishe’s company. Apparently all performances were given inside the Courthouse. According to the Daily Journal of Commerce (7 July 1859), the hall in the Courthouse was “well ventillated [sic], and with comfortably arranged seats.” Described as a company from St. Joseph, J. S. Langrishe’s troupe arrived on 4 July 1859. Jack Langrishe (1829 –1895) was a talented comedian from Ireland who later followed the Pike’s Peak gold rush, managed the Apollo Theatre in Denver and the People’s Theatre in Central City, and became known as “the father of Colorado theatre.” Despite the competition from balls, fireworks, and “other patriotic demonstrations,” the troupe’s opening performance of an unnamed play attracted a “small, but select audience.” On 5 July, it presented The Stranger, an old warhorse melodrama by Kotzebue; on the sixth, The Lady of Lyons by Bulwer-Lytton; on the seventh, Lucretia Borgia; or, the Poisoner, a five-act tragedy that “abounds in thrilling incidents,”followed by a farce titled Catharine Hays; on the eighth,The Orphan of Geneva and the uproarious farce The Toodles, with J. S. Langrishe in the title role; on the ninth, a last-minute change of bill due to a company member’s illness: Nature and Philosophy and Tom Noddy’s Secret; on the eleventh, the five-act historical drama Damon and Pythias, followed by the farce A Silent Woman; on the twelfth, The Iron Chest and Asmodeus; or, Little Devil’s Share; on the fourteenth, Othello; on the fifteenth, a triple bill: Black Ey’d Susan, The Old Guard, and The Artful Dodger; and on the sixteenth, an unnamed play to benefit Mrs. Allen,“a clever and pleasing actress.”10 The ability of a small troupe to perform a repertoire of so many different plays in ten days tells us much about the demands on a trouper during that era. The success of the Langrishe troupe’s first “season” (4–16 July 1859) in Kansas City prompted the Journal to begin campaigning in print for a more appropriate performance space. For example, on 16 July 1859 the paper editorialized:“It is a matter of regret, that as yet we have no hall of sufficient capacity to warrant a longer stay, as the company are all well worthy of patronage. Mr. Langrishe proposes to return when the new theatre is completed.” Nevertheless, the troupe did return by the end of the month to present a fresh selection of plays (31 July–12 August) at the Courthouse. Mrs. Langrishe was praised for her “chaste acting” ( Journal, 30 July 1859) and Mr. Langrishe for his comic singing.The farewell benefit for Mr. and Mrs.

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage

A Theatre Whatever may be the opinions entertained in regard to theatres, there is one thing certain—they are a fixed feature in civilized society, and possess the favor of a large portion of the human family. More than this, a theatre is a powerful auxiliary to the attractiveness of a city, and when properly conducted a source of refined social amusement.We need a theatre in Kansas City; the large number of transient sojourners want some place of rational amusement to spend an evening in, when they visit us.We have none such now to offer.We have been often spoken to and written to on this subject.There are several good dramatic companies now in the West, who want to play here; who want to make part of their season in Kansas City, but there is no building that is fitted for the purpose.Will not some of our enterprising citizens who are building, supply this want, or will not a company of them unite and put up a building as a joint stock concern, that will afford us a good theatre. It will not cost much money, and we can show them the figures to prove that it would be one of the best paying buildings that can be erected. (Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, Friday, 29 April 1859)

Langrishe included “a local comedy, written by a gentleman of this city.” That piece and an original humorous song performed by Mr. Langrishe promised to take “hits at everything in town,” along with “funny remarks about persons in the room.” The news story from the Journal of 12 August 1859 can only tantalize us with hints at the humor of the day.There must have been a high-spirited running gag associated with the line, “Did you ever send your wife to McGee’s Addition?” Kansas City’s long-anticipated public hall opened with a grand ball on 2 November 1859. Lockridge Hall was constructed of walnut timber grown south of Eighteenth Street by lumber dealer Thomas J. Lockridge, who was branching into real estate. Extolled by the Journal (1 November 1859) as “the finest public hall in the State,” outside St. Louis, this brick-fronted building on the southeast corner of Fifth and Main featured “a magnificent room at the disposal of the public,” which measured sixty by seventy feet, unobstructed by columns, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling. Lockridge Hall also seems to have been the city’s first facility to use kerosene lighting instead of the usual candles. Occasional minstrel troupes and musical variety performers used Lockridge Hall, but its reign was brief. A Fourth of July

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ball held there in 1860 was disrupted when a storm tore off the roof, causing panic on the dance floor, though Bantie’s Band played on.The Journal reported on 6 July that the tin roof was lying on Main Street,“twisted like paper by the force of the storm.” Lockridge continued in use for a time, but the land settled where a sewer ran under the building’s east side, making it less appealing for audiences. Lockridge Hall served as a billiard hall in the 1860s and later as a saloon and gambling house. It was demolished in 1884. In a location called Concert Hall, English soprano Anna Bishop—the first acknowledged star performer to play Kansas City—gave two performances, 16–17 July 1860. Given the vagueness in the press about the location, Concert Hall may well have been a temporary name bestowed on Lockridge Hall to lend it an aura of gentility. The Kansas City Journal of Commerce for 18 July 1860 declared that “no such vocal talent had ever before visited the west,” adding that Bishop’s “power and compass of voice and her complete and admirable management of it, far surpasses anything of the kind we have ever heard.” Long’s Hall became the performance venue of choice from its opening in 1860 until surpassed by Frank’s Hall in 1867. After that, performances are listed only sporadically at Long’s as late as 1877. Located in the same block as Lockridge Hall, Long’s Hall—the second-floor space in Long’s building—accommodated traveling troupes bringing the ever-popular melodramas and farces that reflected the taste of the American theatergoing public at large throughout most of the nineteenth century.The incomplete records suggest that traveling troupes performed in Kansas City at intervals of several months and that a given troupe’s engagement might last a week or more with a nightly change of bill. Between visits by professional players, Long’s Hall served various public purposes, including church services, social club meetings, and balls. One story has it that a tall fellow who spent a couple of hundred dollars on raffle tickets sold by charming young ladies at a church fair in Long’s Hall—and then disappeared before the drawing for the cake or the doll or any of the other prizes on offer—turned out to have been Bill Ryan, a member of the James Gang. The Civil War proved devastating to the developing city. The largely southern population lived under Union control from 1861. Despite some social strains, Kansas Citians might have weathered the hostilities had it not been for the infamous Order Number 11 that provoked outrage reverberating across six generations to our own day. On 25 August 1863, four days after William Quantrill’s murderous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, Brig. Gen. Thomas E. Ewing signed the order forcing rural residents of counties

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The Enchanted Years of the Stage

To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Constructed in 1856, Long’s building on the east side of Main Street between Fifth and Missouri had a public hall on the second floor with a coal-oil chandelier. Originally used for all-night masked balls, the room was fitted up for theatrical use as Long’s Hall in 1860. Kansas City Star, 29 December 1907.

around Kansas City to leave their homes, many of which were then plundered and burned by Union troops. In terms of the intended effect of depriving bushwhackers of shelter by sympathizers, Order Number 11 made no perceptible difference, but it did create long-seething resentments on both sides. How this impacted the theater more than twenty years later will be seen in Chapter 4. During the war years, there was no money in circulation. Businesses shut down, including newspapers and places of amusement. Not one professional legitimate theater performance is on record for 1861 or 1862 in Kansas City. At the end of July 1863, the Union Theatre company, managed by John Templeton, settled into Long’s Hall for a full month of repertory, continu-

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ing the practice of following the main play with a short afterpiece.We find Mademoiselle Aubrey associated with this troupe, again as a dancer to fill out the bills. An even longer run—six weeks (26 October to 16 December 1863)—is recorded for the National Theatre at Long’s Hall.What piques interest about this troupe are the names of some of the players:Thomas W. Davey, Lizzie Maddern, and Emma Maddern. Two years later, on 19 December 1865,a red-haired baby girl would be born to Tom Davey and Lizzie Maddern. Little Marie Augusta Davey would grow up in the theater, eventually to win renown as Minnie Maddern and later as Mrs. Fiske, the greatest actress of her day. On her many Kansas City engagements, Minnie Maddern Fiske was a great favorite of Kansas City Star critic Austin Latchaw as well as of the Star’s publisher,William Rockhill Nelson. Playing Long’s Hall in 1864 –1865 were the Union Theatre, the Leavenworth Theatrical Company, a nameless group of players that seems to have splintered off from the National, and Frank Howard’s Atheneum Combination Dramatic Company. The latter company advertised itself as “comprising 15 talented Artistes.” It garnered a string of favorable notices, as exemplified by this one from the Journal of 26 September 1865 for a Shakespearean tragedy followed by a farcical afterpiece: THEATRE.—Long’s Hall was again crowded last night, and the great play of Othello rendered in a very acceptable manner. Mr. Howard is an actor of much promise, a beautiful reader, and has always a nice conception of his part. His Othello was remarkably good. Mrs. Jordan as Desdemona was very pleasing, and looked decidedly too pretty to be smothered. “Our Gal” brought down the house, and kept the waistcoats on a stretch.To-night there is no performance, on account of the Hall being engaged for a dance.

For fifty cents, one saw not only two plays but also extra entertainments that varied from one bill to the next:a suite of musical numbers,a grand Ethiopian olio, and “Howard’s beautiful National tableaux.” Doors opened at seven, with the curtain rising at a quarter to eight.“Go early,” the newspaper reporter would advise. Or:“All lovers of the drama should attend.” When Howard’s company returned in April 1866, its reputation sat well enough in the city that the players remodeled the hall over Long’s Grocery and renamed it Howard Theatre (Howard, Bowers, and Chatterson, proprietors), though it reverted to being Long’s Hall when the company completed its five-week season in mid-May. Among the improvements were two hundred new chairs as well as new scenery and a carpet for the stage.

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Advertising itself as a “First-Class Dramatic Company, Consisting of Ladies and Gentlemen of acknowledged ability only,” the Howard Theatre offered “gentlemanly ushers” in attendance,“to seat every one comfortably.” In an effort to attract ladies and children, hitherto scarce in theater audiences, the company presented Saturday matinees at 2:30 p.m., with admission reduced to twenty-five cents. Indeed, the Daily Journal of Commerce reporter thought it significant to note that every seat was occupied at the opening performance on Monday evening, 9 April, and that “the audience was very respectable, with a fair proportion of ladies.” As ambitious as ever in its repertoire, the Howard Theatre struggled to make the best of supporting players of uneven ability. Successive notices fault them for invention of lines that had little to do with the original text, rushing through speeches and business, mushy diction, and poor conception of the roles. By the second week, the reviews were taking a harsh tone toward even the leading actors. Mrs. Howard—originally seen as “excellent” and having a “lithe, agile, and rather elegant figure”—on 22 April “failed signally” in Don Caesar de Bazan and on 24 April was “a decided failure” as Emilia in Othello. Mr. Pope and Mr. Gooding came in for some gently constructive criticism.The only member of the company to emerge as a consistent crowd-pleaser was the comic actor Dan Russell:“His ‘Christopher Strap’ was most excellent, and elicited roars of laughter and thunders of applause” (13 April 1866);“Russell is the life of the Theatre” (15 April); “excessively funny . . . professionally, a good comedian, and socially, a clever gentleman” (4 May);“Russell is the life of the company, an actor of decided merit” (10 May). On 20 April 1866, the Journal of Commerce reported that the Howard Theatre had given no performance for two nights “owing to the bad weather and non attendance of those, who, if we had a good theatre, would patronize it.” On 26 April: “The Lady of Lyons was butchered at Long’s Hall last night.” On 2 May: “Being nobody present at Long’s Hall last night, there was no performance. Howard’s Theatre is about ‘played out.’ The troupe, which is of no account, we learn are going to Lawrence next week.” During the final week’s series of benefit performances, news reports reverted to a more benevolent tone. For example:“This gentleman [Mr.W. C. Pope] has done much under the difficulties of insufficient support, to sustain the credit of an ill-assorted company here” (12 May). And finally:“Of all the company belonging to the Howard Theatre, none have won upon the regard of our citizens more than Mr. and Mrs. Gooding” (15 May). Both William Coleman Pope and comedian Dan Russell returned to Long’s Hall about three weeks later, in June 1866, with the Breslaw The-

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atrical Troupe, which garnered more favorable press than that accorded its predecessor. The Breslaw company’s repertoire during its monthlong run ranged from claptrap melodramas such as East Lynne and Ten Nights in a Barroom to classier European romantic dramas and melodramas such as Camille, Lucretia Borgia, and La Tour de Nesle to classics (admittedly prone to melodramatic effects) such as Medea and Macbeth. The lovely Mrs. Breslaw won such a following that the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce of 26 June 1866 published an open letter to her, signed with the individual names of twenty male citizens along with a collective reference to “forty others,” stating that they wished to show their appreciation of her, “both as an actress and lady,” by offering her “a complimentary testimonial” at whatever time she might designate. Mrs. Breslaw’s gracious reply was published the next day:“Gentlemen: Your correspondence of the 23d inst. is before me, and in response I would state that I feel highly honored by the compliment tendered. I would name Friday evening, June 29th, as the time, and Ingomar as the play to be presented. Mr. Frank I. Frayne will, on this occasion, appear in the character of Ingomar. I remain yours, respectfully, Melissa Breslaw.” Her benefit drew a large and warmly responsive audience, after which it was announced that the following evening’s Macbeth would be a benefit for Mr. W. C. Pope. What we can see from these listings is that players frequently moved among different troupes, often remaining within a region. Indeed, the next few years would bring back Dan Russell at the head of his own company and playing Frank’s Hall many times in 1868 –1869, and Frank Frayne billed as “star” of the house company at the Walnut Street Theatre when it opened in 1871. The Gaylord, Fowler and Company Opera Troupe that gave two performances in Long’s Hall (24 and 26 March 1866) could more accurately be called a variety show.The Sixteen Talented Performers,“every performer a star,”presented Ethiopian minstrels,vocalists,acrobats,dancers,theatrical delineations, altogether (according to its advertisement) “the best and most versatile company of performers ever organized.” What lingered in the memory of Kansas Citians of that time, however, was the company’s activities outside Long’s Hall.Instead of resting up after arrival on Friday for their Saturday performance, they went en masse to serenade Mayor Patrick Shannon with their “excellent music” until Mr. Shannon opened his saloon to the visitors. After partaking of Shannon’s generous hospitality, the troupe moved on to stand outside the offices of the Journal of Commerce to demonstrate anew with another serenade that “they are most excellent vocalists.”11 On Saturday afternoon, the Opera Troupe gave a free tightrope-walking

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

In this 1869 photograph of a parade coming south on Main Street, Frank’s Hall may be glimpsed at the corner of Fifth and Main, in the block beyond Marble Hall. Marble Hall was a billiard parlor frequented by Wild Bill Hickok.The old Market Place was located across Main Street from Frank’s Hall. From a glass slide in the author’s collection.

exhibition for a crowd gathered on Main Street. A rope strung from the roof of Hammerslough’s Dry Goods House to the roof of Snell’s Saloon (or, according to another report, from the roof of the Journal office to that of the Savings Bank) was kept taut by volunteers holding guy lines on either side of it.The “celebrated Trapez performer,” J.T. Crew, wore spangled tights and carried a balancing pole as he made his way across.The biggest thrill came on a subsequent crossing when he pushed a wheelbarrow (with a grooved wheel) that carried another man. After so tantalizing their potential paying audience, they lived up to expectations, according to the 25 March 1866 notice in the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce: “It was all good, very good.They play again on Monday night with an entire change of programme, and have, wisely, reduced the price of admission to fifty cents.” After Lockridge and Long,the third—and most important—of the upperstory halls that served as venues for lectures, church services and fairs, balls,

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and theatrical entertainments was Frank’s Hall. Construction began in 1865 on Frank’s “mammoth building” on the northwest corner of Fifth and Main to house the Frank Brothers’ grocery business, but fitting out the upstairs facility as a theater took considerably longer than did completion of the building itself.Thus Frank’s Hall did not begin to siphon attractions from Long’s Hall until 1867.The opening of Marble Hall, with considerable fanfare on 22 February 1866, had no impact on Long’s, for Marble Hall was not a theater but an elegant billiard parlor, the best lighted and ventilated in the city, and it became Wild Bill Hickok’s preferred hangout there. C. J. Frank had come from Germany as a youth with virtually no money, settled in Kansas City, and by years of hard work gradually built up a major wholesale and retail grocery business, in partnership with his brother, on Main Street opposite the Courthouse. In April 1866, the partnership broke up, with C. Frank continuing to operate the established grocery, while C. J. Frank opened a new store dealing in “staple and fancy groceries, liquors, cigars, &c., &c.” in his new building,“erected at a cost of some twenty-five thousand dollars.” Commercial space on the first two floors quickly proved attractive.The Brown and Case law firm,for example,moved its offices from the Courthouse to Frank’s building in May. Still, an editorial in the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce on 7 June 1866 lamented the third floor’s unreadiness for use by theater companies:“Cannot the proprietors of Frank’s Hall be induced to make the slight modification in its arrangement necessary to fit it for a theatre? The change would involve but a trifling expense, and for every other purpose excepting as a dancing hall, the raised seats would be vastly better than the present arrangement.That a large hall so finished is needed, every one can see.” A week later Frank’s “splendid speaking hall” accommodated “a thousand of our best citizens in one room” to hear Professor Lyman’s lecture, while the Breslaw Troupe was presenting the melodrama The Stranger at Long’s Hall on the same night. Professor Lyman’s “excellent impersonations” impressed the reviewer:“His rapid change of voice, manner, feature, and even form, are truly strange, and we have never seen in Kansas City or elsewhere, an appreciative audience more highly pleased.”12 For the exhibition of Siamese Twins Chang and Eng and the Wild Australian Children at Frank’s Hall on 18 January 1867, people came into town from the surrounding area. But the actual impetus for Frank’s Hall to be formally declared a theater came from the favorable response to a troupe that played Long’s Hall under the auspices of Kansas City’s active German community, which frequently supported athletic exhibitions, declamations, and

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musical programs.The Graff Family Company presented German works in English at Long’s Hall, eliciting enthusiastic commentary in the Journal of Commerce for 23 January 1867:“Let the Germans of this city look to it that the Graff family will stay among us. Mrs. Graff is undoubtedly a sublime actress, and while she and the pretty Miss Mary are such favorites with us, we do not see that, with such assistance as Mr. Snyder, who played beyond all expectation and really excelled himself, this institution should not be kept up this winter.” Miss Mary continued to delight spectators, even when she played the male role of Kosinsky in Schiller’s The Robbers. The performance on 25 January was marred by a sad occurrence:“a former Lieutenant of the Turnverenian army died suddenly of extemporation; the funeral will take place from the Germania Saloon this morning at lunch time.”13 In any case, it was the popularity of the pretty little ingenue of German heritage that apparently induced the German-born Christoph Frank to advertise “Opening of the New Theatre!” with a benefit for Miss Mary Graff on 8 February 1867. Perhaps the advertised comic opera, The Fairies, was somewhat pared down, due to the nonappearance of some easily spared “amateurs who resigned on account of the change” to the “better adapted hall.” The performance at Frank’s featured Mrs. Graff as the “angelic” fairy; Mr. Graff ’s beautiful singing; and fine performances by Mr. Snyder and others. And, of course,“Miss Mary was in her glory.”As an added feature, Mr. Daenzer performed comic impressions of different nationalities, all well observed and in good taste. In sum, the reviewer concluded, “we hope our German friends will continue to appreciate the benefit of a theatre.”14 Christoph Frank, proprietor of Frank’s Hall, seems to have taken the hint, for the third-floor facility was seldom dormant over the next few years. A few examples from February and March of 1867 suffice to suggest the variety of attractions. Mrs. Graff played Desdemona in Othello there in March. The exhibition of Gropius’s Panorama of Europe (25,000 feet of canvas painted with views of all the European capitals) in the hall drew such crowds that the attraction was held over two nights with a special matinee for schoolchildren. Local singers and seamstresses joined forces under the musical direction of Mr. W. S. Mills to create the oratorio of Esther with opulent biblical costumes for the tableaux vivants. Four years before he was to win international renown for finding Livingstone,“the celebrated American and Asiatic traveler” Henry M. Stanley—wearing Turkish dress— lectured in Frank’s Hall about his adventures in Turkey. Chaplin’s Opera Troupe, based in Leavenworth, enjoyed a very successful run in Frank’s Hall from 23 October to 3 November 1867, four of those

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Frank’s Hall on the third floor of Frank’s building at the northwest corner of Fifth and Main was Kansas City’s performance venue of choice from 1867 to 1870. Although the building stood until the 1950s, performances in the hall were discontinued in 1878 when the roof caved in. From the Western Historical Manuscript Collection– Kansas City.

performances featuring English actress Mary Gladstane, who was then touring as a star.15 Indeed, she later returned to Frank’s Hall in a star engagement with Dan Russell’s troupe. After Gladstane moved on, the leading actress roles were taken by Madame Methua Scheller, a German-born actress, whose Juliet opposite George Chaplin’s Romeo was praised as displaying her musical voice and graceful form to advantage in the charming role she had selected for her debut. Subsequent performances confirmed the initial impression of the sweetness of Scheller’s singing voice. Chaplin’s Lord Dundreary in Our American Cousin showed him to be as adept at comedy as in serious roles: “Chaplin’s Hamlet was, beyond question, the most artistic specimen of tragic acting ever witnessed in the West.”16 The Chaplin Troupe’s success in Kansas City not only encouraged Christoph Frank in the risky business of theatrical entrepreneurship but also gave a huge boost to Kansas City’s civic pride,for the Chaplin company had been experiencing difficulties in Leavenworth under the nominal management of Susan Denin. At the beginning of the Chaplin engagement, an editorial called for support and appreciation of this higher class of entertainment. That the comments were taken to heart by Kansas Citians may be surmised

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The Theatre. For some time it has been creeping through the hair of a good many, even the most unwilling, that Kansas City is bound to be a railroad center, and a place of commercial and social importance after all. Merchants, business men, speculators, &c., have found it out and acted upon this idea, and now the players follow suit.The company at present performing in this city, is by odds the best that has ever visited us.We are no longer entertained by one-horse shows and burlesques upon the histrionic art, but actors and actresses of reputation, who dream and perform their parts in conformity with the tastes of an appreciative audience, find it worth their while to cater for the tastes of our theatre goers. We hope the quiet and refined style of acting which has hitherto mainly marked their performances, may be persevered in.We have had enough of a lower class of entertainment, and the people who attend such amusements, should be educated to higher tastes, and an appreciation of something besides coarseness and vulgarity. We were sorry to see upon a recent occasion, one or two persons who, by loud laughter and other conspicuous conduct, apparently wished to gain credit for metropolitan airs, but who really annoyed and disgusted those who have had better opportunities to judge of propriety of conduct in a public assembly. (City of Kansas Daily Journal of Commerce, 24 October 1867)

from the fact that Frank’s Hall was sold out for most performances and, perhaps more significantly, one could see “a greater number of ladies attending than upon any previous occasion during the present season.”17 Only a week after the troupe ended its lucrative Kansas City engagement to return to Leavenworth, the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce announced: “The Theatre has closed in Leavenworth, that ‘magnificent city’ being unable to support a place of amusement. This is another evidence of decline in our neighboring towns.We invite the Troupe back to Kansas City, where they will be sure of paying houses.They are now playing in St. Joseph.”18 One of the most sensational attractions to appear in Kansas City occurred on 11 February 1868: the much-heralded appearance of the diminutive Charles Stratton, whom the great showman P.T. Barnum had popularized as “General Tom Thumb” in the 1840s. Now thirty years old,Tom Thumb toured with his wife Lavinia Warren, her sister Minnie Warren, and Com-

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modore Nutt, all dwarfs who owed their celebrity to Barnum. Huge crowds lined Main Street to watch the entourage drive to Frank’s Hall in a miniature carriage pulled by puppy-size ponies for the matinee performance.The hall was already packed beyond capacity, ladies and children included in that audience, when General Thumb and his fellow performers arrived, wrapped in blankets and carried up the exterior staircase to the third-floor hall in the arms of their attendants. When his bearer could not find passage through the throng to the platform stage, General Thumb “raised himself from his wraps and called for the police. None came.Then Thumb proved that size had nothing to do with lungs.He turned on a volume of profanity.The populace fell back and gave him and his people the right of way.” Frank H. Brooks’s reminiscences tell us also about the conclusion of the performance: “when the Lilliputians were carried out and the audience came in close contact with the little people,Tom Thumb had another attack of profanity and this was punctured with his opinion of Kansas City, which did not coincide with that held by the assemblage.”19 The company’s matinee and evening performances, however, as reported by the Weekly Journal of Commerce on 15 February, included “songs, dances, impersonations, and speeches” in splendid costumes, “while diamonds were sported with profusion.” Frank’s Hall remained Kansas City’s premier venue for entertainments of all kinds until the opening of Coates Opera House, which marked the beginning of a new chapter in the city’s cultural history in 1870. Yet, attractions continued to be presented at Frank’s, including theater troupes as prestigious as that of the New Orleans and St. Louis manager Benedict DeBar (1871), until the roof of the third-floor hall collapsed under a heavy mass of snow. Although performances in the hall were discontinued after that occurrence on 18 December 1878, the building itself still stood in the 1950s.

Chapter 1 COLONEL AND MRS. COATES BRING CULTURE TO COW TOWN

Frank’s Hall served its purpose for the rough-and-tumble cow town that was Kansas City in the 1860s, but with the influx of eastern business interests it became apparent that something classier was needed. Kansas City got its first-class theater in 1870.That the finest theater between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast—at least for a few years—should be located in Kansas City may be credited entirely to the visionary enterprise of Col. Kersey Coates with the quiet support of his wife, Sarah Walter Chandler Coates. Kersey and Sarah Coates were Quakers who grew up in the idyllic surroundings of Lancaster and Chester counties, Pennsylvania.They met when Coates happened to hear Miss Chandler speaking to the Young Ladies’ Lyceum, expressing strong antislavery views that accorded with his own. Soon after their marriage in 1855, Kersey Coates left his bride in Philadelphia while he traveled west as an agent for an organization that aimed to populate Kansas with people of abolitionist persuasion, thus ensuring that the territory’s eventual statehood—unlike that of neighboring Missouri— would not be as a slave state. Despite his sheltered upbringing, Kersey Coates somehow possessed the intrepid spirit and entrepreneurial self-confidence to decide to move away from his nurturing family to the untamed west. The Kansas towns of Lawrence and Leavenworth both appealed to him as places to make a home, but it was the untidy aura of possibility in the newly incorporated City of Kansas that galvanized his business sense. In 1856 he brought Sarah on the

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wearying thirteen-day journey from Philadelphia to Kansas City. As their daughter Laura later wrote:“Out into a veritable wilderness they journeyed: the one bold, confident, and enthusiastic; the other timid, loving, and trustful.”1 Four days and five nights aboard the steamer William Campbell on the “Big Muddy” river brought them to the very muddy settlement beneath the rocky bluffs of the south shore. Few streets had yet been cut into those bluffs to create the layout of a town. Clearing tons of earth to level the land took a good many years and brought the town a temporary nickname— Gullytown—as well as plenty more mud. Upon arrival, Mr. and Mrs. Coates checked into the Gilliss House. Sarah Coates may have been the first well-bred woman to lodge in that hotel. While her husband was out on business, from the window of her tiny second-floor room she could watch the steamers come and go.The gently reared Quaker also heard profanity, drunken caterwauling, and gunshots. Moreover, huge gangs of southerners would ride past the hotel calling for death to all Yankees. Like other hotel guests, the couple slept with revolvers under their pillows. Kersey Coates built their home in 1859 at Tenth and Pennsylvania, the latter street named by Coates for his home state. For many years it was the only residence on what would come to be known as Quality Hill, which offered a beautiful view of the confluence of rivers. The Coates children long remembered terrifying incidents during the Civil War years when southern raiders approached the vulnerable mansion. But Sarah Coates tended the wounded of both sides in the makeshift hospital that was set up in Lockridge Hall. Kersey Coates was in constant danger, targeted by bushwhackers for his service to the Union, which earned him a colonel’s rank. Surviving the war and financial setbacks, Colonel and Mrs. Coates emerged as civic and social leaders. The still unfurnished parlor of their home was the scene of lively dances, sometimes French-style with a couple of fiddlers, other times accompanied by Bantie’s Band (also known as Banta’s Band) playing outside the windows. Colonel Coates cofounded the city’s first bank, made astute investments in real estate, helped create a chamber of commerce, and was instrumental in narrowly beating Leavenworth to obtain federal authorization for the first bridge across the Missouri.The bridge’s construction at Kansas City ensured that the major railroads, too, would come through there. It was a crucial triumph, for river traffic was rapidly declining in counterpoint to the rise of rail transport.The opening of Hannibal Bridge on 3 July 1869 marked a huge celebratory triumph for the city’s business leaders. Finally they could turn their attention to the arts.

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

The bluffs still rose sharply behind Kansas City’s first hotel, the Gilliss House, when this photograph was taken in 1869, thirteen years after Kersey Coates brought his bride, Sarah, to lodge there, on the south bank of the Missouri River.The view is toward the northeast. From a glass slide in the author’s collection.

In order to build a fine hotel for the burgeoning city, Colonel Coates started his own kiln to supply the bricks. Construction on the hotel began in 1860 but was interrupted by the war.Only the foundation had been completed, and that enclosed space served as a stable for Union troops. After opening the hotel in 1868, Coates undertook construction of a theater (politely termed an opera house, for the word theater still had unsavory connotations) diagonally across Broadway from what was then named the Broadway Hotel, but always referred to as Coates House.The location lay outside the city limits of 1869, though it was only three blocks from the Coates family home. Many scoffed at Coates’s decision to build an opera house in a cow pasture with a pond. Yet the visionary business leader saw from the beginning that the arts were necessary to the creation of a great city. The opera house, noted the Kansas City Journal of Commerce on 11 September

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1870,“induces country merchants to patronize Kansas City, and at the same time gives life and spirit to the place.” During the first decade of its operation, going to Coates Opera House was a somewhat daunting trek for theatergoers who could not afford a carriage.There were no streetlights, so those who came on foot would carry their own coal oil lanterns. Nor was there any pavement or even wooden sidewalk.When the thoroughfare was not slick with winter ice and snow or ankle-deep in summer dust, the normal surface condition was mud. Yet crowds of culture-seekers of the 1870s would put on rubbers over their shoes, hoist their trouser legs and skirts, and make their precarious way up the hill to Coates Opera House.Often one could see rows and rows of muddy rubbers lining the hallway of the opera house along with the lanterns deposited there. Sometimes theatergoers would forget to shut down their lantern flames when they went into the auditorium.To minimize the smell of burning oil, the janitor made it part of his regular rounds to check the lanterns in the hallway and extinguish them. Coates Opera House was constructed in less than a year and a half, beginning in January 1869. It was dedicated on 6 October 1870.The original cost was $105,000. Using Detroit Opera House as a model, Colonel Coates himself planned the layout and supervised construction. Rising three stories above grade with a basement and cellar below, the building had brick walls twenty-two inches thick upon a four-foot-thick stone foundation. The Broadway facade, with the main entrance, was 97 feet wide, while the Tenth Street side extended 110 feet. Iron pillars and cornices added decorative support,and the arched brick windows sported sandstone trim.Fortysix windows on the second story alone, according to the Journal of Commerce for 11 September 1870, were each fitted with “two solid panes of glass 28 by 54, with inside folding blinds all around.” On the facade, a mansard containing several oval niches afforded garret space for prop storage. Lamps placed in those fourth-story windows must have served as a welcoming beacon to theatergoers making their way out from town during the early years. In the theater’s original configuration, various stores occupied the ground level, notably O. C. Day’s Feed and Grocery Store.The building also contained ten dressing rooms, a greenroom, and various-size club rooms. From the street, theatergoers reached the second-floor auditorium through two six-foot-wide arched doorways and a wide flight of steps up to the ticket office (behind which was located the manager’s office).Through doors at the top of those stairs, one entered the back of the “opera room” on the parquette (seating and standing room beneath the two balconies and slight-

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

When Coates Opera House opened in 1870, it stood on a dirt street (today’s Broadway) with pasture behind it. Commercial interests occupied the street level while the auditorium was on the second floor. From a glass slide in the author’s collection.

ly elevated above the orchestra floor). All three levels in a slightly semicircular configuration around the orchestra seating were fitted with tiers of curved benches very much like church pews.While the benches on the top balcony (known as the gallery) were plain wood, those on the parquette and the first balcony boasted red leather upholstery. The orchestra had a flat floor, filled with lightweight wooden chairs. When those chairs were removed, the uncarpeted yellow pine floor served well for dancing; the opera house earned esteem as the city’s most elegant venue for balls. Four large private boxes, two on each side of the stage, had Solferino red plush walls, lace curtains, and red cloth-upholstered cushioned chairs. Estimates of the theater’s capacity at that period range upward of twelve hundred, plus standing room for six hundred. Gilt brackets with gas fixtures on the front of all tiers illuminated the tasteful frescoes painted on the plaster walls and ceiling by Chicago artists. Circular floor registers in the auditorium vented heat from the basement

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Taken from the stage of Coates Opera House, this photograph shows the secondfloor auditorium as it appeared before the 1881 remodeling that lowered it to ground level.The scarcely visible upper gallery had curved benches, as did the first balcony and the parquette (a mezzanine).The chairs in the orchestra were unfixed, allowing them to be removed when the opera house was rented for balls. No source is given for this photograph, which appears in Alice Mackey’s thesis,“A History of the Coates Opera House.”

furnace. The building’s numerous windows allowed ample ventilation. In view of the frequency of theater fires, even with modern gas lighting, the Journal assured its readers that “the latest improved fire-extinguishers are provided for every floor.” The stage area, thirty-six by seventy-two feet, was said to be one of the largest in the west. Like most stages of the day, the Coates stage had a wide apron. Numerous gas jets above the stage and in the footlights could flood the playing area with light. Mr. Noxon of St. Louis painted the beautiful

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drop curtain showing a violinist with medieval dancers.The stagehouse was well equipped with machinery to raise and lower the curtains and to aid in the scene shifting. Colonel Coates opened the theater for advance viewing by the press in September, with an additional preview of the facility for invited guests the night before the inaugural performance.The official opening on 8 October 1870 drew the wealthy and fashionable people of Kansas City in unprecedented numbers. Between seven and seven-thirty, streams of humanity filled the streets to the opera house from all directions. Lines of private carriages, public hackneys, barouches, and horse-drawn omnibuses pulled up to the entrance on Broadway. By the time the curtain rose at eight, reported an eyewitness, the ladies and gentlemen in the brilliantly illuminated auditorium formed “an assembly such as was never before gathered in this city.”2 The occasion certainly marked a great forward leap in the city’s social and cultural life. A stock company had been assembled to perform regularly at the theater whenever no touring company was booked in, and to perform in support of any touring stars.To manage the company,Colonel Coates hired the German-born Charles Pope, who had been leading man with Benedict DeBar’s company at the glamorous St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans for two seasons, 1854–1856, before touring the west as a star. In 1870,“the road” had not yet reached its glory days, so no theater could yet count on steady bookings of traveling players to draw audiences six nights a week. Pope’s first order of business at the Coates was to engage some workhorse actors and to weld them into an ensemble capable of adding new plays to the repertoire on an almost daily basis.The eight women and thirteen men of the resident company were chosen from varied theatrical backgrounds, as shown by the listing that appeared in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce on 6 October 1870. Pope’s leading lady, Miss Alice Gray, had just come from a season with Ben DeBar (to whom she would return the following season); she is remembered in theater history largely because John Wilkes Booth had her daguerreotype in his wallet when he was killed after his assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Frank Murdoch from the Boston Museum theater was a strong supporting actor. Lena Prentice came from Philadelphia’s famed Walnut Street Theatre. Mrs. Agnes Naylor had performed at Booth’s Theatre in New York. Others came from Boston, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Louisville, and California. For a few, the season at the Coates was an opportunity to move up to legitimate theater from variety. The inaugural evening began with the stock company’s singing of the

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Kersey Coates (1823–1887) was instrumental in the development of the crude town at the mouth of the Kaw into a great metropolitan crossroads of transportation, commerce, and culture. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

national anthem, punctuated by vigorous applause after each stanza. The Honorable T. Dwight Thatcher addressed the audience, complimenting the citizens on their enterprise and their recognition of the worth of culture in support of business, and culminating in a tribute to Colonel Coates, who had put those ideals into practice.Thunderous applause accompanied calls for “Coates,” who then left the private box where he sat with his family. Stepping onto the stage, he made some brief, gracious, impromptu remarks. Gifford’s orchestra played, and then the stock company performed Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular comedy Money, the title of which would seem to reflect with singular appropriateness the driving motive behind Kansas City from its inception, though the play actually spoofs commercialism.The audience’s ecstatic response to the performance and Pope’s well-received curtain speech clearly signaled that the cultural enterprise was off to a great start. Throughout October the stock company played six performances a week with a nightly change of bill. Most of the plays were English social comedies and melodramas, among which we find a single performance of Shake-

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speare’s Richard III. On 20 October, Money was reprised for the only time during the company’s seven-month season. Charles Pope and Alice Gray took the leading roles in all of these initial performances but in subsequent months would frequently step aside to make way for stars who played engagements with the company. A “star” was any actor or actress who could muster enough capital to go on the road and enough attitude to convince the locals of his or her importance. The winter months brought star engagements of Annie Ward Tiffany, Madame Methua Scheller, Leona Cavender, and, finally, in December 1870, a genuine luminary: Lawrence Barrett. Lawrence Barrett (1838 –1891) had earned acclaim in New York for his intellectually grounded romantic acting. In addition to that initial season at Coates Opera House, Barrett played eight more engagements there during the next fifteen years, followed by a memorable Kansas City appearance of 1887 at another theater (see Chapter 4). In 1870, the resident troupe headed by Charles Pope and Alice Gray performed eight plays in seven days with Barrett in the leading roles of all except the matinee, which was a play titled The Serious Family from the stock company’s repertoire; that evening Barrett played the demanding role of Richard III. He also performed the title roles in Hamlet and Richelieu, Iago in Othello, both Phydias and Raphael in The Marble Heart, Captain Henri de Lagadare in The Duke’s Motto, and (for his benefit) Elliot Gray in Rosedale. Of the seven plays in which Barrett starred, only Richard III is listed among the thirty-eight plays presented by the Coates ensemble during its two-month existence prior to the Barrett engagement. It could not be clearer that a professional actor of the era needed to be a quick study. The pattern of stock and touring interactions at the Coates continued in the spring, the biggest names being Lucille Western and Fanny Janauschek. A benefit for Alice Gray on 22 April 1871 marked the end of her association with the Coates Stock Company. A month later Charles Pope resigned as the theater’s manager. He returned to acting and played the Coates again in 1874 and 1878, but it was in St. Louis that Pope enjoyed his greatest success.There he built and managed Pope’s Theatre, the finest in St. Louis and renowned throughout the west. After selling that playhouse for a tidy profit in 1888, Pope went into politics. In retrospect, the inaugural season of Coates Opera House could be summed up as an artistic success and a commercial disappointment. A core constituency of regular theatergoers attended every production offered, but for most people the novelty faded and they waited for the star engagements. Although theatergoers professed to want high-quality legitimate drama, it

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Lawrence Barrett (1838–1891) was the most important actor to perform at Coates Opera House during its inaugural season. He is shown here in what was regarded as his finest role, Cassius in Julius Caesar. From The American Stage of Today: Biographies and Photographs of One Hundred Leading Actors and Actresses (1910).

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was the minstrel shows that sold the most tickets. Colonel Coates himself probably had little passion for the theater as an art form, but he understood its value as a magnet for businessmen from out of town and thus as a stimulus to commerce. His visionary commitment to the opera house never flagged, and he always made up any deficit that it incurred.That first season, 1870–1871, cost him $7,000. His daughter Laura Coates Reed later recalled that Coates family members often took items from their own home for use onstage, and that by this means they lost a valuable pair of brass candlesticks. In response to a compliment about the magnificence of the opera house, Colonel Coates once joked: “Yes, but it costs me fifty dollars every time the curtain goes up.” The Coates family retained ownership of the theater throughout its thirty-year existence, and throughout that time it held its position as the city’s most prestigious cultural venue. The new manager, John A. Stevens, had the idea of supplementing the Coates box office by organizing a regional circuit and sending the stock company out periodically to perform in small towns with theater facilities. Stevens opened the opera house’s second season on 23 September 1871 to high expectations, followed by some disappointment in that the advertised “new and brilliant combination of artists” did not measure up to the previous season’s company. Compounding the problem was Stevens’s choice of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to introduce the ensemble.The Kansas City Times reviewer condemned the play as “a caricature and a slander on Southern society and Southern institutions as they formerly were. And as the Southern element is a large, respected and educated one in this community, it would seem that common courtesy and common sense would have dictated that on the opening night, of all others, the management would have aimed to steer clear of everything that would wound the sensibilities of so large a class.This will clearly account for the conspicuous absence of this portion of our citizens last night.” Stevens redeemed himself by the magnitude of the stars he booked into the Coates during his two seasons as manager.The 1871–1872 season included Stuart Robson (15 –21 October); Fanny Janauschek (23 –28 October); Frank Chanfrau, famous for the Bowery role of Mose the Fireboy, which he played during his Coates engagement (13–16 December); Edwin Forrest (26– 30 December); comedian Joe Murphy (17–23 January and returning twice the following season); Joe Emmet (1–6 February); Lucille Western (26 February–2 March); and Lotta Crabtree (18–23 March)—all names that still shine brightly in the annals of American theater.The drawing power of such celebrities justified Stevens’s introduction of the practice

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of reserving seats in advance. The star appearances were interspersed by stock company performances, by small touring ensembles usually offering a mix of classics and melodramas, by minstrel companies, lectures, and concerts, as well as by occasional presentations for one night only by Kansas City’s two leading amateur groups, the Kemble Club and the Siddons Club. Snagging the legendary Edwin Forrest for a five-night engagement certainly reflected well on Stevens’s managerial acumen. Forrest, who died the following year at age sixty-six, had used his strong voice and manly physique to achieve stardom in his twenties with portrayals of democratic heroes like Spartacus and the indigenous chief Metamora. In Kansas City he played the title roles in Richelieu, Othello, King Lear, Jack Cade, and Hamlet with the Coates Opera House Stock Company supporting him. The Kansas City Times extolled his “wonderful magnetic power” and his Hamlet as “a masterpiece of acting.” Excursion trains were scheduled on four railway lines to bring in hundreds of people from rural Missouri.The Fort Scott line alone brought nine carloads of people, including three brass bands. An incident that occurred during the performance of Forrest’s King Lear hints at the complexities of race relations in those years immediately following the Civil War. Forrest had just finished the second act with a superbly delivered speech when a commotion was heard at the rear of the parquette. After the dimming of gaslights in the auditorium, John Gatewell (or Gatewood, in another account), an African American barber from Fort Scott, had taken a seat among the white ladies and gentlemen, who suddenly noticed his presence and panicked. An officer was called to escort Gatewell out, but Mayor William Warner intervened and invited Gatewell to join him for a drink in the bar downstairs. In the aftermath, it was the fact that the mayor of Kansas City had been drinking with a black man that most scandalized people. From the news reports, it is not clear whether Gatewell had been deliberately testing the limits of his civil rights or, as manager Stevens suggested in a letter to the Times, had simply bought one of the excursion tickets that included rail fare, supper at the Broadway Hotel, and seating in the parquette. Stevens wrote:“It has always been, and still is, customary in the United States for a particular portion of every theatre to be set apart for people of color; the Opera House in this city is no exception to the rule. During the fourteen weeks I have managed the four theaters constituting the Great Western Star Circuit, no colored person has been admitted to the parquette of either of them, until Thursday night last, and that was by accident.” Stevens’s letter, published in the Times on 3 January 1872, was in response to an editorial in the Kansas City Bulletin of 30

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

America’s first truly legendary actor, Edwin Forrest (1806–1872), played Kansas City one time, near the end of his career. He is shown here as Spartacus in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator. From The Stage and Its Stars Past and Present (1890s).

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December 1871, which suggested that Stevens should have insisted upon Gatewell’s remaining in the parquette. Stevens felt that the manager’s job was to conduct the business of the theater according to established practice, not to bend policy to serve one or another side of a political issue. Stevens’s second season was marked by financial losses as he attempted to uphold legitimate drama despite his audience’s inclination toward more popular fare like the sensational drama Mazeppa, in which the villain orders the title character stripped and tied to the back of a stallion that is sent galloping through thunderstorm and wilderness, pursued by wolves. Beginning with the 1861 success of Adah Isaacs Menken in the male role of Mazeppa (wearing a flesh-colored body stocking to give the illusion of nudity), the role was usually played by a woman. A number of actresses followed Menken in making a specialty of it, the principal requirements being equestrian ability and a willingness to let spectators believe they had glimpsed exposed limbs. Sometimes the big scene involved a dash up a ramp supported by scaffolding and masked by scenery to create the illusion of a steep mountainside; sometimes the horse galloped on a treadmill while a moving panorama unscrolled behind it in the opposite direction.The cheap thrill that resulted from putting a conceptually naked woman on the horse (as opposed to the male dummy of the original production) gave the poorly written play an extended stage life. In February 1873 Stevens presented three performances of Mazeppa at Coates Opera House, featuring one of the best equestrian actresses in the business: Miss Leo Hudson, with her own mare Black Bess as the “fiery steed.” An advance notice in the Journal of Commerce on 9 February 1873 declared that “new scenery and gorgeous new costumes” were being prepared for this piece. On 14 February it was reported that “the runs, or inclined staging is very extensive, and on these will the terrific ride, on the wild horse of Tartary, be made; the ascent being to the extensive length of the stage, with the fearless performer bound to the back of the steed.” The opening-night performance on 17 February did not go well,for “the machinery of the stage never worked so badly before, making quite a bungle, and the company having been absent playing other engagements had not had sufficient time to rehearse.”Stevens assured the public that the problems would be resolved for the next night’s performance, and indeed, as the Journal reviewer reported,“all went like a charm.” The reviewer noted also that “the House was filled again, many of those who were disappointed the night before having attended again, and all went away pleased.” It is sad to note, however, that not long after her Kansas City performances, Miss Hud-

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son ( Julia Lee Hodgen) was seriously injured during a performance of Mazeppa at Wakefield’s Opera House in St. Louis on 11 May, and she died in that city on 5 June 1873.The accident occurred during the scene of the dash on a zigzag scaffolding with two sharp turns at a steep angle. On the second turn, Black Bess’s right hind foot missed its footing. As the mare attempted to recover, the other hind foot slipped off, but she clung to the ramp with both forefeet long enough for Miss Hudson to disengage herself. It was a fourteen-foot fall for both horse and rider. Black Bess had to be shot. Despite cuts and bruises, Miss Hudson gamely completed her performance but soon afterward began vomiting blood. She was advised to bring a lawsuit against the theater but refused to do so. Although griefstricken over the death of the horse she had trained since it was two months old, Miss Hudson bore her final suffering with dignity. If the thrilling equestrian spectacle of Mazeppa represents the lowbrow appeals that best served the box office, the five-performance engagement of Mrs. D. P. Bowers in March restored an element of class.The Daily Journal of Commerce did its part to support highbrow culture with advance notices hailing her as a tragedienne of first rank, an “actress of power and taste,” with a magnificent wardrobe. Mrs. Bowers performed with the stock company in Lady Audley’s Secret (opening night and a matinee), Elizabeth, Queen of England, Mary Stuart, and Macbeth, while the encomia continued unabated. Even the stock company rose to the occasion, with Augustus Pitou and George Holland garnering particular accolades. But we learn from the Journal’s front-page story of 22 March 1873 that the third-night benefit performance of “the foremost actress of the age” drew only “a meagre audience.” The editorializing portion of the review bears quoting at length: As the peerless actress stepped upon the stage for the first time and at a glance realized the paucity of numbers present, our cheeks burned at the want of taste exhibited by the citizens, and by “citizens,” we mean you who now read this paper. If ever a management has passed through a little hell, we believe that of the Opera House this season to fill that bill. Everything that tends to make a theatre attractive, a good company, the best stars the world can boast, liberal advertising, conscientious dealing with the public, all this and much more has been in the work of the year, and yet the season has been disastrous financially, spite of a system of management believed by those who know most of the business to be unexceptionable. A management expects to lose money on some stars, but not on such as Mrs. D. P. Bowers. Mr. Stevens is determined to carry out the season and fulfill to the letter every contract made with his company and

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stars, but that he will again assume so ungrateful a load is not at all probable. In a word, without the remaining few weeks of the present season give indications of the existence of a demand for first class amusements, Mr. Stevens will assume contract and probably purchase the Louisville Theatre and relinquish the West, as being for a manager a veritable Sahara of dry bones.

Given the drop in attendance after the first two performances, one is tempted to speculate that Mrs. Bowers’s performances did not live up to the hype. However, she had a very successful career both before and after the Kansas City debacle, having been a prominent member of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre and having played leading roles in London and New York, and then going on in the 1880s to play major roles in Othello and Hamlet with Tommaso Salvini and Edwin Booth. John A. Stevens did resign from his position at Coates Opera House, announcing that he would devote himself to acting, “unharnessed from the cares of management.” That his efforts over two seasons to raise the level of culture were appreciated by some is evident in that the members of the Kemble Club took it upon themselves to offer a benefit evening for Stevens. Amazingly, the three short pieces presented by the amateur group at Coates Opera House on 24 April 1873 were interrupted by a surprise visit from the president of the United States, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. City leaders had learned only the day before by telegram from St. Louis that President Grant would pause in Kansas City.The president’s train arrived at Union Depot at ten o’clock that evening, and he was taken by carriage directly to Coates Opera House, where a crowd followed him inside. The curtain quickly dropped on the performance, then rose again to reveal the president and his distinguished companions alongside the amateur actors on the stage. The audience cheered. Col. Robert T.Van Horn introduced the president of the United States, who expressed his regrets that he could not stay long enough “to look upon your prosperous and growing city by daylight.” The orchestra played the Star Spangled Banner and Hail, Columbia, and the audience gave three cheers for the president, who then returned to his train for a 5:20 a.m. departure. Manager Stevens read a very gracious farewell text, thanking the Kemble Club for the unsolicited benefit and expressing great goodwill toward Kansas City.The Journal of Commerce reprinted Stevens’s address the next day.Stevens had also managed the magnificent Tootle Opera House in St. Joseph, Missouri, since its opening on 9 December 1872, and he was given a benefit there on 10 May 1873.

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Charles Locke, who had served as treasurer (the position we now call box office manager) of Coates Opera House under Stevens, succeeded Stevens to become the facility’s third manager in its first three years. Locke lasted a season and a half in the job. He was well liked for his continuing participation in amateur theatricals (serving as treasurer of the Siddons Club), even as he made hard decisions in an effort to get the opera house on firm financial footing. One of his first moves was to disband the resident stock company, as he saw the trend toward stars traveling with their own companies, each with a fixed repertory. Increasingly, there was less call for a resident company to provide support for solo touring stars. As a result of Locke’s decision, Coates Opera House was often dark during those years. For the entire month of October 1873, for example, only one attraction is listed: a lecture on the twenty-fourth by author Bret Harte on “The Argonauts of ’49.” During Locke’s fifteen months ( June 1873 through October 1874), minstrel companies played eight engagements, Benedict DeBar’s St. Louis company came twice, and the infrequent star attractions were Joseph Jefferson (in Rip Van Winkle and Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Joe Murphy, Lotta Crabtree, and Lawrence Barrett (supported by T. W. Davey’s Dramatic Company). During dark periods between engagements, Colonel Coates allowed religious groups to use the building rent-free for meetings, benefit entertainments, and—as exemplified by the Unitarian Congregation, whose church was not completed until 1880—for Sunday services. Despite his fiscal conservatism, Locke ended up—like his predecessors—operating the opera house at a loss. Although he resigned in midseason, Locke did not leave Coates Opera House in the lurch. He arranged for booking agents Baker and Thompson to bring in a series of stars, beginning in November 1874 with Mrs. D. P. Bowers, supported by J. C. McCollum. Locke then headed west with a traveling magician and ultimately became a successful manager in San Francisco. After those five financially precarious seasons with three different managers, Coates Opera House finally got the manager who would stay with it for twenty-five years and bring it to its peak of glory. Melville H. Hudson (1846–1907) was born in Carrollton, Ohio, served as a drummer boy for Union troops in the Civil War, and was wounded. Most people saw only a slight limp, though he actually suffered a lifelong, painful disability known only to family and close friends. Arriving in Kansas City in 1868, Hudson made friends easily and proved his work ethic through a stint as city clerk. He had already started a bill-posting business and was handling advertising

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Melville H. Hudson (1846–1907) was a central figure of the enchanted years of the stage. As manager of Coates Opera House from 1875 to 1900, he brought the top stars of the American stage to Kansas City. Kansas City Star, 31 March 1935.

for Coates Opera House when he approached Colonel Coates about the possibility of taking over the management. As Mel Hudson remembered it,he and Colonel Coates stood on the curb in front of the opera house and made a verbal contract whereby Hudson would lease the playhouse and assume the financial risk of making it profitable.Hudson was to book all attractions,pay theater rental and all expenses, and keep any profit he made. Astoundingly, Hudson quickly turned a profit, so Colonel Coates officially appointed him manager. Equally astounding to us today is how casual Hudson was about bookkeeping. His pocket notebook served as a record of performers and play dates,but only by the amount of cash in his pocket did Hudson know whether he was running a deficit or a profit. Hudson certainly made mistakes during his early years of learning by experience, and the press was often harsh in its criticism, especially when Hudson booked an attraction of inferior quality. As exemplified by his dealings with Sarah Bernhardt’s agent on her first American tour (see Chapter 2), his misjudgments were often the product of his fiscal conservatism, and perhaps this is also why he lasted as long as he did.

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“Mel” Hudson was fair, square, and direct. . . .“Mel” Hudson had a natural flair for theatrical management.The pronounced success of his theater was attributable largely to his determination to serve the public with the best attractions available, and to the cordial relations he always maintained with producing and booking managers. Early every summer he went to New York to make his bookings for the following season and we used to wait with keen interest the announcements of coming attractions. (EY 1)

Melville H. Hudson maintained other business ventures alongside his management of the Coates, and his name is associated with several other early theaters that will be covered in subsequent chapters. Hudson’s offices were located in the Music Hall, which he built in 1885, on Broadway, a block north of Coates Opera House. Music Hall not only housed Hudson’s bill-posting company and other theatrical business ventures but also served as a venue for summer entertainments, because the south wall could be opened to the cool evening air of an adjoining garden.3 Hudson would travel to New York each summer to book attractions for the coming season. He recalled that in the early years there were few booking agencies. He would make the rounds to talk with the stars themselves and take whatever dates he could get. Mel Hudson’s hard work and affability served the theater well, for it prospered under his management. Together Coates Opera House and the Broadway (Coates) Hotel catered to the social elite and the wealthy of Kansas City. During the booming economy of the 1880s, both buildings were remodeled.The opera house remodeling in 1881 might have been prompted to some degree by William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star, which began in 1880 as the Evening Star. Nelson was certainly one of the most important civic leaders in Kansas City’s history, but in this instance he was supposedly miffed that Coates Opera House had not bought advertising in the Star. Within a couple of months of founding his newspaper, Nelson went after the tenyear-old Coates Opera House as a potential firetrap.“A Coming Tragedy,” the headline screamed on 9 November 1880: “The Danger of Terrible Death To The Crowds Who Visit: Coates’s Opera House, The Death Trap On The Hill.” The article attacked the opera house as “inconvenient, old fashioned, unpleasant, and most of all, unsafe.” Given the length of time it

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took—up to thirty minutes—to clear the packed house after the recent performances by the popular opera singer Emma Abbott, the Star editorialist could envisage the horrors that might result from a fire or a panicinduced stampede. Meanwhile, the screed concluded, some shrewd citizen ought to build an opera house downtown. A follow-up article on 12 November noted that the situation was even worse than previously mentioned. Not only were the two narrow exits on the first floor bad enough, but the upper galleries were provided with only one narrow exit. On 11 November 1880 the Kansas City Daily Journal gave Colonel Coates an opportunity to defend his playhouse. Fifteen to thirty minutes to empty the house? “No,” said the colonel,“it don’t take half that time. I have repeatedly timed it when there was a thousand dollars in the house and found the time to vary from five to eight or nine minutes.” He noted further that people liked to chat after the opera, so there was no urgency to empty the house, and that it had been built according to recommendations by Chicago architects after the Brooklyn theater fire, with a solid brick wall separating the auditorium from the staircase. Nevertheless, on 17 January 1881, the Evening Star announced that Colonel Coates was planning extensive alterations and improvements. Accordingly, Coates Opera House was closed from 7 May to 28 August 1881. The most significant change in the configuration was the lowering of the auditorium to ground level.The addition of a foyer was lauded in the Times on 28 August 1881 as “the now indispensable attachment for all first-class theaters.” There “the sentimental youth and maiden can dally in sweet converse, or the pleasure seeker can retire for rest or to adjust her toilet in such a manner as exigency may require.” From the foyer, entrances were added, so that each section of seats in the auditorium was accessible from all sides along widened aisles.The main floor was divided into an orchestra section with nine rows of chairs nearest the stage and, behind that, the dress circle (formerly called the parquette), with a combined capacity of six hundred. Also on ground level, in addition to the stage and a slightly sunken orchestra pit, were four dressing rooms and a greenroom, all “very large and commodious, with all conveniences, such as water, gas, closets, etc.” The new grand stairway from the foyer to the upper tiers allowed those standing at the balustrade above to observe all who entered (but had the unfortunate side effect of accommodating mashers). The broad, wide steps flanked by polished black walnut newel posts lent an impression of opulence.The second floor, or balcony level, offered seating for 425 in twelve rows, all of them affording excellent views of the stage.The four prosceni-

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Some exterior changes to Coates Opera House are evident after its 1881 remodeling, but the more significant alterations occurred inside with the addition of a foyer and the lowering of the auditorium to street level. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

um boxes that remained from the theater’s earlier configuration were now flanked by six French boxes, each seating twelve people and reached by separate stairways. Both the balcony and the orchestra were fitted with Andrew’s patent opera chairs with the innovative hinged seat that could be folded up to allow easy passage between the rows.Ten rows of benches allowed seating for about six hundred in the gallery on the third floor.Two stairways, one on each side of the second and third floors, allowed rapid exit to the outside. Other precautions against the ever-present danger of fire included two fire walls, a two-and-a-half-inch water pipe to which a rubber hose could be attached at any level of the building, and iron bars in the walls for added structural strength. The stage, now measuring forty by seventy-two feet, could accommodate flats twenty feet high. It was projected at the time of the reopening that Coates Opera House would eventually boast twenty-three sets of scenery. Scenic artist E.T.Harvey had been brought in to execute these units as beautifully as he had painted the Moorish design on the drop curtain. A cellar beneath the stage was deep enough for the most elaborate trap effects.Lighting and heating elements were updated to equal those of any first-class the-

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ater in the country.Two large sun-burners in the dome represented the latest in lighting technology. Each of these had sixty-three gas jets configured with reflectors and ventilators to give a brilliant and beautiful effect. The old smoke-belching furnace was replaced by a system of steam heat that combined radiators and hot air rising “almost beneath everyone’s feet.” All of the dressing rooms were now located on the side of the stage nearest the stage door on Tenth Street, the old ones remodeled and new ones added.The star dressing room,“arranged in elegance as well as comfort and convenience,”earned favorable comments from its occupants over the years. To reopen Coates Opera House the Salsbury Troubadours played a fullweek engagement. Despite pouring rain on opening night, 30 August 1881, an enthusiastic audience warmly greeted Colonel Coates, who gracefully apologized for work that remained unfinished. Nate Salsbury’s popular comedy with songs, The Brook, already familiar from a Salsbury engagement the previous April,was performed with “even more than customary sprightliness.”4 Periodic improvements, both structural and cosmetic, were made at Coates Opera House over the years, during the summer months.The season ended earlier than usual in April 1888 when heavy rains were blamed for a crack that appeared in the west wall of the building—that is, the wall at the rear of the stagehouse. Colonel Coates asked the superintendent of buildings to inspect the situation, and it was found that excavations for a hotel adjacent to the opera house had also weakened the theater’s northwest corner.With the building deemed unsafe, Mel Hudson attempted to arrange the transfer of the current production to the nearby Music Hall. Little Puck, a comedy written by and starring Frank Daniels, had done excellent business in the first two nights of its full-week engagement, and Hudson was eager to continue it. Unfortunately, Daniels insisted on his contract for a first-class theater and declared that he would not perform at Music Hall, where the dressing rooms were “not only damp but wet.” Furthermore, Daniels expected Hudson to cover the estimated two to three thousand dollars he would have earned at the Coates. However, the Star on 12 April 1888 calculated that the loss to Mr. Daniels could be no more than $1,400 and reported the comment by an actor that the company had played this season in houses that were inferior to Music Hall. In any case, patrons arriving for the 11 April performance had to be turned away, while Daniels and his company remained at leisure in Kansas City until they departed for their Topeka engagement on 16 April. Other attractions booked for the remaining three weeks of the Coates season were transferred to the Gilliss

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Opera House. Architects Van Brunt and Howe were engaged for the Coates Opera House repairs, which led additionally to the rebuilding of the north and south walls. Electric lighting was installed, and the interior decor was toned down from the colorful “Oriental effects” of the 1881 renovation, as the Times reported on 7 September 1888. The auditorium was freshened up again in 1896 (new wall frescoes,a new drop curtain, and new draperies for the boxes), in 1898 (elegant upholstered seating in the orchestra with matching red plush for the chairs in the dress circle behind the orchestra), and in 1900 (remodeling of the stage and dressing rooms, addition of hospitality and smoking rooms, and opera chairs to replace the benches in the gallery). After Colonel Coates’s death in 1887, his family (heirs to more than two million dollars) supervised the complete rebuilding and enlargement of Coates House hotel, which Coates’s son Arthur managed from 1889 to 1900. A gala celebration of the opening of both new wings of the hotel on 10 January 1891 dazzled guests with the magnificent staircases, the carved marble fireplace in the lobby, the Turkish bath, the nine-table billiard room, the continuous second-floor balcony, and large glass windows for viewing the elegantly attired theatergoers as they stepped out of their carriages at the opera house across the street.The livery business run by Doc Landis was especially prosperous, thanks to its location on Broadway near Coates Opera House and the Coates House hotel. For distinguished customers, Landis liked to drive the hackney himself and would wear a silk hat and frock coat. The economic boom of the 1880s brought significant growth in real estate and other businesses, including livery stables, stores, restaurants, saloons, boardinghouses, hotels, and new theaters.The opera houses constructed in the 1880s, as will be seen in subsequent chapters, filled expanding entertainment needs for the burgeoning population (100,000 by the mid-1880s), yet none rivaled Coates Opera House in prestige.The Coates remained the theater of choice for the great touring stars during that peak decade of legitimate drama on the road, although the attractions were so abundant that many dazzling bills appeared also at Gilliss Opera House and at the Warder Grand.The major newspapers—the Kansas City Journal, Star, and Times— carried local and national theatrical news. The latter had an outstanding Sunday music and drama section under the direction of Roswell (“Rose” to his friends) M. Field, brother of the poet Eugene Field, who also frequented Kansas City theaters. Coates Opera House was also highly regarded as a social gathering place. A St. Louis reporter observed in 1901 that for three decades the Coates had

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been “the hallmark of swelldom in a city where swelldom had to make itself and to measure its neighbors by what they paid for their seats.” Indeed, it was not unusual for patrons of a popular-price theater to ride the theater cars a block or so beyond their destination in order to disembark at Tenth and Broadway with “the Coates crowd” and then walk back to the Ninth Street Theatre.Seating in the boxes at the Coates was not cheap,yet the boxes were nearly always sold out and the occupants dressed up. For gala events, most of the audience would wear full evening dress. Young people liked to sit in the orchestra, often reserving rows of seats for “line parties.” It was a fad for “young men of prominent families” to usher at the Coates, thereby earning admission to see the shows. After the 1888 remodeling, the Kansas City Star charmingly reported on 7 September 1888 that “everything about the theatre is spick and span, trim and tidy, and the season of 1888 –89 opened last night with a well-bred performance by a company of graceful, easy, and capable actors.The audience was intelligent, appreciative, and well clad.” During most of Mel Hudson’s management of the Coates (1875–1900), reserved seats in the orchestra and parquette (later known as the dress circle or orchestra circle) cost one dollar. General admission was seventy-five cents for the balcony, fifty cents for the gallery. Star attractions and operas often commanded increased prices, with reserved seats going for as much as $2.50 for Edwin Booth’s Kansas City debut at the Coates in April 1887. After eighteen years of stable prices, Hudson raised standard ticket prices to $1.50 for the parquette.The public outcry was such that he felt obliged to explain his position in the Journal on 2 January 1893: “People seem to be much more concerned about the price of their amusement than about the cost of living.” He had held the standard price of the Coates down to one dollar as long as it was still possible to book certain attractions without paying an advance. Increasingly, the managers of the best companies had been requiring hefty advances. The price increase would enable the Coates to continue offering only first-class attractions, while popular prices would remain in effect at the other theaters under Hudson’s management (see Chapter 5). On the other hand, in response to his halving of the fifty-cent admission to the Coates gallery in 1900, Hudson received a petition signed by nearly one hundred gallery regulars, asking him to restore the higher prices as a precaution against the invasion of “cheap” people. After twenty-five years of successful management of Coates Opera House, Mel Hudson declined to renew his lease in 1900.When the building was destroyed by fire on 31 January 1901, he had already sailed from

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New York for a European vacation, but Hudson could never fully retire. His continuing partnership with Abraham Judah kept him involved in the operation of Grand Opera House. He also continued to run his bill-posting and publishing enterprises. After Hudson’s death, the Kansas City Bill Posting company devolved to his son Melville H. Hudson Jr., one of four children born to Hudson and his wife, Mary (Thomas), whom he had married in Salem, Ohio. For many years the family lived at 922 West Thirteenth Street before moving in 1898 to a fine brick country home on thirty-five acres in Englewood on the Independence trolley line. Swales in the sod across one corner of Hudson’s property gave evidence of the thousands of wagons that had once passed there en route from Independence to Westport on the Santa Fe Trail. A year or so after the move, Hudson was boarding at Hotel Washington in town to be near his work. And then he also brought his work out to the country. One of the outbuildings he added to the property was a two-story theaterette. A first-floor auditorium seated two hundred. On the second floor a wide veranda surrounded four rooms and a bath.There the Hudson children could play at theatricals, but when it happened that an actor was stranded in Kansas City for a week or so between engagements, Hudson would bring him out to lodge in the theaterette and take meals with the family. Melville H. Hudson died of a brain hemorrhage on 6 February 1907. When Hudson declined to renew the Coates Opera House lease, O. D. Woodward and W. J. Burgess, the managing partnership of the Auditorium Theatre (Chapter 4), acquired it, and they held it when the building was destroyed by fire early the next year. Insurance covered the cost of improvements they had made on the house the previous summer: new interior and exterior lighting, repainting, creation of two new rooms as well as lobby nooks for socializing, addition of a smoking room, recarpeting of the boxes, replacement of the gallery benches with opera chairs, and renovations to the stage and dressing rooms.5 The building itself was still owned by the Coates family, whose investment over the years totaled more than $200,000; they carried $40,000 fire insurance on it.The most devastating losses were to the company booked into the Coates that week as well as to the people of Kansas City, who long mourned the loss of the theater that had given them so many cherished memories. On the evening of the fire,Walker Whiteside’s company had performed Heart and Sword to open a full-week engagement, and Whiteside had returned to his room at Coates House hotel.The diminutive actor with the rich, deep voice was always well received when he played Kansas City, be-

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

So devoted to the theater was Mel Hudson that even when he was at home, on his thirty-five-acre estate in Englewood on the Independence trolley line, he was only a few steps from a theater. He had this two-story “theaterette” built on his property. Kansas City Star, 24 March 1912.

cause it was two local men who had supported the launching of Whiteside’s career when he was fifteen. His uncle,W. H.Whiteside, in Kansas City real estate, and Dr. J. M. Ford had underwritten Whiteside’s Chicago debut in the title role of Richard III in 1885. Whiteside later recalled (quoted in the Star, 26 August 1942) that he spent the summer in Kansas City after his debut and he would ride his uncle’s white pony down Broadway from Westport (where his uncle was platting additions) to view Coates Opera House, which was “then the great temple of drama in the Middle West.” It was also from the back of the pony,“one strangely luminous day in May, 1886,” that Whiteside looked with horror upon the devastation wreaked by the tornado that struck Lathrop school, killing fifteen children.

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Walker Whiteside (1869–1942) was an actor of national prominence with strong Kansas City connections even before his name became associated with the end of Coates Opera House. The loss of his theatrical wardrobe in the fire forced his premature career change to character roles. From The American Stage of Today (1910).

Before he was twenty,Whiteside had established himself as an important touring star, playing Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Richelieu, and Lear at the head of his own company. His New York debut as Hamlet at the Union Square theater in 1893 won over skeptical theatergoers who had come prepared to throw vegetables. He had already begun to salt his repertoire with contemporary romantic dramas such as Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot when the Coates Opera House fire destroyed his entire stock of scenery, costumes, and manuscripts. Financially unable to replace his Shakespearean production elements, Whiteside turned entirely to new plays and remade himself as a character actor, at which he enjoyed greater success than ever. Heart and Sword, the last play performed at the Coates, was described as “a new romantic and picturesque comedy.” Whiteside wrote the play as a vehicle for himself and his wife, Leilia Wolstan, but no author was credited in the advertisements and advance stories. Heart and Sword had been so successful on tour—with its beautiful settings, lovely gowns, and some quaint German country characters—that Whiteside had decided to open his Kansas City engagement with it instead of with Hamlet, as previously sched-

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Whiteside’s very first role was Richard III. . . . It was regarded as rather unfortunate that the aspirant should have chosen such a robust character as Richard, for he was both short and slender. But he had a marvelously deep, rich and pliable voice, and in spite of his physical limitations gave a surprisingly good account of himself in the trying role. So surprising, in fact, that there was no hesitation in making plans forthwith for his career. Young Walker spent the following summer in Kansas City visiting his uncle. He gave a program of Shakespearean readings at the Gillis theater. He used to ride about town on a white pony. (EY 24)

uled.This fortuitous decision undoubtedly saved many lives, in that the fire broke out shortly after Heart and Sword ended and the theater had cleared, whereas the audience would still have been in their seats for the much longer Hamlet. Those who had attended Heart and Sword that evening told the Star reporter, as the newspaper’s story of 1 February 1901 recounted, that the theater had been unusually warm, to the point that the heat had been the main topic of conversation at intermission. When the performance ended at 10:30 p.m., the theater’s thermometer had registered eighty degrees. At 11:00, Lyman Depuy, the Coates’s head stage carpenter, made his rounds, which included visiting the boiler room in a subcellar of the basement under the northwest corner of the stage. From there, he proceeded to check the dressing rooms and noted that two company members remained.While attending to other duties, he smelled smoke from beneath the stage and headed for the boiler room staircase,but was driven back by heat and smoke. He called a warning to the two actors on the upper level, then tried to get to the telephone in the box office. However, the fire was already eating through the stage floor, and a wall of flames blocked his access to the front of the house. Depuy then crawled out a window, ran around the north side of the building, and broke a window to get in to call an alarm on the box office telephone, according to the Times of 1 February 1901. Fire department records showed that an alarm came in at 11:07. Some reports credited a passerby in the street who saw flames at the upper windows and called the fire station. Meanwhile, Miss Willette Kershaw of the Whiteside company smelled the smoke from the door of her dressing room two floors above the stage

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and ran to warn her colleague Frederic L. Powers. He grabbed two wigs, slammed his theatrical trunk shut, and followed Miss Kershaw downstairs. Flames already blocked access to the stage door at the southwest corner of the building. Luckily the two actors stumbled into a passageway along the north side and groped their way in the dark to the main lobby. As the flames advanced from the auditorium, they pounded on the locked doors facing Broadway. A young man in the street used a club to break the glass in a door, and the actors climbed through to safety. In gratitude, Miss Kershaw asked the young man’s name, but he was concerned about the damage he had done to the door and would not identify himself. By 1:55 a.m., however, that very wall had fallen, flames had gutted the theater, and only the north and south walls remained standing. In the Coates House hotel across Broadway, a large gathering had enjoyed a banquet and listened to an after-dinner speech titled “Exit Hell,” but the next speaker was interrupted when sparks began to fly against the windows. The hotel management alerted all guests that evacuation might be necessary. By the time Walker Whiteside came down to the lobby from his room, he realized that he had lost everything. Yet he managed to quip coolly to his manager and partner, E. J. Snyder:“I guess we’ll have to walk back.” Losing the scenery for all three productions in his current season’s repertory forced the cancellation of the remainder of Whiteside’s tour, but it was his Shakespearean wardrobe that would be most difficult to replace. His wife’s costumes alone were valued at $3,000.“Everything I have in the world is in those flames,”Whiteside told the Star reporter, deploring especially the loss of the only existing copies of several new plays in manuscript. The members of Whiteside’s company, too, were left with only the clothes they wore at the time of the fire, for the standard practice was to store one’s theatrical trunk in one’s dressing room with all belongings locked inside. In those days when actors were expected to provide their own costumes, a theatrical wardrobe was a major investment in one’s career. Powers, who did at least save his two wigs, estimated that his “wardrobe used in Shakespearian plays was worth fully $2,000 and that is less than it will cost me to replace it.” Besides the clothes she wore,Willette Kershaw came away with one kid glove and the key to her ill-fated trunk in which she had stowed her jewelry and about $150 in cash.Whiteside’s was only the second professional company with which the pretty young St. Louis actress had worked; it is gratifying to report that Miss Kershaw continued in the profession, played a very successful London engagement, and lived until 1960. Speculation began immediately about rebuilding Coates Opera House.

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

The ruins of the beloved Coates Opera House remained for nearly a decade, a poignant reminder of glory days of the theater, while Kansas Citians hoped in vain that it would be rebuilt. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

More immediately, lessees Woodward and Burgess needed to find performance space for the companies they had contracted to play the Coates for the remainder of the season. Indeed, the engagement following Whiteside’s was already completely sold out. Only twenty-four hours earlier, dozens of people had shivered through the January night to have a place near the front of the line when the box office opened at eight in the morning to sell reserved seats for Sarah Bernhardt and Constant Coquelin in L’Aiglon on 4 February.To discourage speculation, each person in line was allowed to purchase no more than eight tickets; even so, all seats were sold by 10:30 on the morning of 31 January—sadly, for a theater that would be lost forever only twelve hours later. Since Woodward and Burgess also controlled the Auditorium Theatre (see Chapter 4), they were able to transfer Sarah Bernhardt’s production there.Woodward then negotiated with J. J. Butler to transfer the Auditorium Stock Company’s scheduled performance into Butler’s Standard Theater (later the Folly; see Chapter 6). Although the Standard had been open

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less than six months, it had earned a reputation for presenting somewhat questionable fare.Thus it is amusing that on 4 February 1901,the same night as Sarah Bernhardt’s single performance at the Auditorium, the Standard was sold out, including standing room, for the local stock company. Interestingly, as reported in the Times on 5 February 1901, the overflow crowd largely comprised respectable women, who apparently seized the opportunity to view the interior of the pretty little theater without compromising their reputations. Decency prevailed, for in place of the Standard’s settings with “the water nymphs bathing in a pool, the girl in the moon and all the rest,” the Standard stage had been fitted out with the Auditorium’s familiar “old drop curtain.” Woodward and Burgess contracted with Butler to lease the Standard for the twelve-week remainder of the season.They first planned to use it as a venue for the syndicate attractions that would have played Coates Opera House, thus keeping the stock productions at the Auditorium. However, their efforts at making the best of the situation were thwarted by the manager of their next scheduled attraction, a road company of Sardou’s Theodora. The manager of that company canceled his Kansas City engagement on the grounds that the concept was to present Sarah Bernhardt’s old vehicle in the same theater where she played in the same week. Besides, he contended,the Standard was too small to be considered a first-class theater.Thus the Woodward Stock Company continued performing at the Standard that spring, leaving its home theater, the Auditorium, for use by the touring syndicate shows. The ruins of Coates Opera House remained nearly ten years as a reminder of the public’s hopes, occasionally fueled by the press, that it would be rebuilt. In 1910 the land was sold to Rothenburg and Schloss, a tobacco firm, which built a seven-story wholesale and warehouse building on the site. On the day after the fire, the Kansas City Star published an impressive year-by-year list of the stars who had trod the boards of Coates Opera House. Half a century later, on 21 June 1950, Louis W. Shouse asserted in the Kansas City Times that “the flames and the smoke could not wipe out those memories.” The lasting gift of Col. and Mrs. Kersey Coates was to look beyond the mud, filth, and crudeness of Kansas City in its early days and see the role of the arts as the crucial stimulus to civic pride, moral uplift, and a harmonious society.

Chapter 2 WHEN THE STARS SHONE ON KANSAS CITY

Coates Opera House gave Kansas City the opportunity to see many of the finest actors in American theater history, including Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Booth, Lotta Crabtree, Edwin Forrest, William Gillette, John McCullough, Richard Mansfield, Julia Marlowe, Clara Morris, Joseph Jefferson III, James O’Neill, Otis Skinner, and many others. In reminiscences about the legendary opera house that were published in the days after it burned, some claimed to have seen Charlotte Cushman perform there. It must be acknowledged that Cushman never played Kansas City, for she was of an earlier generation, roughly contemporary with Edwin Forrest, whose death came less than a year after his 1871 Coates engagement. Because most of Austin Latchaw’s fondest memories centered upon players and performances at Coates Opera House, it is appropriate to focus in this chapter on those who were most vivid in his recollections of “the enchanted years,” as an indication of what this cultural mecca meant to the city during the three decades of its existence. Ironically, the most dazzling international star of all, Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), did not appear in the city’s most renowned theater on any of her five Kansas City engagements. As we have seen, she was booked for Coates Opera House in 1901, but arrived when the embers of the fire that destroyed it were scarcely cooled; her production was moved to the Auditorium Theatre. Nevertheless, Sarah Bernhardt’s magnitude demands special coverage before we look at the stars that did shine at the legendary

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Coates. Long before her first Kansas City engagement in 1887, the great French actress was extensively written up in the local press.There is no question she was a remarkable actress who possessed a commanding stage presence, the intelligence and courage to imbue familiar characters with fresh interpretations, and that famously pure, expressive “golden voice.” Even before her ship docked in New York on 27 October 1880 for the first of her nine American tours, there was a feeding frenzy of stories about her, and many were picked up by the Kansas City newspapers. On 21 September 1880 the Times published “An Actress’s Opinion of Bernhardt” by Alice Harrison, who had attended a performance in London:“I call her unevenly great; that is my opinion of her as an artist. She is the female Barnum of the day.Why, she even advertises her thinness. I have seen plenty of actresses who were far thinner than she. But she uses everything as an advertising dodge. She descends to little tricks, too, which I think are out of place in a legitimate actress, and are only becoming in a soubrette like myself.” Under the headline “Bernhardt Again,” the Journal on 23 October 1880 reported on her home life and concluded:“Mademoiselle Bernhardt is sincerely desirous of pleasing the American public, and has made most elaborate preparations for her tour.Thirty of the dresses which she will take over are new, and some of them are magnificent. She regrets very much that she has not had time to try the effect of them before appearing in them in the United States. She is very well pleased with the company which is to assist her, and means to do her best to achieve a great artistic triumph during her campaign of 100 nights.” The triumph of Bernhardt’s East Coast performances led to the extension of her planned three months, as her American tour managers Henry E. Abbey and Maurice Grau arranged bookings all across the nation. Kansas City’s failure to get a performance by Bernhardt on her 1880– 1881 tour eventually manifested itself in the local press as sour grapes, not only because people were eager to see her but also, more significantly, because the city itself craved the cultural validation.The Star reported on 14 January 1881 that Mel Hudson, manager of Coates Opera House, was angling for a two-night engagement, which would mean—given Bernhardt’s huge fees—that he would have to charge five dollars for the front seats, so he sought the reassurance of a groundswell of interest before going ahead and assuming the risk. According to the Times story of 16 January 1881, negotiations between Hudson and Abbey were at a stalemate, for Abbey was asking $4,500 per performance, Bernhardt herself being guaranteed $1,500 per performance beyond expenses. Hudson was offered 10, then 12, and fi-

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nally as much as 15 percent of the receipts (from which house expenses and advertising would be deducted), but he was holding out for 20 percent. He noted that the top American stars Edwin Booth and Lotta Crabtree were the only ones who could claim as much as 60 percent of the receipts, so he could not condone Bernhardt’s getting 85 percent or more. On 24 January, Bernhardt began a full-week engagement in St. Louis, playing to enthusiastic sell-out houses. On 3 February came the news that Sarah Bernhardt had been booked for two performances at Tootle Opera House in St. Joseph, Missouri (only sixty miles north of Kansas City), with seats in the three front rows selling for five dollars. Milt Tootle’s strategy was to put tickets on sale at the advanced prices for three days, after which the management would decide whether it could pay expenses. If not, the engagement would be canceled. The Star commented: “It would be a good idea to try this plan in Kansas City if people want to see Sara very badly; but if she don’t come, T E S assures the citizens that the city will continue to remain in the same place, and perhaps prosper just the same.” A filler expressing similar sentiments appeared on the editorial page on 19 February:“It is just possible that Kansas City will survive if S B doesn’t play here. This may not have occurred to Manager Abbey.”Although the Tootle’s manager quickly blanketed Missouri valley towns with handbills claiming an exclusive booking for the entire region, it was soon announced that Bernhardt would play one night at Leavenworth. Mel Hudson persisted in trying to arrange a Bernhardt booking for which he was holding dates open at Coates Opera House, yet he remained adamant that he must have 20 percent of the gross receipts.The showdown came at Union Depot on 18 February when the Bernhardt company’s advance agent, Marcus Meyer, met with Hudson and a Times reporter during the train’s stop there. According to the Times the next day,the dialogue heated up to the point that Meyer exclaimed,“we don’t care a d—n for Coates, or T T, or Kansas City, and you can say so.” Hudson replied:“Just because you have stuck St. Joseph for $2,500 a night is no reason why we should pay you exorbitant rates here.We are not a country town. Surely if Leavenworth with her $1,500 a night is worth 10 per cent, Kansas City is worth 20 per cent.”After Meyer departed on the train for St. Joseph, Hudson went to inform Colonel Coates, who assured Hudson that he had done the right thing.The Times reporter speculated that an incident several years earlier might be at the root of the current difficulties with Henry Abbey. As Colonel Coates recalled it:

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Mr. Abbey was manager for Lotta. After the performance he had a sort of banquet on the stage, and there was general carousal. The gas was in full blast and the consequent expense to me considerable. He had said nothing to me about it. But worse than this—Mr. Abbey had invited two notorious prostitutes to the performance that evening and given them a private box, and they subsequently participated in the banquet on the stage. Abbey had a box of cigars and wine for them and they used them all up before quitting.Why, sir, the offense was a gross one! A number of our best citizens complained to me. I could not overlook it—I was deeply humiliated. I gave Mr. Abbey to understand once and for all that I would not brook any such insult to the chastity and dignity of our people. I think I made myself perfectly understood.

On 21 February the Times published a follow-up interview with Meyer and corrected the assertion that Bernhardt would play Leavenworth for $1,500: “She appears nowhere for less than $2,500.” A crowd of Kansas Citians gathered at the depot to see the train with Bernhardt’s private car pass through en route to St. Joseph, but they caught no glimpse of “the great animated skeleton” herself. However, an enterprising Times reporter had boarded the train at Lee’s Summit and, by pretending to represent a St. Joseph newspaper, gained access to Bernhardt’s private car to interview her. His resulting story, which ran on 28 February, extolled her beautiful eyes, expressive features, and sweet voice, and found her “not so dreadfully thin”—certainly “not a skeleton!” He commented further:“She gesticulates a great deal. In this respect she is very Frenchy.”A long passage in the news story purports to quote their conversation in French, but it is “fractured French” at best, even in the comments attributed to Bernhardt. Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden and his party rode on the same train, but had not met the actress. Mrs. Crittenden and the other ladies, however, expressed dismay at the “boisterous wine-drinking and card-playing” by the women in Bernhardt’s troupe, who were not as pretty as they expected French women to be. Bernhardt opened her two-night engagement in St. Joseph on 28 February 1881 with Frou-Frou, which took $3,750 at the box office. Under the headline “Sara in the Suburbs: How the Provincialists Welcomed the Only Bernhardt,” the front-page story in the Times on 1 March noted that the city’s hotels were full and that a large crowd gathered at the Pacific House to see her get into her carriage to visit Tootle Opera House for an afternoon rehearsal; they then waited two hours in the street outside the opera house to see her enter her carriage to return to the hotel. An exquisitely

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Sarah Bernhardt was much caricatured in the American press during all nine of her American tours.This drawing from the Kansas City Times of 1 February 1901 lampoons her frizzy hair, thin physique, and extravagant gesticulation.

attired audience filled the opera house that evening. Bernhardt’s first entrance drew some applause followed by slight laughter as “she gathered up her riding habit and showed her skeleton figure to its full advantage.” By the third act she was winning hearty applause. In the reporter’s assessment, “Bernhardt’s Frou-Frou accomplishes more by the cunning of art than the honesty of intent. It is bewitching, fascinating, elegant and natural if you like, but it is not sympathetic in its final result, and it never quite touches the secret spring of the heart.” The Kansas City Journal ’s front-page March 1 review was headlined “Bernhardt:‘Sleepy Hollow’ Crazy Over a Very Ordinary Show.” One senses from these reviews that if the audience response fell somewhat short of full-blown enthusiasm, it was because theatergoers

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did not magically understand the French language in which the play was performed. Bernhardt’s second performance in St. Joseph was the more familiar play The Lady of the Camelias, known to American audiences as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils.The Times reported on 2 March that Bernhardt had spent the day confined to her hotel room by “nervous prostration” and did not attend rehearsal. Nor did she attend the reception given by the ladies of the city for Mrs. Crittenden: “The reception was a very swell affair.” Meanwhile,Governor Crittenden had spent part of the afternoon just across the river in Kansas. It was explained that he had left the state of Missouri for two hours in order that Lt. Gov. Robert Campbell could be the one to sign a pardon, since Crittenden had once defended the convict in a criminal prosecution and did not want to appear personally interested in the case. That evening the Crittenden party again viewed the play from a proscenium box while Milton Tootle’s family occupied another box. Bernhardt’s death scene brought out the pocket handkerchiefs in the audience, and her final curtain elicited vigorous applause, foot-stomping, and shouting. An informal reception with dancing at the Pacific House followed the performance, but the governor’s party had changed to travel attire and left on the midnight train. For her performance in nearby Leavenworth on 2 March 1881, Bernhardt’s troupe departed St. Joseph at 2:30 on the afternoon of the performance.The Times reporter seems to have redeemed himself from the incident at Union depot twelve days earlier, for he now traveled on Bernhardt’s train as “Mr. Meyer’s special guest.” The Star’s front-page 3 March review of Camille at Leavenworth’s “handsome little opera house” is the news story that best suggests Kansas City’s embarrassed angst over the missed opportunity to bring Bernhardt to Coates Opera House. Besides naming the prominent Kansas Citians who had attended the performance in Leavenworth, it praised Bernhardt:“a superb piece of acting, a consummate work of art, and excited the audience to the highest pitch of enthusiasm.” And then the zinger: the two performances in St. Joseph netted $1,000 after expenses. Leavenworth’s smaller opera house earned its manager 10 percent of the $2,300 in receipts, resulting in little profit after payment of expenses, but large satisfaction in having served his city. Moreover, both St. Joseph and Leavenworth profited from money spent there by out-of-town visitors.“If Hudson had accepted Abbey’s terms, which were the same as at Chicago, St. Louis, and other places, Hudson would have made a clean $1,000 or $1,500.”

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One final episode completes the saga of Sarah Bernhardt’s nonappearance in Kansas City on her first American tour. Both the Times and the Star reported on 5 March 1881 that the Bernhardt troupe’s departure from Leavenworth had been the occasion of a serious disturbance. After the St. Joseph engagement, Henry Abbey had departed for business elsewhere, leaving Marcus Meyer to discharge the duties of business manager for the company. Some friction developed between Meyer and the troupe’s treasurer (not named in either source, but described as “a big, red-whiskered fellow”).The trouble began in the lobby during the last act of the Leavenworth performance; some prominent Kansas Citians arrived, having been delayed by late trains, and hoped to be admitted to standing room for the final minutes of the play.The treasurer wanted to charge them four dollars apiece, but the opera house manager and Marcus Meyer told them to go on in without paying. Apparently Meyer and the treasurer exchanged hot words in the vestibule even before the curtain came down. After the performance, Bernhardt and company took carriages directly to the depot while Meyer and the treasurer dealt with box office matters before following them. At about two o’clock in the morning, just before the train arrived to take the special Bernhardt cars to their next destination, the depot’s baggageman and another baggage carrier named George Fernal came to the car in which Meyer and the treasurer traveled, each seeking to collect payment for services. Fernal said he was owed one dollar, and the treasurer paid him in silver.The depot’s baggageman presented bills totaling twenty-two dollars. The treasurer handed the bills to Meyer; Meyer returned them, saying,“Why don’t you pay them?” The two newspapers quote the subsequent exchange in almost identical words.The Star’s account follows: “Why don’t you give me some money to pay them with,” said the treasurer. Mayer [sic] said, “how much do you want? I have got a couple of hundred dollars.”“Why in h—l don’t you give it to me then?” asked the treasurer.“Well,” said Mayer,“it’s my individual money, but I can let you have what you want to pay the bills.”“Give it to me.” Mayer then shook his fist at him.The treasurer said “You have been insulting me and I will not stand it any longer.”“I have not insulted you,” said Mayer.“Yes, you have insulted me,”and at the same time the treasurer drew back and struck Mayer powerfully on the left side of the face just under the eye, inflicting a wound from which blood spurted out all over the bills. Mayer staggered back against the door of the state-room and was caught by a young attendant in charge of bedding of the car who got in between them and endeavored to prevent further trouble.

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Mayer said:“Sir, you are done with this company.” The treasurer said: “I don’t care a d—n for you or this company either.” Mayer threw his hands around the attendant and found a pistol in his pocket, which he leveled at the treasurer.The attendant, seeing the pistol, said: “For God’s sake don’t shoot.” The treasurer drew his pistol and started toward Mayer. Some men rushed in and got hold of him before he could do anything, and threw his hand up.

At this point,Sarah Bernhardt appeared,having been awakened by the commotion.The starstruck Times reporter’s version is worth quoting: She was naturally excited, and was unmindful of her wardrobe and was attired in what is known in vulgar and common parlance as a night gown, her beautiful hair hanging loosely down her back, and she looked as charming as she did on the stage. Her expressive eyes spoke volumes, as she urged the gentlemen to desist, and during the lull caused by her appearance, our informant noticed that the neck was trimmed with ruffles, very narrow edged, with valenciennes lace, and seem to be box-plaited. She wore no night cap, and with the exception of a little embroidery which adorned her garment, she was attired as plainly as any American maiden who retires to rest unconscious of the fact that in a short time she would be unexpectedly called upon to participate in the role of a divine peace-maker in a drama not on the bills.

Hovering behind Bernhardt were her lady attendants, also in their nightclothes.The tableau effect of the imperious Bernhardt backed by the frightened women all dressed for bed instantly brought the men to their senses. The episode was over by the time Detective Cleary arrived, and the train departed for Bernhardt’s engagement in Quincy. It was six years before Kansas City got its own Bernhardt engagement: two performances, 9 and 10 May 1887. She again toured under the management of Abbey and Grau, and Mel Hudson was still managing Coates Opera House as well as the Gilliss Opera House.This time Bernhardt was booked into the Gilliss Opera House, which had opened in 1883 (see chapter 3). Clearly the passage of time allowed both parties to put their business interests ahead of their egos.Why Hudson booked her into the Gilliss rather than the more prestigious Coates is less clear.The most likely explanation is the significantly larger capacity of the Gilliss, for it seated 2,059 as opposed to the seating for 1,550 at the Coates. Sarah Bernhardt arrived on Sunday for her Monday night performance,

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the Bernhardt special having made “one of the fastest runs on record” (five and a half hours) from Omaha. In addition to Bernhardt’s private car (the same olive-upholstered Pullman that Adelina Patti had toured in), there was a coach car for the company members and a baggage car carrying their trunks.The weather was unseasonably warm for May; indeed, a number of ladies attended the opening without bonnets. Reporters for all three newspapers noted that the audience, apart from those in the boxes, was not particularly dressy for Fedora on 9 May.The Gilliss simply did not elicit the degree of finery that would have been seen at the Coates.The Star reviewer the next day complimented the intelligence of theatergoers who “willingly remained through four acts of French, with the thermometer near the boiling point.” As for the star herself, “what she lacks in a lovely face she makes up in expression,” for she seemed as “deeply interested in the play” as were those watching it. Comparisons with American actresses who had played Fedora in Kansas City were inevitable:“Bernhardt’s Fedora has that spirit of the lurking devil which no American actress, with the exception of Clara Morris, has succeeded in exhibiting.”1 The supporting players and the production values were deemed seriously disappointing. Stirred perhaps by detailed descriptions of Bernhardt’s elegant dresses for Camille, the second-night audience made more effort to dress up. Again, the actress compelled attention despite flaws in the production. She wept real tears. Her anger was also very real behind the scenes in response to a snafu with the curtain at the end of the first act. According to the Journal of 11 May 1887, it was company members who had insisted on placing the furniture too far forward for “the eccentricities of the Gillis proscenium arch.”Thus the curtain, painted with a seascape, a hut, and dancing figures, stopped when it encountered a table, leaving the lower half of Bernhardt visible to the audience until the obstructions were removed and, in the words of the Times account from the same day,“the scene of war was shut out from the audience.” Instantly, the Journal reported, “the madame flew into a rage and proceeded to wipe up the floor with the stage carpenter and Manager Hudson in spite of the latter’s spade tail coat and white kids.” The moment-by-moment account in the Times notes that the mildmannered stage carpenter Charley was singled out for attack and that “the madame flew at him like a tigress, uttering strange cries in a foreign tongue” while “the excited company danced a war dance” around them. Charley eluded Bernhardt’s blows and escaped down the stairs on the Walnut Street side of the theater, where he met Mel Hudson on his way up. Hudson, carrying his small bamboo cane,“advanced fearlessly to meet the fiery Gauls.”

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Luckily, two policemen arrived on the scene just in time to rescue the unflappable Hudson from being attacked. Assistant manager Charles Thomas had gone to find the police on the street as soon as the brouhaha began. Hudson then explained to Bernhardt that someone in her company had moved the table and that “if the curtain had been allowed to descend upon it the center board would have been smashed.” Bernhardt responded by decreeing that either she or Charley must leave the theater.While “the whole company fell at her feet and wept,” imploring her to stay, Hudson spoke eloquently of Charley’s desire to serve her. And so—just when the theater’s orchestra had exhausted its entire repertoire of intermission music and was about to start over—Madame Sarah consented to go on to act 2. Nonetheless, in the passion of performing her leave-taking from Armand in the country cottage scene, Bernhardt accidentally kicked a chair too far downstage. Once again the act curtain stopped in mid-descent. As soon as the policeman in the lobby saw the situation, he ran for the stage door.This time, however, Bernhardt merely laughed. No one could have been happier than Mel Hudson to see the train carrying Bernhardt and her company disappear into the west. Hudson had recently retired from his long, successful management of Coates Opera House when Sarah Bernhardt was at last booked for one performance at the venerable theater in February 1901. Given the passage of nearly fourteen years since her previous Kansas City engagement, it is not surprising that creative memory came into play. A feature writer for the Times recollected on 27 January 1901 that in 1887 Bernhardt had “managed to make things lively in Kansas City by becoming enraged during a performance and chasing a stage hand out of the theater at the point of a dagger.” Nevertheless, Bernhardt’s past transgressions were overlooked if not forgotten as an estimated three hundred people came out in the frigid January weather to stand in line for up to twenty hours before the box office opened.There is something poignant in the juxtaposition of the Kansas City Star’s front-page headlines on consecutive dates. On 31 January 1901: “Bernhardt Seats All Sold / ‘Standing Room Only’ Two Hours After the Box Office Opened.” On 1 February 1901:“Coates Theater Is No More / Kansas City’s Oldest Playhouse Destroyed by Fire.” O. D.Woodward, manager of Coates Opera House and the Auditorium Theatre in partnership with W. J. Burgess of Omaha, made arrangements to move Bernhardt’s performance to the Auditorium Theatre, exchanging the reserved seat tickets from the Coates for seating as equivalent as possible in the Auditorium.The Auditorium’s larger capacity made six hundred addi-

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tional tickets available, and they sold quickly. Meanwhile Bernhardt’s arrival with her costar, Constant Coquelin, made front-page news. Her traveling arrangements were far more elaborate than on previous visits. In addition to her luxurious private car,“Olivette,”with its two bedrooms,dining room, kitchen, and salon, a boxcar brought her own victoria and cabriolet for local sightseeing. Five boxcars of scenery suggest that production values were significantly improved over her previous visit. Among the attendants accompanying Bernhardt was her personal “beauty doctor,” Dr. Cassaerlietto. For the company of sixty there were two coaches, two baggage cars, and a combination buffet and observation car. Bernhardt’s performance of the title role, a breeches part, in Edmund Rostand’s L’Aiglon (The Eaglet) at the Auditorium Theatre on 4 February 1901 earned ecstatic reviews. Her costumes—tights and cutaway coat—revealed “every curve of her supple body,” reported the Times the next day, and dispelled forever the notion of skeletal angularity. Her voice, her expressive eyes, her poses and gestures all contributed to her characterization of the young duke, while Coquelin’s superb portrayal of the old grenadier added a touch of comedy.They held their audience until the final curtain came down after midnight. Despite the high costs of drayage (transport of scenery and properties from the depot) and the hiring of extra musicians, O. D. Woodward expressed particular delight in the profitable evening he had enjoyed. On her 1906 American tour, Sarah Bernhardt performed under the management of the Shuberts, who were then engaged in fierce rivalry with the Theatrical Syndicate. Because the Syndicate, also known as Klaw and Erlanger, controlled the first-class theater in virtually every city, the Shuberts had to find other venues and sometimes resorted to erecting circus tents with temporary stages. In Kansas City, the Shuberts booked Bernhardt for one performance in the mammoth Convention Hall. Patrons were allowed to vote on which play from her repertoire she would perform, and Camille won with 784 votes, followed by 749 votes for La Sorcière and 703 for La Tosca. One wag wrote in a vote for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ticket prices ranged from one to three dollars, and the best seats sold out on the first day of sales; indeed, it was the biggest one-day box office in Convention Hall’s history. Bernhardt arrived on the morning of her performance, 28 February 1906, on her special train: two sleepers, two baggage cars, and a brand-new private car named “Sarah Bernhardt.” She was personally attended by two maids, a valet, a masseuse, and a chef, as well as her traveling companion, Madame Seylar, and her secretary, Frederick Meyer. With more than six

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There was something mystical about the influence Sarah Bernhardt had on her audiences. Her native gifts were supplemented by untiring, intelligent study. She was instinctively an artist, with constant command of the instrumentalities of expression. Everything she did was consciously done. . . . If to be an actress merely is to impersonate, one may be an actress and still be superficial. But Bernhardt was much more than an actress; she interpreted deeply, convincingly, vividly, all the while her technique infallible. It was as if she played upon her audience as a virtuoso plays upon the keys. She wove a sort of spell, for there was, along with all the rest, something of the sorceress in her—perhaps a great deal. (EY 17)

thousand seats sold in advance and all possible standing room sold when the doors opened, that evening’s performance of Camille in Convention Hall possibly still holds the record it set for the largest indoor audience ever for legitimate theater anywhere in the world. Remarkable acoustics compensated for the considerable distance from the stage of most in the audience. Again Bernhardt worked her magic. At sixty-two she appeared as young as ever. Although the 1906 tour had been billed as a farewell tour, Bernhardt played Kansas City twice more. Producer Martin Beck amazingly booked her 1913 tour on a vaudeville circuit, promoting it as an altruistic venture that would bring her before the vast moderate-price audience. For five days at the Orpheum, surrounded by comedians, acrobats, and musicians, Sarah Bernhardt played matinee and evening performances. The selections she presented were: on Wednesday 9 April, act 3 of Lucretia Borgia; on 10 April, a one-act play, One Christmas Night; on 11 April, act 3 of Theodora; on 12 April, act 3 of La Tosca; on Sunday 13 April, act 3 of Camille. Latchaw felt that she attained her greatest dramatic heights in La Tosca. Bernhardt again played the Orpheum in 1918 (1–7 September), on her last American tour.To reviewer E.B.Garnett,she appeared ten years younger than in 1913, despite the leg amputation she had undergone in 1915. Again she gave matinee and evening performances, a playlet titled From the Theatre to the Field of Honor in the first half of the week, followed in the latter half of the week by the last act of Camille. In the Times of 2 September 1918, Garnett waxed eloquent:

To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

This photograph was taken from the stage of Convention Hall between acts of Sarah Bernhardt’s performance in Camille on 28 February 1906 to document what was claimed to be the largest indoor audience ever assembled for legitimate drama. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

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There are the same penetratingly bright eyes and the exquisitely emotional lips, parting in glorious smiles, or quivering as she sobs in pain or cries in defiance, as vividly expressive as the wonderful Bernhardt voice which all the years have left unchanged. And the grand simplicity of it all! The quaint little half silences; the words flowing out now so tenderly or so tragic; the smiles in the thick of tears—is it any wonder the audience forgets it is in a vaudeville theater and weeps?

Among the acts on the vaudeville bill with Bernhardt were Officer Vokes and Don, a dog that played the part of an inebriated man; a two-man “darktown” skit; a shadowgraph performance; a comedian; a dancer; and a singer. While Sarah Bernhardt was surely one of the greatest luminaries in the annals of the stage, a host of other foreign stars invaded America during the enchanted years. Coates Opera House figured prestigiously in the itineraries of many, including Czech-born Fanny Janauschek (who had nine Kansas City engagements beginning in 1871, the first seven of them at the Coates), Polish-born Helena Modjeska (who played the last four of her seven Kansas City engagements at the Coates), Italian star Tommaso Salvini (at the Coates in 1886 and 1890) as well as several engagements of his son Alexander Salvini, and the notorious English beauty Lillie Langtry (at the Coates in 1884, 1887, and 1888). All are fascinating figures, and thus the visits of Oscar Wilde and Sir Henry Irving, to be discussed later in this chapter, are but two examples in a vast, rich history. It has been noted that the eminent American actor Lawrence Barrett first played Kansas City during the inaugural season of Coates Opera House: a full-week engagement, 7 to 14 December 1870. He returned to the city eleven times, always at the Coates until the famous 1887 inaugural week at the Warder Grand (see chapter 4).Small in stature and limited in vocal range, Barrett built a solid career through hard work to overcome those deficiencies, but he remained a technical actor, one who built his characterizations intellectually rather than emotionally. The role of Cassius in Julius Caesar was widely acknowledged as the one most suited to his temperament, especially as the character progressed from calculating watchfulness to frenzied exultation at the fall of Caesar. Off the stage, Barrett was regarded by his fellow players as somewhat thin-skinned and incommunicative, yet William S.Hart—who toured with Barrett’s 1889 Ganelon company (which turned out to be Barrett’s last)—testified to the star’s sense of humor. Barrett must have needed a sense of humor when Louis James (1842– 1910) toured with him as a supporting player from 1877 to 1886. With a commanding vocal and physical presence as well as ease of emotional range,

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Louis James (1842–1910), shown here in the role of Virginius, was a remarkably versatile actor of classics, comedy, and melodrama. Among theater folk he was a practical joker. He toured with Lawrence Barrett and later as a star, often playing Kansas City. After his divorce from actress Marie Wainwright, he married Kansas City actress Aphie Hendricks. From Margaret, Theatrical Sketches: Here and There with Prominent Actors.

James earned respect in the profession and faithful audiences on the road, even if he never attained Broadway stardom. However, he was also known for the practical jokes he perpetrated on his fellow players. One oft-repeated story concerned his playing Brutus to Barrett’s Cassius in Julius Caesar. As Brutus takes his leave of Cassius in act 1, scene 2, his lines are: “Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this: Brutus had rather be a villager Than to repute himself a son of Rome Under these hard conditions as this time Is like to lay upon us.” With “chew upon this,” James clasped Barrett’s hand and left a raw oyster in it, forcing Cassius to keep it hidden in his palm for the remainder of his long scene (EY 18).2 Although that story was not tied to any particular locale, it was in Kansas City that James and Barrett had a serious falling-out that led to James’s abrupt departure and formation of his own company. Marie Wainwright (1853–1923), who was also in Barrett’s company until she joined James to tour as his leading lady, was much later interviewed by Latchaw and “did not comment on the nature of the quarrel, but that it was ‘very genuine.’ It was so disrupting that James left the Coates theater before the last act of

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Richelieu, in which he was playing De Mauprat, and he left never to return to the great tragedian” (EY 18). Although Miss Wainwright’s memory might have been faulty on the details, the breakup must have occurred on 17 September 1885, for that was the night that Barrett and James last performed Richelieu together in Kansas City. James had indeed played Mauprat with the company on other occasions, but the Kansas City Journal lists him for the role of Count de Baradas that night.The local newspapers carry no mention of the break,nor do we find any reason given for the abrupt change of bill on 18 September from the announced Julius Caesar to a repeat performance of Francesca da Rimini. One is tempted to read a subtextual defense of Barrett in the Journal ’s 20 September 1885 analysis at the end of the engagement, devoting a full column to Lawrence Barrett’s work, with no mention of his support by Louis James,who had been prominently billed in the advertisements.The reviewer observed about Barrett:“Certainly even his enemies, and who has not them, will grant him physical reserve, a well knit form and face capable of expressing sorrow, by the merest movement of a muscle; joy, by the kindling of the eye; or rage, by the transport of the entire body. . . . One marked advance, and [sic] important one, which Mr. Barrett has made in the past few years is in the thorough mastering of his own voice.To control this organ is of first importance on the road to success.” Interestingly, a month later, on 26 October 1885, the Kansas City Star reprinted a “special telegram from New York” to the Chicago Tribune: “The cause of Louis James’s retirement from Lawrence Barrett’s dramatic company, to be followed by the secession of Marie Wainwright, is divulged. It was the social snubbing of them by the tragedian.” The paragraph went on to explain that although both James and Wainwright belonged to respectable families, “Barrett always held aloof from them during the years of their employment by him,” but the break was actually precipitated by Barrett’s refusal to allow his daughters to associate with James and Wainwright.The notice implied that both James and Wainwright had divorced spouses to marry each other, but in fact James was a widower, his wife, Lillian Scanlon, having died in 1876. Louis James and Marie Wainwright toured together until 1888.For a time after their divorce, James teamed with Frederick Warde under the management of Wagenhals and Kemper. Later he formed his own company and toured as a star. Alphia Hendricks, a Kansas City woman who had distinguished herself in local amateur performances,won her first professional engagement with Wagenhals and Kemper. Three months later she married Louis James and thereafter performed as Aphie James (1868–1940), often

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returning to her native city as a professional actress.The James couple spent several summers at the Hendricks farm on the site of the present-day Notre Dame de Sion school. Louis James died in 1910 while dressing to play Wolsey in Henry VIII in Helena, Montana. His wife had James buried in Kansas City’s Forest Hill cemetery, where she joined him after nearly three more decades of performing in vaudeville and on Broadway. Lotta Crabtree (1847–1924) played all ten of her Kansas City engagements at Coates Opera House.The pert, petite red-haired comedienne had been performing since the age of seven, when coins would shower the platform on which she sang and danced in various California gold-mining camps. Perennially youthful, she often played boy roles and unfailingly drew full houses with posters that proclaimed simply “Lotta Tonight!” Lotta’s Kansas City debut on 18 March 1872 was in The Little Detective, which remained a local favorite, reappearing in her repertoire—often selected for the lucrative closing-night benefit slot—for seven of her Coates bookings. The play was written for her protean comic abilities, giving her six distinctive roles in the action, in addition to which she performed a Swiss yodeling “hoopty-dooden-doo” song.The ecstatic review in the Times hailed her as a “bewitching embodiment of grace, very personification of jollity, double-distilled essence of rollicking fun, black-eyed, curly-haired, eccentric, sparkling, fairly brimming over with joyous life.” Reviews of subsequent offerings in the 1872 engagement continued in the same vein. On 21 March, the city was hit with a blinding snowstorm and piercing cold winds, yet “fully a thousand of the very élite of the city climbed over hills, scrambled through gullies and slid along the slippery pavements to the Opera-house. So large a house on such a night was never before known in Kansas City.And Lotta appreciated the compliment.The jolly little charmer was never more fascinating.”3 She closed that engagement with Family Jars, in which she played two roles and set a new record for receipts at the Coates, even surpassing Edwin Forrest’s box office. Six of Lotta’s Kansas City engagements included Musette; or Little Bright Eyes, as did her last visit in 1891, after which she retired from the stage. Musette and Zip, both written for her by Frederic T. Marsden, have action set in England and yet managed to incorporate opportunities for Lotta’s banjo playing. Her clog dancing, Irish jigs, and walk-arounds enlivened many an inferior script, while high spirits and improvisational skill surely compensated for any deficiency of real acting ability. She got away with her teasing, mischievous, devil-may-care stage persona because in private life, under her mother’s watchful eye, Lotta’s behavior was irreproachable. Lot-

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

“Lotta!” on a poster meant Lotta Crabtree (1847–1924), the pert redheaded singing, dancing, banjo-playing bundle of energy. Her numerous Kansas City engagements always sold well. From Lewis C. Strang, Players and Plays of the Last Quarter Century, vol. 2 (1903).

ta’s biographers, Dempsey and Baldwin, credit her with being one of the first actresses on the road with her own company as opposed to simply making star appearances with local stock companies; thus she contributed to the rise of the “combination” system.The vivacious performer became legendarily wealthy and even bought land in Kansas City (on the east side of Grand Avenue, just south of Admiral Boulevard). She retired in 1891, and when she died in 1924 she left an estate worth four million dollars.

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Joseph Jefferson III (1829–1905) projected decency, goodhumored warmth, and sincerity in his great comic interpretations of Bob Acres in The Rivals and Rip Van Winkle. His stage career lasted seventy-one years. From Strang, Players and Plays of the Last Quarter Century, vol. 1 (1903).

Joseph Jefferson III (1829–1905), surely the most beloved male comic actor on the American stage, had toured the Midwest as a boy with his extended theatrical family.Well before there was a Kansas City, the MackenzieJefferson troupe played rural Missouri towns that included Palmyra, Jefferson City, Fayette, and Boonville in 1839 and 1840. Although largely identified with the “lovable rogue” role of Rip Van Winkle (which he performed approximately five thousand times), Jefferson often toured with a repertoire of several plays. Of his ten Kansas City engagements, four were at the Coates (1873, 1890, 1893, 1896).The 14 June 1873 Daily Journal of

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Commerce review of his Kansas City debut noted Jefferson’s way of investing the character’s believability with both comic warmth and pathos, making him “unsurpassed” in “the representation of that humorous, original, worthless, but always good-hearted Rip Van Winkle.” Gilliss Opera House booked Jefferson’s other visits, apart from his final Kansas City engagement (23–24 October 1903), when he played the Willis Wood. Latchaw noted that on his last two or three engagements, Jefferson stayed as a guest in the home of Kansas City Star owner William Rockhill Nelson. Nelson’s mansion, Oak Hall, on the site of today’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, was located a considerable distance south of the downtown theaters, so Jefferson was taken back and forth in the Nelson carriage.The driver, Peter Larson, told Latchaw that “Jefferson always wore a shawl on these trips, common enough in Lincoln’s time but now a ‘believe-it-or-not.’” The comedian and the publisher enjoyed each other’s company and found much in common, including their admiration for Grover Cleveland and their interest in art (EY 57). Oscar Wilde’s twelve-month American lecture tour, January to December 1882, brought him to Coates Opera House on 17 April.Wilde’s flamboyant leadership of the “too, too, utterly utter” school of aestheticism had been regularly reported in the American press well before he was booked for 50 speaking engagements (which soon grew to 140) in the United States—and this was still more than a decade before his success as a playwright with such arch comedies as The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Much attention was devoted to Wilde’s platform appearance—the purple velvet breeches with knee buckles, black silk stockings, cutaway coat, white neck scarf with diamonds, and long, center-parted hair—while less coverage went to the content of his somewhat boring lecture on “The English Renaissance.” On the road, however,Wilde (1854 –1900) honed his crowdpleasing skills and soon put together a more engaging lecture,“The House Beautiful.” By the time he came to Kansas City, during his second swing through the region, the so-called apostle of the lily and the sunflower had already visited California and had made his famous descent into a Leadville, Colorado, mine shaft.Wilde had certainly hit his stride, yet Kansas Citians were not impressed. Of the three local newspapers, the Times summoned the most enthusiasm for Wilde’s visit, reporting the day before the lecture that “the sale of seats has been very large.”A filler on the morning of the lecture noted:“Oscar Wilde at the opera house tonight, a circus in town and the inauguration of the new city administration today, ought to be enough to interest and

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Oscar Wilde’s American tour spawned quite a few musical compositions that gently mocked the aesthete.The cover of the sheet music for the Oscar Wilde Galop shows the knee breeches he wore for his lectures and reminds us of Wilde’s avowed predilection for sunflowers. Used by permission of the University of Missouri–Kansas City Libraries, Special Collections Department.

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excite our populace for one day, or, rather, the only thing that would complete our happiness today, would be the capture of FRANK JAMES.” On 18 April, the Times reported what Wilde wore on the street and before the footlights, his movements about the city, his interest in meeting Colonel Warder (who had published a rapturously effulgent poem of greeting to Wilde in the Times on 16 April), and a summary of his lecture. A separate column on the editorial page included several points that referred to Wilde in its wry list of “What the Times Would Like to Know”: Where were the sunflowers and the lilies last night, Not to speak of the knee breeches. Why the people will clatter out of a lecture hall before the speaker concludes. And why people thought it necessary to apologize for going to Oscar Wilde’s lecture.

A more skeptical, even hostile, tone pervades the reporting of the Evening Star and the Journal. Indeed, the Star’s front-page story on Wilde’s earlymorning arrival on the seventeenth sets the acerbic tone in its third-tier headline:“An Evening Star Aesthete Meets Him at the Depot, and Listens to His Sentimental Nonsense . . . A Very Transparent Humbug.” The Star’s front-page coverage on the day after the lecture consisted of two full columns of commentary on how “The New Craze” for knee breeches would, if adopted, affect the looks of various Kansas City men, a long list of prominent citizens.The Journal had two pieces of filler on the seventeenth: “Oscar Wilde and a circus to-day. You pay your money and you take your choice.” “Oscar Wilde is expected at the Vienna Model Bakery, Café, and Restaurant to-day. The patrons will therefore have served to them at 549 Delaware street a purely aesthetic bill of fare from which to select their orders.” The Journal’s 18 April review of the lecture on “Decorative Art,”headlined as “A Bore to the Public,” gives the most detailed account of Wilde’s dress, stance, speech patterns, and gestures.The writer speculated that few would convert to aestheticism, “for the speaker disgusted more than he pleased his audience.” The content was faulted for a paucity of new ideas, and the delivery was pronounced “horrible.” The audience was not large, yet it was composed of some of our most prominent citizens. At 8:15 the ring of a bell signaled the rising of the curtain.Then was presented to view a stage carpeted, containing parlor furniture, two easles [sic], on which were placed two engravings, a stand,

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and on this a glass of water. A few moments later, through an opening at the rear of the stage room presented, the lecturer appeared. When first seen a slight applause greeted him.

After a long description of Wilde’s dress and poses, the report continued. Latter [sic] in the evening he held in his hand a handkerchief and toyed with it as does a bashful maiden. When not holding either his watch charm or handkerchief his hand played with his coat tail.This he bobbed up and down like a frisky lamb does its caudal appendage when running in a field.

The review noted also that both the speaker and some in the audience seemed annoyed by whispering in the audience almost from the beginning of the lecture. At 9:30 Wilde finished his lecture and left the stage;“after he had gone a few applauded.” In a study of Wilde’s visits to four Kansas towns (Leavenworth,Topeka, Lawrence, Atchison) during the week following his Kansas City engagement, Charles Harmon Cagle has shown that the press was instrumental in fomenting negative impressions. Although Wilde had clearly been prejudged and found utterly too effete for Kansas City, his American tour on the whole has been seen as a triumph. Thus it is difficult to say whether Kansas City was, in this instance, out of step with the rest of the nation. William Gillette (1853 –1937) was a consummate character actor who wrote his own vehicles beginning with The Professor, which his Madison Square Theatre company performed at the Coates in December 1882. After two Coates engagements in 1885,both with The Private Secretary, Gillette stopped touring because he was in such demand in the east. His manager, Charles Frohman, sent out combinations presenting Gillette’s successive hit plays, but minus the star. Meanwhile, Kansas City native actress Marie Doro (1882–1956) became Gillette’s leading lady in three Broadway productions. Finally, Gillette played Kansas City again—in his greatest role, Sherlock Holmes.The tall, lean actor’s impeccable timing and smooth self-possession served him well in the role, which he began playing in 1899. He brought it to the Willis Wood Theatre for three performances (16–18 February) in 1903 and was—in Latchaw’s view—“Holmes incarnate” (EY 45). James O’Neill (1846 –1920) brought his renowned vehicle The Count of Monte Cristo to the Coates Opera House for half-week engagements in April 1884, February 1885, April 1886, March 1887, April 1888, March 1889, January 1894, February 1896, February 1897, February 1898 (with

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Marie Doro (1882–1956) was one of several Kansas City performers who rose to stardom in New York and abroad, notably Alice Nielsen, Felice Lyne, Mabel Hite, and Edythe Baker. Née Marie Stuart, Doro was the daughter of lawyer E. H. Stuart for the Guardian Trust Company. She acted at Coates Opera House as a child and eventually became William Gillette’s leading lady. From The American Stage of Today (1910).

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Always an interesting actor, sometimes truly great, a handsome figure and a fascinating swordsman, James O’Neill represented personally the old romantic stage at its best, as “Monte Cristo” represented it at its fullest realization. . . . Six thousand times James O’Neill was put in prison; 6,000 times he escaped, climbed the rock, gained his riches, hunted down the men one by one. Six thousand times he came down that magnificent stairway.Whether we saw him once or ten times, we shall never forget him. Six thousand times! Such was the vitality of the old theater. (EY 14)

two other plays), and March 1900 (with one other play). The fact that O’Neill—today remembered mainly as the father of playwright Eugene O’Neill—was able to tour year after year with so limited a repertoire is a tribute to his star power, for most actors were expected to refresh their offerings as the work became familiar. Yet O’Neill considered The Count of Monte Cristo to be a trap that prevented him from realizing his potential as a Shakespearean actor. One of those performances at the Coates was the occasion for a mishap that the theater’s electrician, D. H. Sheriff, recounted to Latchaw.While the play was in performance,“a messenger boy came to the stage door with a telegram for a member of the company.” Told that the addressee was on the other side of the theater, the boy started across the stage, paying no attention to the fact that the curtain was up. It happened to be the moment when Edmond Dantes, having escaped from prison, rises to the surface of the waves and pulls himself onto a rock.“The waves on this occasion were flopping canvas. So the messenger, before he realized what he was doing, was in mid-ocean, so to speak, just as O’Neill had gained the rock and shouted, ‘The world is mine!’” That line cued not only the curtain but also the messenger’s hasty departure with the infuriated actor in pursuit (EY 57). Maude Adams (1872–1953), now remembered as the quintessential Peter Pan in James M. Barrie’s play, so delighted Latchaw in various roles over the years that he devoted a long chapter of “The Enchanted Years of the Stage” solely to her. She first came to his attention when she was sixteen, playing a small role in Charles H. Hoyt’s A Midnight Bell at the Coates in September 1889. Latchaw’s review noted her “exquisite grace and naturalness,” and he was told by the manager of the Hoyt company that it was Miss

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And what shall we say of Peter Pan, the play in which Maude Adams made all of us believe in fairies? How we liked it, this believing! We older folk took the children, but it was a good deal like taking them to the circus; we were as keen about it as they were. Likely as not we slipped back a second time, when the children were abed, to watch Peter and Wendy and the rest of them in their adventures in fairyland, a fairyland of Barrie’s creation and which made us love him ever afterward. It was in this fantasy that we saw the Maude Adams spirit of revelry, of playful adventure, of sportive invention, released in a boundless realm. It was here that she revealed so beautifully her understanding and liking of children and her capacity for gaining their spontaneous and complete confidence. . . . I do not know whether we of this more practical age have lost our capacity for the enjoyment of this sort of thing or not. Sometimes I fear we have, in some measure at least.Yet the theater always has been and still should be the land of make-believe. It was ordained for this function.When it fulfills this function and we recognize it and are in sympathy with it, we may give way to even such a fantasy as Peter Pan, to such enchantment as Maude Adams cast about us. If we insist that the theater shall be real life always, real life no matter how ugly, we have, I believe, lost something very precious, something that could and should make real life, ugly though at times it may be, more enjoyable or more endurable, according to the circumstances. (EY 46)

Adams’s first press notice.Whether the record bears this out or not, it was after Latchaw’s Kansas City Times review of 24 September 1889 that the leading New York theater manager Charles Frohman (1860–1915) went to see her for the first time “and was sufficiently impressed to prepare the way for making her John Drew’s leading woman.” Maude Adams rose to stardom in Barrie’s The Little Minister in 1897, and other Barrie roles followed: the leading ladies in Quality Street, What Every Woman Knows, and A Kiss for Cinderella. Her ineffable quality suited Barrie’s “mischievous though highly intellectual” women characters, while Frohman’s management—very much in the nature of a mentorship—suited her. It happened that Maude Adams was playing Kansas City on 7 May 1915 when the news reached her, during a matinee of Quality Street at the Grand Opera House, that “her friend and benefactor” Charles Frohman had been among those who went down with the sinking of the Lusitania. “But she played her part,” Latchaw remembered.“She played it with feverish eyes and

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

The lovely Maude Adams (1872–1953) began her career in childhood and played Kansas City many times.After her retirement, she taught drama at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. From The Illustrated American Stage:A Pictorial Review of the Most Notable Recent Theatrical Successes,Together with Many Drawings and Portraits of Celebrated Players (1901).

restrained voice; but despite her fortitude, tears would come. Surreptitiously she dashed them away, but they glistened in desolate Phoebe’s ringlets” (EY 46). It happened in Kansas City also that Margaret Anglin (1876–1958) got the big break that took her to stardom. On 13 January 1898, E. H. Sothern

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(1859–1933) opened a three-performance run of Anthony Hope’s comedy The Adventures of Lady Ursula, in which Sothern normally played opposite his wife,Virginia Harned (1868 –1946). However, the Coates playbill listed Harned’s understudy, the hitherto little known Margaret Anglin, in the title role. Latchaw was informed that Harned had “remained in Chicago because of a raging tooth,” which later could be diagnosed in retrospect as “hopeless marital incompatibility.” Margaret Anglin surprised everyone with her own captivating interpretation of Lady Ursula. “And that is how we first met one of the most accomplished and interesting of American actresses,” Latchaw recalled. Indeed,“her success was so pronounced that Miss Harned speedily recovered and rejoined the company.” On a subsequent visit to Kansas City,Anglin told Latchaw that her one evening as Lady Ursula at the Coates had decisively advanced her career. Another repercussion of that evening says more about the audience than about her performance. When Lady Ursula dressed in her brother’s clothes as a masculine disguise, the sensibilities of “a few puritanical theatergoers” were offended. “There was enough to the buzz of criticism to prompt the late Bishop Cameron Mann, then rector of Grace Episcopal church, to write a letter to the Star defending Miss Anglin’s trousered leg” (EY 47). Another instance when the church came to the aid of the theater occurred in connection with the English Romantic verse drama Richelieu (1839) by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which stood alongside the great Shakespeare plays as a vehicle for stars of both the English and the American stages; thus Kansas Citians saw numerous productions of it over the decades. As late as December 1897, for example,Thomas W. Keene (1840– 1898)—although best known for his Richard III, which he played more than three thousand times and often in Kansas City—opened his weeklong Coates engagement (his last appearance in Kansas City before his death) with Richelieu. One of Keene’s almost yearly visits from 1881 to 1897 (with little variation in his repertoire) was marked by the loss of the trunk containing Richelieu’s costumes.With every expectation that a subsequent train would bring the tardy baggage, Keene decided not to shuffle the order of plays that had been announced. However, the performance date for Richelieu arrived and there was still no delivery. Father John J. Glennon at the nearby cathedral was asked whether some church robes might be lent for Keene’s portrayal of the eponymous cardinal. Father Glennon provided a black priest’s cassock and a red robe, and so the play went on as scheduled for 25 March 1896. Keene sued the Depot Baggage and Carriage Company for $692 for breach of contract to deliver “the Richelieu trunk” as con-

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We used to wait for Keene’s combat on Bosworth Field. It was a terrific encounter, taxing the strength and swordsmanship of both Richard and Richmond. It was one of Keene’s tricks, when forced to the ground near the end of the fight, to rattle his sword on the floor before regaining his feet. It was great stuff for the galleries, but was not so far under the heads of even the first floor crowd. He was unquestionably the best American Richard, dramatically, for a good many years. (EY 26)

tracted and for the value of the missing costumes. Years later Archbishop Glennon was reminded of his church’s service to the theater, and Latchaw reports that Glennon replied: “I was glad to outfit him, but I never would have done it if I had thought Keene’s press agent would herald the fact all over the country” (EY 26). Richelieu was the title role that also prompted Latchaw’s reevaluation of Robert B. Mantell’s dramatic stature.The handsome, poised Mantell (1854– 1928) had been playing engagements in Kansas City since 1887 when his role in Fedora with Fanny Davenport’s company “had made one of the most sensational hits in the American theater.” Latchaw felt that the romantic melodramas in which Mantell had established himself were limiting his potential, for he had acquired vocal and physical mannerisms that worked as long as “the plays themselves were artificial” but were “incongruous in Shakespeare.”After a three-year absence from the Kansas City stage, during which Mantell came under the management of William A. Brady (1863– 1950), he returned to play a full-week engagement (beginning 25 September 1905) of classical plays: Richelieu, Richard III, Othello, and Hamlet. Latchaw recalled:“I went to the theater that night rather indifferent about the occasion. But what I saw was not the Mantell Richelieu I had seen before, but one of the most natural, dignified and forceful characterizations of the cardinal I had witnessed at any time. Just what had happened I never knew with certainty, but always assumed that Brady had done some very effective coaching.” This marked Mantell’s emergence as a leading Shakespearean actor, eventually to be recognized as “the foremost tragedian of his time” (EY 26). It is interesting that Richelieu, a costume melodrama, should have made the transition along with the actor from popular romances like The Marble Heart to a Shakespeare-dominated repertoire. Among the greatest names to play the Coates were Sir Henry Irving

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

The Scottish-born Robert B. Mantell (1854–1928) maintained a large touring repertoire of melodramas and Shakespearean roles. From The American Stage of Today (1910).

(1838–1905) and Ellen Terry (1847–1928), stars of the London stage. Latchaw had seen them on tour in the 1880s in Philadelphia, but for some reason they did not make it to Kansas City until 1900. He recalled that their engagement at the Coates “was awaited with feverish interest. The house was sold out in advance.There was an air of uncommon expectancy in the gathering throng.The event was regarded as the most important since the appearance of Booth and Barrett more than ten years before.” The threeday Irving-Terry engagement opened with The Merchant of Venice, followed by Sardou’s Robespierre and (with Nance Oldfield as curtain-raiser) Irving’s ever-reliable warhorse melodrama The Bells. However, it was Sardou’s opulently staged historical melodrama that captivated the local theatergoers. Latchaw reported that it sold out on the first day of ticket offerings. Standing-room tickets became available on the evening of performance and also sold out, leaving many to offer top dollar in the lobby, while hundreds re-

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mained disappointed. Describing various effects in vivid detail, Latchaw claims that the pageant scene both advanced the drama and regaled the eye with pictorial splendor. Robespierre, Latchaw claimed, was one of Irving’s “very greatest creations,” and he invoked other critics who had seen Irving’s most magnificent productions to back up his own assessment that “the staging and direction of Robespierre surpassed those of any other Irving presentation” (EY 21). Irving’s tour manager, Bram Stoker, later published his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving and included an anecdote about Kansas City. Stoker explained that despite the fact that almost all theaters had electric lighting by 1900, Irving still preferred limelight, also known as calcium light, for its softer effects.Because the necessary oxygen tanks were not available in many towns on the tour, Irving traveled with an entire railway car carrying gas tanks that would be unloaded and taken to the theater.The wide sidewalk on the south side of Coates Opera House afforded space for the gas tanks to be stored, just outside the stage door. Meanwhile Irving and Terry had taken a waiting carriage from the depot in a driving rain to Coates House hotel, where Irving enjoyed the Turkish bath and drank hot lemonade. A Kansas City Journal reporter, unable to obtain an interview with Irving, saw the bright red oxygen canisters on the sidewalk outside the theater and jumped to conclusions to make a story of it. On 17 April 1900, under the headline “Irving a Sick Man,” it was reported that Irving needed to inhale oxygen between the acts of a strenuous performance.“On the stage of the Coates opera house yesterday two great ominous tanks of the gas stood. Later they were rolled to the star’s dressing room, to be used during last night’s performance.” The story claimed that, in fact, “the door of his room was caulked, the keyhole stuffed, to prevent leakage.” Rather than risk disappointing an audience,“he resorts to the heroic expediency of breathing oxygenized air.” The Evening Star of the same date, in addition to its review of Irving and Terry’s opening performance, published a short piece about Irving’s offstage activities in Kansas City and noted that “Sir Henry’s manager laughed this morning over the story in a morning paper to the effect that oxygen was taken by the actor to give him life and strength on the stage. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘They must think he is about to die. They’d better learn what a calcium can is.’” While that tale cautions us yet again about the unreliability of the era’s news reporting, one of Latchaw’s anecdotes tells us something about duplicitous practices in the theatrical business. On 13 November 1899, opening night of Charles Coghlan’s three-performance run in The Royal Box,

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Latchaw was unnerved at the appearance of the star. He had not seen Charles Coghlan (1842–1899) perform for twelve years, but he couldn’t help thinking that Coghlan had been taller.The friends he spoke with at intermission laughed at Latchaw’s questioning whether the actor, who had the Coghlan voice and manner, might not be Coghlan. Latchaw sought out the company manager, who assured him that he was mistaken.That night, while writing his review, Latchaw called fellow critic Louis Shouse of the Times. Shouse had never seen Coghlan before, but suggested that Latchaw telephone the company’s advance agent, whom they had both known for several years and who was still in town. Called out of his bed at the Hotel Baltimore, the agent responded to Latchaw’s question: “You’re crazy. You don’t think we would try to put anything like that over on Kansas City, do you?” And so Latchaw reported on Coghlan’s performance, as did Shouse. Their reviews had been published when it was learned that Coghlan had taken ill in Galveston ten days earlier, had been left there to recuperate, and was replaced in the role by Alexander Robson. Although Coghlan died and was buried in Galveston shortly afterward (on 27 November), the journalistic damage had been done, and various subsequent sources have erroneously listed the star as performing at the Coates from 13 to 15 November. Latchaw noted that “the aforesaid advance agent continued ahead of important companies for some years after, but he always detoured Kansas City,” for Shouse and Latchaw would have made two against one! (EY 12) Although Julia Marlowe (1866 –1950) made her earliest Kansas City appearances at the Gilliss and the Warder Grand, she often later played the Coates: in 1892, twice in 1894 (February and October), 1895, 1897, and 1898. Born in England, the child then named Sarah Frances Frost was brought to America in 1870 to join her father, Jack Frost, who had settled in Lenexa and moved to Kansas City, Kansas, in 1872. Although the family subsequently moved to Ohio, Sarah was soon on her own, touring with a juvenile opera company and then, under the name Fanny Brough, with the Reilly company, a Shakespearean troupe that played Kansas City’s Gilliss Opera House in November 1883. On that occasion, the young actress played Maria in Twelfth Night and Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet. By 1887 she had changed her name to Julia Marlowe and shot to stardom in New York. Kansas City audiences always had a warm reception for Marlowe (although her local connection did not become known until late in her career). Her determination to revive Shakespeare plays (which had fallen into neglect along with romantic melodramas, nudged aside by the vogue for Ibseninfluenced contemporary realism) fully blossomed when she was paired with E. H. Sothern in 1904.Together the wholesome actress with the dim-

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pled chin and the handsome matinee idol performed the great romantic couples in lavishly mounted Shakespeare productions. As late as 1922, Sothern and Marlowe brought a four-play Shakespeare repertoire for a full-week engagement at Kansas City’s Shubert Theatre. Comic actors who made strong impressions on Latchaw included William J. Florence (1831–1891), who enjoyed his greatest success as the loquacious Honorable Bardwell Slote in The Mighty Dollar, a spoof of government corruption written for him by Benjamin E. Woolf in 1876, and performed by “Billy” Florence opposite Mrs. Florence at the Coates in 1878, in 1880, twice in 1886, twice in 1887, and in 1889. John T. Raymond (1836–1887) played essentially the same character based upon his own ingratiating personality in many different plays but found his greatest success as Col. Mulberry Sellers in The Gilded Age (sometimes presented under the title Colonel Sellers), which he brought often to the Coates between 1876 and 1886. In The Gilded Age Raymond delivered what Latchaw called “one of the most memorable lines in all comedy,” which became a popular catchphrase:“There’s millions in it!” Indeed, the phrase occasionally pops up in newspaper advertisements of the era for Hammerslough’s Department Store and elsewhere. Latchaw recalled that one of Raymond’s “favorite little rackets was to bet even money that someone could not guess within ten the number of times the ‘millions’ line occurred in The Gilded Age.” Most people would guess around twenty, and Raymond would reply: “Just three times, my boy—three” (EY 22). Two favorite comedians who played most of their Kansas City engagements at the Coates were the tall, thin, squeaky-voiced Stuart Robson (1836–1903) and the more versatile and conventional-looking William H. Crane (1845–1928). Both boasted successful independent careers but won a special following in partnership with plays such as The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor (Crane as Falstaff, Robson as Dr. Caius), and, above all, Bronson Howard’s Wall Street comedy The Henrietta. Together they “served us bountifully,” as Latchaw recalled it, with eight Kansas City engagements during the 1880s. With the end of the partnership, Robson purchased Crane’s share in The Henrietta. Latchaw “regarded it as one of the best written, best peopled and best constructed of American comedies” but was disappointed when he saw a 1913 revival that exposed its obsolete techniques:“the old flavor was lacking.” However, it was gratifying to him when Stuart Robson chose it for his last appearance in Kansas City—at the Willis Wood on 13 December 1902—“giving us a last look at his memorable Bertie” (EY 32). Irish singing comedians sparkled in a long succession of forgettable

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Stuart Robson (1836–1903) excelled as a comic actor who punctuated his staccato delivery with occasional squeaks. From 1877 to 1889 he performed in partnership with William H. Crane, seen here on the right (1845–1908). From William H. Crane, Footprints and Echoes (1925).

comedies. Joseph Murphy (1832–1915) was the Irish singer-comedian perhaps most frequently booked for the Coates by manager Mel Hudson. During one of Murphy’s numerous engagements there, Hudson teased Latchaw about Murphy’s talent:“You don’t think he is much of an artist.Well, to me he is one of the finest ‘artists’ it is my privilege to book. He gets the mon-

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ey. He always gets every dollar the house will hold. Now from my point of view—at least from one of my points of view—that makes him a great artist” (EY 22). Latchaw acknowledged Murphy’s following in Kansas City for more than thirty years.Two of his plays of proven popularity, Kerry Gow and Shaun Rhue, were almost always in Murphy’s touring repertoire. In Kerry Gow Murphy played a blacksmith and had a sequence in which he expertly shod a live horse onstage, a procedure with which many local playgoers were familiar and able to vouch for its authenticity. In that play too Murphy sang the “mournful, but always awaited, song ‘A Handful of Earth.’ Almost everyone cried.They were expected to cry.The song was written and sung for that purpose.” Murphy’s fans “crowded the Coates year after year from orchestra rail to the back rows of the gallery. There were not a few faithful ones who rarely went inside the theater except when Joe Murphy came.” At his death, Murphy’s fortune earned at the box office—estimated at nearly three million dollars—was exceeded only by the wealth of Lotta Crabtree and Joseph Jefferson III (EY 22). Latchaw’s collective appreciation of Irish singer-comedians, Chapter 22 of “The Enchanted Years of the Stage,” includes William J. Scanlan,Andrew Mack, J. K. Emmett (who, though Irish, won his greatest renown as “our Fritz,” a German immigrant character in a series of comedies), and, of course, the great Chauncey Olcott (1860 –1932). Latchaw had noticed Olcott long before he attained stardom, when he had sung only one number in the Hanlon Brothers’ spectacle Fantasma in Philadelphia. That glimpse impelled Latchaw to follow Olcott’s rise through many slight comedies that were well served by Olcott’s acting ability as well as his beloved Irish ballad singing. African American performers played engagements at Coates Opera House from the beginning. The Hyers Sisters, Anna Madah (1855–192?) and Emma Louise (1857–1899), were sixteen and fourteen years old in 1871, when they made their first national tour, including performances at the Coates on 1 and 2 September.Their program on that tour was largely musical, featuring Anna Madah’s soprano in sweet melodies and Emma Louise’s contralto in comic character songs. Returning in 1877, as the Hyers Sisters Combination, with the experienced minstrel comedian Sam Lucas, they presented Out of Bondage, the drama of a slave family separated by the Civil War and later reunited. The Daily Mail advertisement for that “Great Moral Musical Drama” at Coates Opera House on 15 December 1877 claimed that “this is the only company of Colored Dramatic Artists in the world.” Their success warranted a return booking at the Coates just

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twelve days later.The Mail reported on 24 December, “Their former visit here was sufficient to give them a high place in public esteem, and the music is of the best that ever came to Kansas city.” Lucas and Miss Emma Hyers were singled out for their comic talents. Repackaged as stars of the Hyers Sisters Colored Burlesque Troupe,Anna Madah and Emma Louise Hyers returned to Coates Opera House a year later. According to the Mail (7 December 1878), a large and diverse audience was sympathetically disposed in response to the news that the troupe had been refused lodging at hotels in St. Joseph. Unfortunately, many were less well disposed toward the political humor, puns, and animal characters that were standard burlesque fare in those days when “burlesque” still meant “parody.” Only the singing of Anna Madah Hyers and the comedy of Billy Kersands found favor with the reviewer.The following year, the sisters returned to their more successful presentation of musical drama: Out of Bondage on 1 September and Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore on 2 September 1879, and once again they earned rave reviews for the singing and the comedy. The 1883 engagement of the Hyers Colored Musical Comedy Company in The Blackville Twins at the Coates (12–13 October) did not include the sisters at all. Beginning in 1883, according to Errol Hill, there were two separate Hyers troupes, a split probably occasioned when the sisters’ fifty-three-year-old father, S. B. Hyers, married a teenage contralto who subsequently performed as May Hyers. In the roles of the twins, May C. Hyers and Jennie Carter were deemed “clever vocalists and actresses” by the Star on 12 October 1883, while the number of solos, duets, trios, quartets, and choruses made “a very pleasing entertainment.” The Hyers sisters returned once more to the Coates for three performances (1–3 November 1883) under the management of L. H. Donavin in a revival of their “great moral and musical drama” Out of Bondage, once again joined by Sam Lucas as the comedian. Sam Lucas (1840 –1916), who earned recognition as “the dean of the colored theatrical profession,” played Coates Opera House several times between his 1877 and 1886 stints with the Hyers Sisters. In May 1879, Sam Lucas and Company brought two performances of “the Great Moral and Musical Drama” Underground Railroad, “written expressly for him by Miss Pauline K. Hopkins.” According to the advertisement in the Times on 23 May,“Mr. Lucas will be supported by a company of Colored Dramatic,Vocal, and Specialty Artists of rare excellence. After the drama all appearing in a Grand Parlor Concert.” Also at Coates Opera House, Lucas headlined with the Colored Boston

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Ideal Musical Combination in March 1881 and played the title role in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in February 1882.The arrival of C. H. Smith’s Double Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company at the depot in Kansas City on 27 February 1882 came to the attention of a Star reporter who had been attempting to interview Lotta Crabtree before her departure.When the Uncle Tom Company jumped off the train, the “Lotta crowd” came out of the waiting room, and all “shook hands effusively, and then the entire party adjourned to the express car to see the blood hounds unloaded.” As noted by Errol Hill and James V. Hatch in their study of black theater, Sam Lucas was an African American pioneer in performing a leading role with a white company during those decades before racially integrated casting, when speaking roles were given to whites in blackface, while black performers were relegated to the plantation chorus.The idea of a “double mammoth” Uncle Tom’s Cabin is interesting: certain key roles were played by two performers at once for double the fun.The ad proclaimed:“MR. SAM LUCAS, the Great Colored Comedian, as UNCLE TOM. 2 Topsys, 2 Marks, 2 Donkeys, Pack of Bloodhounds. Double Company from Boston to Kansas City and the West. People turned away in Chicago and Omaha almost nightly. Strongest Company in America.” The little Sherwood sisters as the two Topsys earned special notice in the Times review of 28 February 1882. Lucas, however, not only got the role of Uncle Tom all to himself, but he wowed the audience with his singing and comedy specialties between the second and third acts. Other African American performers at Coates Opera House included pianist Blind Tom in 1872 and 1878 and a number of minstrel troupes.While it is true that minstrel companies were largely regarded as the domain of Irish Americans in blackface, minstrelsy offered an entrée into show business for blacks immediately following the Civil War, and many—like Charles B. Hicks—leveraged theatrical careers from it. Prominent among those so-called authentic minstrel companies at the Coates were the Georgia Minstrels in 1873 and 1877,the Jubilee Singers in 1875,Callender’s Colored Minstrels three times in 1883 and again in 1884, and Haverly’s Colored Minstrels on numerous visits from the mid-1870s and throughout the 1880s. Billy Kersands, who had won acclaim with the Hyers Sisters, formed his own Colored Minstrels and played the Coates in July 1885; his company featured the great tenor Wallace King, who had also performed with the Hyers Sisters. Finally, it is interesting to note that a local group, billing itself as the Colored Company,rented Coates Opera House for two performances (9 –10 May 1899) of a locally created production titled Thirty Years of Freedom to benefit the Old Folks’ and Orphans’ Home. The all-black cast of

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I have always believed that a vast majority of the American people are decent in thought and impulse; that this majority would prefer a clean theater to a smutty theater; that while the salacious may be passingly profitable, it soon absorbs that part of the public attracted by it; that the enduring successes are likely to be those that are, first of all, appealingly human, and, second, decent enough to make moral sense. The Old Homestead is the most striking example that could be drawn from the old theater to sustain this conviction. It was more than a mere play of homely characters. It was a really artistic presentation of an aspect and feeling in American life.We are getting farther removed from the agricultural background that was once so much of America, but we still instinctively yield to simplicity, warmth and human kindness as these qualities are expressed in rural relations. (EY 19)

three hundred performed a mix of dramatic scenes, songs ranging from operatic to ragtime to comic patter, cakewalks, clogs, and jigs. Popular attractions at the Coates in the 1880s included grand opera, which singer Emma Abbott (1850 –1981) did much to popularize.The lovely Abbott’s repertoire of French and Italian operas along with various operettas never failed to fill the Coates, where she played fifteen engagements between 1879 and 1889.McCaull Opera Company returned yearly through most of the 1880s to play Coates Opera House and was regularly well received. Strangely, however, opening night for “the beautiful opera” The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief in 1883 played to less than half a house. Producer John McCaull learned something about Kansas City—or at least about the Coates clientele—when it was found that ticket buyers had been deterred by the poster “showing two girls dressed as pages, holding a magnified lace handkerchief between them, on which appeared the title of the opera.” It seems that “a lot of the nice Coates patrons had interpreted the picture to mean that The Queen’s Handkerchief was a ‘leg show’!” (EY 19). Light opera certainly played well at the Coates, one of the most popular companies being the Bostonians. Manager Mel Hudson booked the Bostonians (known during most of the 1880s as the Boston Ideal Opera Company) to return each season, secure in the knowledge that they could be counted on to pack the house to capacity (EY 6).The Bostonians were already well established as a Kansas City favorite when they began to feature Kansas City native Alice Nielsen (1871–1943), who had auditioned for

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manager Henry Clay Barnabee in San Francisco and won a contract. Latchaw called the Bostonians “the best all around organization of its kind the country ever saw” (EY 38), so it was quite a thrill for local audiences to see one of their own move from ingenue roles to leading soprano, notably in Victor Herbert’s The Fortune Teller and The Singing Girl, in only two seasons with the Bostonians. According to Latchaw,Alice Nielsen claimed to have sung for pennies as a child on the streets of Kansas City and to have pleaded in vain with Coates Opera House manager Mel Hudson to let her sing from the empty stage to an imaginary audience. In the early 1880s, under the name Rosa Southern, she had sung Nanki Poo in The Mikado with a juvenile company that toured to small towns in the Kansas City area. Encouraged by Bishop Thomas F. Lillis, Nielsen sang for several years in the choir at St. Patrick’s Church and married the talented organist Benjamin Nentwig. Alice Nielsen first came to Latchaw’s attention when she and an older woman, Mrs. C. E. Carhart, stood before Latchaw’s desk at the Kansas City Times, where he then worked.The two women wanted publicity for a locally created comic opera called Chantaclere, composed by a local church organist. Although Latchaw says the meeting occurred in 1888, the record shows an opera, Chantaclere, by two Kansas City men, was given an amateur production at the Coates on 7 and 8 September 1891. Nielsen was twenty, and her “fresh young voice” remained in memory long after the opera itself was forgotten (EY 38). After divorcing Nentwig, touring with the Chicago Church Choir Company, and performing with opera companies in Salt Lake City, Oakland, and San Francisco, Nielsen captivated audiences across the country in the light opera roles composed especially for her by Victor Herbert. And then she abruptly switched her career to grand opera. After operatic training in Italy, she went on to international acclaim and made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1909. Besides the Bostonians, other notable light opera companies that played the Coates included the Whitney Opera Company with Marie Tempest, the Carleton Company, and the beloved Salsbury Troubadors headed by Nat Salsbury (1846–1902), who later went on to fame with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Musical stars who performed there included Lillian Russell, Thomas Q. Seabrook, Della Fox, and DeWolf Hopper. Felice Lyne was a Kansas Citian who studied opera in Paris,then contracted with Oscar Hammerstein I to sing in operetta; he presented her also as Gilda in Rigoletto in London. Her homecoming performance in Kansas City, according to Latchaw, took in $10,000. Rosina Vokes (1858–1894), a sprightly English

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Kansas Citians took great pride in the stellar career of their own Alice Nielsen (ca. 1871–1943), shown in this undated photograph as Yvonne in the Bostonians’ production of Victor Herbert’s The Serenade (1897). From the Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

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comedienne with her own company (including a fine character actor named Felix Morris), returned annually to delight Coates audiences by the “infinite grace” of her humorous songs and dances and the tasteful merriment of her comic material.4 Extravaganzas brought good business to the Coates in the early 1890s. A number of companies presented these opulent spectacles with “ingenious transformation scenes,” but Latchaw saved his superlatives for the American Extravaganza Company organized by David Henderson of the Chicago Opera House:“he so overshadowed his competitors that in a few years he had the field almost to himself. His productions taxed the resources of the best equipped stages. He really gave us some musical comedy of a lavish scale.” Eddie Foy (1856 –1928) toured with the American Extravaganza Company,playing the Coates in Crystal Slipper (1890),Sinbad (March 1892), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (November 1892), and others. “The highly imaginative fairy tales on which these spectacles were based gave the scenic artist the widest range in beauty and variety, and the costumer was in his element. Henderson disregarded cost in staging and cast. He carried large companies of actors, choristers and dancers. His ballets were the best of the time” (EY 12). While few names of players still resonate among Americans today—other than perhaps Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson III, Maude Adams, and Sir Henry Irving—to the theatergoer of the late nineteenth century, the firmament was studded with hundreds of stars of dazzling magnitude.So many great performers played the Coates that some must be given only passing mention here, too little recognition for the pleasure they gave their audiences:Frank Chanfrau (famous as Mose the Fireboy in A Glance at NewYork, which he played at the Coates in 1871), Fanny Davenport, Robert McWade, Maggie Mitchell, Charlotte Thompson, John E. Owens, John Dillon, Jane Coombs, Kate Claxton, Rose Eytinge, Mary Anderson, John McCullough, Fay Templeton, Nat C. Goodwin, the Hanlon Brothers, Dion Boucicault, Sol Smith Russell, Clara Morris, Effie Ellsler, Frank Mayo (in his famous role as Davy Crockett), Hortense Rhéa (see chapter 3), Frederick Warde, E. H. Sothern, Rose Coghlan, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Henry E. Dixey, James K. Hackett,Ada Rehan, John Drew, Ethel Barrymore,Viola Allen, Wilton Lackaye, Herbert Kelcey and Effie Shannon, Anna Held, Blanche Walsh, Otis Skinner, Eleanor Robson, Maxine Elliott. So stagestruck were Kansas Citians during the heyday of the touring stars that many avid theatergoers—like their counterparts in cities all across America—formed amateur societies through which they could indulge

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their passion for playing.The availability of practiced amateurs was a boon to touring companies,which regularly hired locals as supernumeraries.Even better, an amateur theater society could put together a production and fill in one or two open nights between professional bookings at the major theaters. The early 1870s saw a number of occasional presentations by amateurs, most frequently by the Kemble Dramatic Club, but also by the Siddons Dramatic Club, the Dickens Club, and the Thespian Club. It is interesting that those early amateur societies named themselves after English artists. A decade or so later, when Austin Latchaw himself belonged to one such group, it chose an American star’s name: the Lawrence Barrett Dramatic Club.That group presented familiar plays, including Shakespeare, invested sometimes rather heavily in production values, and usually recouped costs by charging up to fifty cents for admission. A predecessor to the Lawrence Barrett Dramatic Club was a group of theater enthusiasts led by an English actor, Stanislaus Stange, “who drifted into Kansas City as an instructor” of elocution using the Delsarte technique and staged plays to attract pupils (EY 43). After mounting The Bells with himself in the Henry Irving role, Stange undertook Richard III, in which Latchaw performed. Not long after that “stirring event,” Stanislaus Stange was hired away to tour with George C. Miln and later with Stuart Robson and William H. Crane; he finally settled in New York to achieve some success as a playwright and librettist. The next stage director to work with the Lawrence Barrett Dramatic Club was Charles Nevins. Nevins was also a playwright, so he supplied the dramatic text performed by his “students” on at least two occasions: The Basilisk at Coates Opera House (14 –16 May 1891) and The Southerner at Grand Opera House (1– 3 November 1891).To Latchaw, the society’s “most noble achievement under Nevins” was the presentation of Julius Caesar at the Warder Grand on 13 February 1890, after three months of rehearsal (EY 43). Lawyers, bankers, and other respectable citizens played speaking roles, while a number of “young-fellows-about-town”—including a future Jackson County circuit judge—composed the unruly mob, directed at close range by Nevins in “his old professional role of Casca.”In later years Latchaw wished he had a photo of Judge Thomas J. Seehorn as one of those surging “supers” who played their unruliness with such passion. As Brutus, Latchaw enjoyed an excellent vantage point from which to observe the action. He recalled that in the last act Cassius planted his piked standard on the stage floor with such force that “it swung back and forth like an inverted pendulum.” Pindarus, when asked to hold the standard for Cassius to run upon,

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Then he [Stanilaus Stange] prepared Richard III, which was staged after prolonged and painstaking drill.We used stock scenery, but had costumes and armor (it seemed like a carload) sent from New York. Stange followed the traditional business of the current stars in his Richard, followed at some distance, perhaps, yet he was not a bad Richard at that.At least, all of us were taken seriously, although of course not so seriously as we took ourselves. In this play I did what probably no professional actor ever did—I played both Buckingham and Richmond, being a “willing worker” and fearing nothing.What I remember most clearly about this experience is the vivid green tights I wore as Buckingham.They were louder than Stange’s Richard and even greener than my performance. (EY 43)

was unable to dislodge it from the floor. Finally he squatted, grasped it with both hands, yanked with all his might, and got it out—as he tumbled backward on the stage (EY 38). One unexpected consequence of Latchaw’s participation in amateur theatricals was his “professional debut at the Coates theater” on 7 March 1894. It came about because Frederick Paulding, while touring A Duel of Hearts, was asked if he could include a performance of Romeo and Juliet in his Kansas City engagement, as there were many who remembered his Romeo from previous tours and wanted to see it again. Paulding’s 1894 company was small, but he agreed to play the Shakespeare with some doubling of roles. The only role he could not cast from his current company was Mercutio, so he telegraphed to New York for William Stafford to come and play the part. Learning that Stafford was not available, Paulding abandoned the plan to incorporate Romeo and Juliet in his half-week run at the Coates. However, some of Latchaw’s colleagues at the Kansas City Times, where he then worked, informed Paulding’s advance manager that Latchaw had played Mercutio. At their insistence, Latchaw agreed to fill in—and even got paid for it. Meanwhile, theaters in Lincoln and Des Moines had announced the inclusion of Romeo and Juliet in Paulding’s engagements there. Latchaw was sent to both cities to help out. In Des Moines he played to sellout afternoon and evening houses, “and because Mercutio dies early, I was able to get a 10:30 train back to Kansas City the same night, although I did not have time to remove my tights until I reached the sleeper” (EY 38). In the history of every city, there are certain buildings that seem to rep-

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resent the striving and dreams of the citizenry. Coates Opera House was not an architectural wonder, but it definitely fulfilled both a symbolic and a real function for the people of Kansas City in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Their cultural yearnings and their desire for lively entertainment came together in evenings at the Coates when stars of widely varying magnitudes shone in the here and now to rekindle an audience’s civic pride and commitment.

Chapter 3 EXPOSITIONS, PRIESTS OF PALLAS, VARIETY SALOONS, AND TARNISHED LEGITIMACY

Outdoor festivities characterized the civic life of Kansas City from the earliest gatherings at the steamboat landing, to parades and other street entertainments that defied the mud, to picnicking, sports, and cultural festivals in the spacious urban parks created by the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s and after.The city’s great regional trade fairs merit brief attention as performance-related activities. Certainly, theater managers anticipated a welcome boost to the box office with the influx of visitors from out of town during the expositions held each autumn beginning in 1871. After years of inconclusive talk about the advantages enjoyed by other towns with fall fairs, a committee led by Col. Kersey Coates and Theodore S. Case finally made one happen for Kansas City in 1871, and it succeeded beyond all expectation. The first Grand Industrial Exposition, lasting five days on forty acres between Twelfth and Sixteenth streets just west of what is now Troost Avenue, included agriculture, livestock, races, pyrotechnics, and music for dancing. A multijet fountain graced the two-story main building, which housed displays of goods, curiosities, and fine arts. Demonstrations of the sewing machine attracted particular interest. An amphitheater accommodated twelve thousand for musical events and horse racing. The exposition became an annual fall event until 1893. The 1872 exposition surpassed the first with throngs of twenty-five to thirty thousand people each day. The fourth day brought sixty thousand through the gates and perhaps the most infamous event in the fair’s histo-

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ry. “High Handed” was the Kansas City Times headline on 27 September 1872: “Most Desperate and Daring Robbery of the Age.” Just at sundown on Thursday, three masked men rode up to the Twelfth Street entrance. One of them dismounted, reached through the ticket seller’s window, and grabbed the tin cashbox while the two mounted men pointed their guns at the crowd.“It was one of those exhibitions of superb daring that chills the blood and transfixes the muscles of the looker-on with a mingling of amazement, admiration, and horror. It was one of those rare instances when it seems as though Death stood in the panoply of the flesh and exhaled a   from his garments. It was a deed so high-handed, so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators for the very enormity of their outlawry,” wrote Times publisher John N. Edwards. Ticket taker Ben Wallace rushed out of the booth to grapple with the robber, ducking just in time to avoid the bullet fired by one of the mounted men. It struck a little girl in the leg. The three men galloped off into the woods to the east of the grounds. Fortunately, the treasurer of the Exposition Association had already gone to the bank with most of the afternoon box office receipts, so the bandits got away with only $978.The men were soon identified at least in the popular mind as Jesse James, Frank James, and Cole or John Younger.The romanticization of the story grew to include a letter allegedly sent by the boastful bandits with an offer to pay the doctor’s bill of the wounded child. Kansas City’s Industrial Exposition continued to draw impressive numbers of visitors each year with added attractions.The 1875 exhibition was noteworthy for the daring choice of leading orator, none other than Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederate States of America. Some feared that featuring him only a decade after the end of Civil War hostilities would keep Kansas visitors away. In the event, however, Davis drew record-breaking crowds. Colonel Coates, well known for his distinguished service to the Union, introduced Davis, who called for pursuing “a policy and the paths that lead to the prosperity and happiness of our common country and our people.” His gracious comments—ending with a prayer “for all that is good to the people of the Missouri Valley”—were met with prolonged applause.1 By 1883 Kansas City had grown to encompass the fairgrounds within its corporate limits; more space was needed for the annual exposition.The autumn event, now called the Inter-State Fair, was moved to Westport, where a magnificent racetrack and grandstand were built at Thirty-eighth Street and Summit. There the fair remained until 1886, after which commercial interests once again forced its move.

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City Star, 20 June 1927.

Kansas City’s answer to London’s Crystal Palace was built as the Exposition Building for the 1887 fair, which was visited by President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland.The structure, with its eighty thousand square feet of glass, stood between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, between Agnes and Kansas Avenues, and it lasted until 1901. Kansas

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The year 1887 represents a kind of apogee—not only for the fair with its Crystal Palace, a visit by President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland on 13 October, a series of crowd-pleasing concerts by Gilmore’s Band of sixty-five musicians, and three parades, including the very first Priests of Pallas parade—but also in the annals of legitimate drama in Kansas City.With two engagements by Edwin Booth, the first Kansas City appearance of Sarah Bernhardt, visits by a host of luminaries of the stage, and the opening of two new theaters (the Ninth Street and the Warder Grand), 1887 can truly be called an annus mirabilis for Kansas City theater. The 1887 fair and exhibition, now called the National Exposition and extended to forty-five days, inspired entrepreneur James Goodman to construct an exposition building modeled after London’s Crystal Palace. Using his own resources as seed money, Goodman raised $200,000 and built the amazing structure on the exposition grounds.With seven acres of floor space and eighty thousand square feet of glass in the roof, Kansas City’s “crystal palace” Exposition Building, open from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., accommodated as many as fifty thousand people in one day.The grand opening was at noon on Thursday 6 October. On the following Thursday, 350,000 people thronged the streets to glimpse President Cleveland in his carriage or to watch his laying of the cornerstone of the YMCA building. Numerous excursion trains with special rates served Kansas City from neighboring states. Connections to the exposition grounds by cable car, horse car, or belt line steam railroad reputedly took no more than twenty minutes from any part of the city. The dazzling Crystal Palace remained in use only six years. After the 1893 exposition, the Crystal Palace was left to deteriorate. A hailstorm broke all the glass panes, yet the empty structure stood for a few more years. On 5 August 1901, five days before its planned demolition, three fires broke out in it, possibly the work of nearby residents concerned about possible damage to their homes if the structure was dynamited.The report of the fire in the Star on 5 August noted that the main blaze occurred not ten feet from the spot where the great Patrick Gilmore had stood to conduct his famous band in 1887. At the time of the fire,the Ringling Brothers circus had erected its tents on the exposition grounds and thousands of people had flocked to the area.The unexpected spectacle of the conflagration delayed the start of the circus about an hour and twenty minutes.It was reported by the Times on 6 August that the Siberian tiger had become restless and let out an uncharacteristically loud roar several minutes before anybody noticed smoke rising from the Crystal Palace. Five fire engines came to the scene and pre-

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vented the fire from spreading to the circus tents, but the palace was destroyed. On the exposition grounds in the summer of 1889, a huge spectacle called Last Days of Pompeii had twenty “thrilling and realistic” performances by a cast of four hundred.The “largest stage on earth, 300 feet long, 100 feet wide, the lake 250 feet by 100” accommodated such effects as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and total destruction of the city, enhanced by the music of a grand military band and a brilliant display of fireworks. The annual Priests of Pallas festival that began in 1887 ultimately surpassed the fairground expositions in Kansas City lore. Inspired in part by the annual citywide Veiled Prophet celebration in St. Louis and the Mardi Gras of New Orleans, the promoters of commercial interests in Kansas City chose the classical Greek goddess Pallas Athena as the figurehead for the Missouri Valley’s rapidly growing metropolis. Scheduling the events at harvest time was calculated to attract regional farmers into the city to sell their crops directly to local merchants. The Priests of Pallas evening parade of elaborate floats under illuminated arches was always the highlight of the week, but there were additional daytime processions of marching bands and a Trades Parade of floats featuring local businesses. In 1887 and in 1888 the mystic pageant of the Priests of Pallas took the theme of Grecian Myths; tableaux scenes on the sixteen floats in 1887 included “Orpheus,”“Sardanapulus,”“Philip of Macedonia,” and “The Coming of Montezuma.” The twenty floats of 1889, led by Pallas Athena perched upon a bank of clouds,formed a Parade of Nations.Other annual themes included American History (1890), Romances of the Ages (1891),Songs and Fables (1892),Prose and Poetry (1893),the Hindoo poem “Ramayana” (1894), Grand Civic Opera (1895), Anderson’s Fairy Tales (1897),Flowers (1902),Animated Circus (1907),Flight of the Hours (1908), A Trip to Mars (1909), and Aerial Transportation (1910). Teams of six or eight mules pulled the floats of the early years, each team led by a costumed man bearing a lighted torch. Beginning in 1901 the floats were built on the truck bases of trolley cars and followed the electric tracks, which allowed each float to tap into the power for spectacular lighting effects.Electric lights on the street arches, floats, and costumes dazzled out-of-town visitors to upto-date Kansas City. The theaters accommodated everyone’s desire to see the parade. In 1906, for example, the Shubert Theatre began that evening’s performance at seven sharp in order to conclude in time for the parade.The Willis Wood Theatre retained the usual eight o’clock curtain but declared an intermission just before the parade passed the theater.The Gilliss adver-

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Songs and Fables” was the theme of the 1892 Priests of Pallas parade.The souvenir booklet depicted nineteen floats. Pallas Athena always arrived on the first float in the parade.The drawing of the float for “Dante’s Inferno” suggests the variety and charm of the fanciful scenes on horse-drawn wagons. From the author’s collection.

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tised:“The electric parade of the Priests of Pallas passes directly in front of the . Patrons holding seats for  night can see parade from Gilliss windows and balconies free of extra cost. Get reserved seats at once and enjoy a fine play and not have a long tiresome wait for the parade. Curtain will be rung down while the parade is passing the .”2 In the early years, Pallas Athena was represented by a man, but women later vied for the honor. Describing the candidates’ qualifications in 1922, pageant director George M. Myers said:“Pallas Athene must be of good reputation, good to look at, stately and taller than the average girl.”3 For many years beginning in 1902 Georgia Brown (see Chapter 4) directed the ballets that were performed on the floats and at the balls. Her dramatic school at the Auditorium Theatre launched the stage careers of dozens of Kansas City girls, so she knew the local talent. She became “as inseparable to the plans of the Priests of Pallas celebration each year as were the men who handled the bank rolls for the pageants.”4 Besides the procession, the festivities always included a Priests of Pallas ball for the city’s elite. Over the years the ball accommodated several thousand people who received the coveted invitations from the mysterious “Jackson.”The trifold invitations for the 1887 ball, printed in New York, measured about a foot square. Before the opening of Convention Hall, the balls (except that of 1888) were held at the Priests of Pallas den, where a dance floor would be laid over the area that had been used for the construction of floats. Attendance in the first year, 1887, totaled seven thousand, including dancers in formal dress plus sixteen hundred seated spectators in the galleries; fifteen electric lights provided the illumination. For the 1888 ball, held in the Warder Grand Opera House, which had opened the year before (see Chapter 4), eight thousand invitations were sent. Guests at the balls each received a souvenir item, something different each year, usually depicting the head of Athena and her symbolic owl, along with the initials P.O.P. and the year.These coveted Kansas City collector’s items were: small copper plaque (1896), silver nib dish (1897), inkwell and stamp box (1898), hand mirror (1899), bronze clock (1900), pot metal jewelry box (1901),eight-inch round mirror (1902),candlestick (1903),fern dish planter (1904), bronzed urn (1905), cloisonné enamel card tray (1906), green ceramic pencil holder (1907), mahogany-frame clock (1908), silver clothes brush (1909), silvered picture frame (1910), thermometer (1911), wood with brass inlay calendar holder (1912), silver-plate bud vase (1924).Three sets of fifteen color postcards published in 1908,1909,and 1910 depict some of the floats for those years. Many of the floats’ fanciful designs—a giant

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lobster, a horrible sea serpent, a love bug, gigantic flowers with beautiful women in them, and so on—could well have been inspired by the popular Oz books of L. Frank Baum (1856 –1919) that began to be published in 1900. Of course, it is also possible that during his years as a traveling salesman for a Chicago firm, 1893 –1897, Baum could have been in Kansas City during a Priests of Pallas week, when he would have seen the parade. There is certainly something Oz-like about one of the ballets performed at the P.O.P. ball in 1909: a Billiken dance, choreographed by Georgia Brown, performed by twenty-four little girls as Billiken figures. Billikens were plump, bald, impishly grinning creatures, seated on thrones with fat feet on truncated legs thrust out in front of their round bellies. Miss Florence Pretz, who had contributed a number of imaginative designs to the Priests of Pallas, created the Billiken as “the god of Things as They Ought to Be,” and a craze for Billiken dolls was sweeping the country. Earlier that year Blanche Ring was a hit with the song “The Billiken Man” in The Midnight Sons on Broadway. Georgia Brown made a point of visiting New York each year to get ideas and was clever about tapping into popular appeals. It must indeed have been hilarious to see the stately march of the grotesque figures with wobbling heads as they crossed the floor of Convention Hall, regrouped at center while each in turn did a momentary solo jig (though only the child’s feet could be glimpsed beneath the curtained base of the throne), and then paired up again for their sedate exit. It was the shortest ballet on Georgia Brown’s thirty-minute program, and it earned the most laughter and applause. One number on the 1908 ballet program (presented at both the P.O.P. ball in Convention Hall on 8 October and at the next evening’s masque ball) similarly took inspiration from a new toy that had captivated the nation: the teddy bear, named after President “Teddy” Roosevelt. Georgia Brown’s 120 girls ranging in age from two to teens began with the pretty dances: a quadrille, a Directoire period dance, and a “Spring Dance” with nymphs and a flower-decked swing. But the highlight was a pantomimeballet on the theme of rivalry between dolls and teddy bears for their owners’ affections.Twelve little girls representing dolls danced in on the arms of twelve taller girls. Twelve girls playing boys danced in, each with a teddy bear.The dolls and teddy bears were placed on the floor, their backs to one another, while the boys and girls danced together. After the humans sat down, the teddy bears rose up to taunt the dolls. The dolls “fell on their backs with their chubby legs in the air.The dolls were righted and danced with the bears.Then they fell on their backs again and the bears made them

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With electrical illumination, these floats from the 1908 and 1909 Priests of Pallas parades must have been dazzling.Three sets of fifteen postcards depict floats from 1908, 1909, and 1910. Representing “The Flight of the Hours” (1908) is the float for “Peep o’ Day.” In “A Trip to Mars” (1909),“Animated Flowers” shows what might possibly be found on that planet. From the author’s collection.

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With every seat taken and a crowd four or five feet deep around the floor, Pallas Athene opened the most brilliant P.O.P. ballet and ball ever held in Convention Hall last night.The standard bearer made his entrance with the Priests’ coat-of-arms at precisely 9 o’clock. Just half an hour later the last of the ballet disappeared behind the stars and stripes curtain, and in a few minutes the big floor was crowded with regular dancers.About ten thousand persons were present for the ballet and most of them remained late into the night to watch the dancers. The general effect of the spectacle was greatly aided by the use of the floor entrance instead of the steps. Never did Pallas Athene and her six attendants enter with such pomp and circumstance as last night, each one standing in her chariot drawn by two pony girls.The 140 girls who had appeared in the parade the night before and 160 others made an avenue of color down which passed the stately procession of handsome women in flowing white robes, headed by Pallas Athene herself, her time honored helmet replacing the coronet worn in the parade. The next entrance not only merited the applause it received, but was indicative of the excellent training Mrs. Georgia Brown had given to all who took part in the ballet. Owing to the crowd of participants around the entrance, the sailor girls, not in clumsy baggy trousers, but in dainty flesh tights, were delayed and Mrs. Brown had already given the order for them to have their place on the program. But before the next item could get up the slope leading to the floor, the first of the sailors was through the crowd and the others came struggling after. “Go on then! Run! Get in!” Mrs. Brown told them.And on they went without waiting to form up behind the curtain.Yet before the first row was a quarter of the way down the hall the whole corps was marching in perfect order. Then came the surprise.Tomasco’s Chicago Orchestra at the other end of the hall stopped playing at the close of a measure. Instantly Hiner’s Band struck up “the Star Spangled Banner” behind the entrance curtain and marched on, followed by the Goddess of Liberty, enthroned among polar bears. Behind her again came the most sprightly figure of Uncle Sam ever seen, doing a graceful toe dance the length of the hall.As this part of the pageant made its way up the avenue of color the girls composing it waved little flags and joined in singing the national anthem. (Kansas City Times, 7 October 1909)

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The surprise victory of the dolls over the newly popular teddy bears was the culmination of one of the ballets created by Georgia Brown for the 1908 Priests of Pallas ball at Convention Hall. Kansas City Times, 8 October 1908.

emit the funniest little ‘mamma’ cry imaginable, after which the bears romped around with the dolls on their backs, only to dump them off ignominiously and vent their contempt by placing thumb at nose in the good old fashioned way of rebuking mollycoddles.”5 Then the boys and girls promenaded with the bears, ignoring the dolls. Amazingly, the dolls then pulled out little rifles that had been secreted in their shirtwaists, shot the teddy bears, and sat on their corpses.The sound of a whistle summoned a dance corps of Red Cross nurses, who carried the teddy bears out on stretchers to the music of a funeral march. Numerous peripheral events clustered around the official Priests of Pallas parade and ball. Some years there were two or three parades, some years three or four balls. A Flower Parade in 1905 featured both horse-drawn car-

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riages and motorcars completely covered in flowers. For a time the term Carnival Week designated the entire range of events. Souvenirs inscribed KK for Karnival Krewe were sold some years. In 1909 the Priests of Pallas festivities segued directly into the Missouri Valley Fair at Electric Park, and Convention Hall was booked for ten consecutive nights: the P.O.P. ball on 6 October, a lecture by North Pole explorer Dr. Frederick A. Cook on the seventh, a masked ball on the eighth, and for a week beginning on 9 October, a huge production of the musical Pinafore on a 125-foot-long, threemasted ship with three hundred singers.The names Gilbert and Sullivan appear nowhere in the news stories or advertisements for the show, but some characters sketched on the front page of the Star on 9 October 1909 include names we recognize from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore: Ralph Rackstraw, Dick Deadeye, and Little Buttercup. For two months Georgia Brown had rehearsed the Pinafore chorus as well as the principals, each of whom had three understudies. A chorus of little girls, each representing a state in the union, wore on their heads small electrically lit battleships. As the states congregated at the center of the floor, the lighting created the effect of the sea, so that when the girls bobbed their heads, the little illuminated ships appeared to be riding ocean swells. After working with the streetcar company for a decade, the Priests of Pallas suffered a sudden setback in 1912.The bankruptcy of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company had a ricochet effect on the Priests of Pallas,which canceled that year’s parade.The 1912 ball was moved to August to coincide with the increasingly important American Royal Livestock Show. Concerns about the war in Europe may have contributed to the long hiatus in the Priests of Pallas after 1912. Finally, in 1922 the P.O.P. parade and the ball were both revived, with Georgia Brown once again in charge of the ballets. That year Brown picked 128 young women to ride the floats and perform various dances, including a quadrille in which half of them were dressed as men in satin suits. However, patterns of entertainment were already changing with the increasing availability of motorcars, motion pictures, amusement parks, phonographs, and new freedoms for women. The final two Priests of Pallas festivals were held in 1923 and 1924, after which the stockholders of the Pallas Holding Company met to arrange for payment of the $15,000 deficit against the company’s property valued at $75,000.The company was then dissolved and the fall festival discontinued. Happily, the year 2005 brought a revival of the P.O.P. ball, held at Union Station to benefit the Jackson County Historical Society. The demise of Kansas City’s annual exhibition in 1893 and the destruc-

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tion by fire of both Coates Opera House and the Crystal Palace in 1901 may have subliminally reinforced David Austin Latchaw’s sense that the 1880s had been the apogee of the American stage. It is interesting—given that the year 1912 was the beginning of the end for the Priests of Pallas— that he later referred to “the enchanted years” as the period from the mid1880s to 1912. However, it is now necessary to backtrack again to look at another form of popular entertainment in Kansas City, one that—like the classier offerings at Coates Opera House—can be traced back to around 1870. When David Austin Latchaw came to Kansas City in 1886, a couple of the “old-time variety houses” were still in operation (EY 8).That was his polite term for the concert saloons or honky-tonks, also known as “freeand-easies,” that catered to a male clientele with their raw material and yet flirted with respectability by passing themselves off as a form of “theater.” Nevertheless, in the 1870s and 1880s, the very word theater carried connotations of something not quite as respectable as an “opera house.” Latchaw mentions some of the early prevaudeville variety houses, but it is difficult to verify their histories precisely, for ownership, management, and names of establishments changed frequently. Some buildings operated briefly as variety houses and then were converted to other uses.In any event, the hub of such activity in the 1870s was Third and Fourth streets at Walnut, Main, and Delaware. In New York City in the 1860s,Tony Pastor had already begun his long, hard campaign to win respectable audiences for variety entertainment. Not until the 1880s would Pastor’s efforts be rewarded with widespread acceptance of variety shows that were “clean enough for women”—and common currency of his new word for them: vaudeville. In Kansas City, much of the fare at Frank’s Hall and the earlier second-floor halls had tested the concept of respectable variety entertainment in a theater format, as opposed to a smoke-filled saloon. And then, just a few months after the opening of Coates Opera House as the city’s first-class theater for legitimate drama (although, as we have seen, even the Coates sometimes resorted to booking minstrel shows and other lowbrow fare), another facility was opened, this one designated expressly for variety entertainment.The Walnut Street Theatre opened on 23 January 1871 on the upper two floors of a newly constructed three-story brick building on the northeast corner of Fourth and Walnut. Its bills regularly combined pantomime, acrobatics, olios, scenic transformations, minstrels, and burlesques. The Times not only carried paid advertisements for the Walnut Street

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Those variety houses were supported almost wholly by men, the exceptions being women who didn’t care.The bills were made up of various acts—sketches, impersonations, songs, dances, acrobatic performances, monologues, and so on, the dialogue and situations often being vulgar, sometimes obscene. But they were operated in nearly every city, and for a time the Kansas City places flourished.They were particularly popular with a certain class of transients bent on “seeing the sights.” The first formidable competition encountered by these old theaters in most cities was the popular price houses, such as the Ninth Street and the Grand.The suppression was completed by the advent of vaudeville theaters, which took over, fumigated and exploited many an act from the old varieties, but by steady progress enlarged the field, set new and higher standards and commanded a tremendous public following. (EY 41)

Theatre but actively promoted “this popular place of amusement” in its columns. For example, on 28 November 1871 the paper reported, “Last night it was superlatively splendid, and the entertainment well worth twice the price of admission.” For the week of 25 September 1871, a new and original burlesque—Woman’s Rights;or,Kansas City in 1971—headlined the attractions there. By comparison with what was playing that same week at Coates Opera House (“a highly sensational drama” titled Under the Willows) and at Frank’s Hall (Sam Sharpley’s Silver Show, with “trained canaries, performing mice and cat”), the Walnut Street spoof on life a hundred years hence seems almost sophisticated. (The subject must have resonated, for not ten weeks later, on 9 December 1871, the amateur Kemble Club gave one performance of “a parody on the woman movement,” Woman in 1896, at Coates Opera House, to benefit the poor of Kansas City.) Under the management of William Carroll, the Walnut Street Theatre offered frequent changes of bill, with some olios even changing nightly in order to attract repeat attendance. Occasionally an evening would be set aside for a “Grand Theatrical Masquerade and Fancy Dress Ball.” Such events were easily accommodated in the old theaters with flat floors and movable chairs, and the revenue could even surpass that for a theatrical performance. Nevertheless, there was a hiatus in the theater’s operation—it was apparently closed for repairs—from February until May 1872. Carroll announced a new company at the reopening, but the Walnut Street Theatre

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could not seem to get fully up to speed again under his management. It did, however, send a variety show out to the exposition grounds in September 1872, although the Times noted on the twenty-eighth that when fairgoers heard that the minstrel company playing there was “imported at great cost from the corner of Fourth and Walnut,” they resolutely passed it by. On 30 November 1872, the Walnut Street Theatre reopened as the People’s Theatre, now owned and managed by D. K. Allen. A series of news stories reiterated Mr. Allen’s intention to make the remodeled facility into “one of the neatest and coziest little facilities in the West” (Times, 27 November 1872),“where chaste, moral, and legitimate drama and comedy will be presented in first-class style” (Times, 28 November 1872). Despite excellent support in the press,Allen’s management lasted only three months.The variety theater itself (subsequently managed by Oscar Willis) kept going until the summer of 1873. Meanwhile, on 22 July 1872, the most notorious free-and-easy, the Theatre Comique, opened on Fourth Street between Main and Delaware.Three months later the Comique moved to a new location “from Hart’s building to the hall opposite the market-house.”6 Two months after that, on 18 January 1873, an enterprise called the Fourth Street Varieties opened.The latter—like the short-lived Fourth Street Grand Opera House in summer 1873—may have been a new operation in the space originally used by the Comique, or it may have been a temporary name change for the Theatre Comique, which is not listed again until the fall of 1874, at which point its location was advertised as the corner of Fourth and Walnut streets. Since the latter address coincides with the memories of old-timers, who specified the northeast corner of that intersection, we may confidently assume that the Theatre Comique moved into the building that had previously housed the Walnut Street / People’s Theatre.There the Comique remained and drew a steady clientele until it burned down on 9 October 1895. Of course, the long intervals with no advertisements or reviews are not unusual for an establishment like the Theatre Comique,which made no pretense of respectability. The name was taken from a very popular Theatre Comique in New York, where Harrigan and Hart performed.The success of Kansas City’s Theatre Comique spawned others farther west, in Dodge City, Leadville, and Butte, where the cowboys pronounced it “com-ee-cue.” Admission to the Comique was free, but there were several other means— including the sale of strong drink—by which the management made money on the entertainment.The performances on the small stage and the attractive “waiter-girls” enticed the patrons to spend freely. Indeed, it was said

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of those establishments that it did not cost much to get in, but it cost a lot to get out. When the top two floors of the building at Fourth and Walnut first became the venue for the Theatre Comique, the street-level business comprised the offices and stables of the Jackson County and Broadway Horse Railroad Company, while the stairs to the second story—the main floor of the theater—were on the exterior of the building. It was said that the beer fumes of the Comique neutralized the stable odors from below. Eventually, under the management of Valentine Love, the horses moved elsewhere and the ground-level space was converted to a saloon. At the same time, an indoor staircase to the second floor was constructed. This new staircase served two purposes: it meant that customers with drinks in hand going up to see the show were less likely to get lost or distracted before they could ascend,and it meant that respectable citizens on their way up to take in some risqué entertainment would not be seen by any person on the street. The main floor of the Theatre Comique, above the saloon, had another bar as well as assorted chairs in the pit area, with fixed seats in the section under the balcony. The stage was somewhat higher above the auditorium floor than was standard for legitimate stages, as this allowed the seated male spectator to see all the sights when the dancing girls pranced.The Comique orchestra was top-notch, and some of the specialty performers lived long in memory, notably clog dancers Billy Hale and Charley Queen; tumbler Charlie Sterry, who later joined the famous Hanlons as Charles Guyer; Billy Devere, the tramp poet of the west, reciting “Little Breeches”; comediansinger Billy Diamond;and the delightful vocalist Carrie Avery. Among those who went on to national celebrity was the future great comedian and dancer Eddie Foy, who was then half of the blackface song-and-dance duo Foy and Thompson. Long pauses between numbers gave the patrons time to belly up to the bar. A haze of cigar smoke hung in the air.Small private boxes in a horseshoe formation looked down on the stage and pit from the building’s third-floor level. Each box was just big enough, J. H. Andrews recalled in the Post on 16 February 1928, to hold a cowboy, a girlie, and a bottle of champagne. When a girl finished her turn on the stage, she was expected to visit a box and begin the process of jarring a man loose from his bankroll.The champagne corks would be “deposited in little bright eye’s stocking along with a five spot now and then to ‘keep her in the best of humor’ . . . Next day girlie ‘cashed in’ on her champagne corks with the house management.” At midnight the cheapskate beer drinkers would be sent on their way

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John Rolle, an honorably discharged soldier, had an experience last night that will probably not pass from his memory for some time, and which, according to his own confession, has increased his stock of worldly wisdom. Rolle took in the gaudy attractions of the Comique last night, and the reckless manner in which he called for wine made him the pet of the girls. He was completely captivated by one of them, and she, reclining her painted cheek on his shirt front, confessed that he was her beau ideal of a gentleman with schoolastic [sic] and military bearing. Flattered by these remarks, Rolle ordered bottle after bottle of wine and finally induced the girl to promise him her company for the remainder of the night. More wine was ordered and paid for until $72 had passed from the ex-soldier to the bartender.At last, stupefied by the wine, Rolle fell asleep and about 2 o’clock this morning he was led out of the theater and informed that it was time for him to move on. He felt for his wealth but found it was not where it was when he entered the theater. He then made a bee line to the police station and explained to the police his sad dilemma. He acknowledged spending the $72, but claims he had $10 additional which was stolen from him. In company with an officer he visited the theater this morning, where he found two bottles of wine awaiting him. He had purchased the wine but could not drink it, so the bar tender thoughtfully set it aside for him. No trace could be found of the money the victim claims to have lost. Rolle feels rather sore over the matter, but claims he has learned something by the experience. His home is in Maryland. (Kansas City Evening Star, 23 October 1883)

with the doors locked behind them, while waiters removed the chairs from the pit and swept the floor. The orchestra moved onto the stage, and the champagne drinkers came down from the boxes to the main floor. And then, Andrews recalled, the “big show” would begin: “It was a dance and drinking orgy, a wild, drunken revel ‘’til daylight doth appear.’As a rule, the real aristocrats did not make their appearance until midnight, chaperoned by some high city or county official who disliked to be present the same as the father who takes his son to the circus to see the animals.” When the Theatre Comique moved into the former Walnut / People’s Theatre, the advertisements listed John McEachirn, proprietor; V. S. Gerber, business manager; and Burt Clark, stage director. But their management—like so many others—was short-lived. For little more than a month

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in the spring of 1875, the facility was renamed Olympic Theatre under proprietor and manager J.T. Leon, who in the Evening Mail for 31 March 1875 announced an entire change of program three times a week: “No waits— no vulgarity—three hours of good, solid comfort and enjoyment . . . Doors open at 7 o’clock, performance commences at 8, precisely. Grand Theatrical Dance every evening after performance, given by the members of the Olympic Theatre.” The ambitious plans soon fizzled, for after the first week of April, the bill showed no change from one week to the next. On 29 April 1875, the Mail reported that “the Olympic Theatre company has ‘busted,’ and everybody is wondering what Manager Leon did with the money taken in, as he paid none out.” Occasional subsequent notices indicate that Billy Hale, Kansas City’s ever-popular clog dancer, gave some performances at Frank’s Hall, which suggests that the building at Fourth and Walnut may have gone dark for a time. The Theatre Comique began once again to be mentioned in the press at about the same time as a new theater company appeared on the scene in the fall of 1877.The Journal reported on 2 September that the New Adelphi had opened at Frank’s Hall with a performance of the sensational drama Mountain Meadow Massacre in addition to “a high toned variety programme,” all of which “gave unbounded satisfaction to the large audience present, and created a good impression for an opening night.” On 6 September, the Journal carried news of both the Adelphi and the Theatre Comique, both of which had drawn good audiences the previous evening. The management of the Adelphi particularly solicited attendance by ladies, for whom the entertainment was deemed “thoroughly unobjectionable.” Over the next week the Comique continued to attract full houses of “lovers of fun and pleasure,” according to the Journal of 11 September, while the Adelphi company traveled to St. Joseph for a three-day engagement at Tootle’s Opera House. On its return, the Adelphi company performed at Dunning’s Hall,Wyandott. Its performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on 20 September, probably back at Frank’s Hall, attracted “at least two hundred ladies.” On 27 September, the Journal again asserted that “the Adelphi is essentially the ladies’ theatre, and the number in attendance is constantly increasing.” Despite its successes, the Adelphi lasted only a month.The Daily Mail on 3 October cryptically noted its closing “on account of trouble experienced with the insurance companies.” Meanwhile the Theatre Comique had been gathering steam again with frequent reports like that in the Journal for 12 September 1877 of crowded houses for its “excellent variety company.” Then, suddenly, the Times re-

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ported on 2 October,“Theatre Comique is a thing of the past.The proprietor, Harris, was wanted very badly last evening by the officers at the Union Depot. Mrs. Harris and a friend were there and had their trunks checked for Cleveland, Ohio.Thus ends another effort to build up a place of amusement repugnant to popular taste. Harris has left a number of little accounts behind him as mementoes of his brief stay in this city.” The Mail’s 1 October version of the news added an editorial comment:“It won’t do for snide show people to come to Kansas City to play tricks of this kind.They won’t work.” The owner of the building, J. Q.Watkins, anticipated reopening the theater under better management. Luckily, the next manager—one of the most elusive and intriguing figures in Kansas City theater history—just happened to be the right person in the right place at the right time. The heyday of the Theatre Comique’s long existence occurred under Valentine Love’s management, which began on 11 November 1877. The “big Englishman” Love, whose real name was Maskell, had made his American stage debut on 31 March 1855 at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia as Bertrand in The Forest of Bondy. By 1869 he had adopted the stage name Valentine Love, when he and his wife Ellen (stage name Nellie Maskell) first performed in New York City in a burlesque sketch,After Dark, at the 4 January opening of the Tammany. In April and May 1869, Love is listed in George C. Odell’s Annals of the New York Stage as performing in his wife’s troupe, the Nellie Maskell Burlesque Company,“alleged to have been gathered in London.” Its burlesques (parodies of familiar works) were all titles that would show up in Kansas City within a few years: Ixion, The Field of the Cloth of Gold, Green Bushes, and Cinderella. In 1870 Valentine Love had his own touring group called the New York Theatre Company. He may have been involved in theatrical ventures in Chicago and St. Louis before he and his wife made Kansas City their home from 1877 to 1881. Valentine Love began to be mentioned in the Kansas City press in September 1877, when he and Nellie Maskell acted in the Adelphi company. The Journal review of the sixteenth lists Vellie Marshall (very likely a misprint for Nellie Maskell) as Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.The sensational melodrama Mountain Meadow Massacre, which the Adelphi performed at least eight times during its monthlong existence in Kansas City, was revived at the Comique early in Valentine Love’s management. Presumably, during the month between the closing of the Comique and its reopening under Love’s management, he traveled to Chicago and St. Louis to book new talent, and he seems to have had a good eye for it.The public loved the variety artists he introduced on the program along with sensational dramas such as The

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Felon’s Wife on 18 November and Mountain Meadow Massacre on the nineteenth. The horrifying true story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre twenty years earlier on the wagon trail about forty miles southwest of Cedar City, Utah, remained vivid in American memory. At daybreak on 7 September 1857, a party of peaceful emigrants bound for California awakened to gunshots by which some were wounded or killed in their sleep. The others quickly and courageously sprang to action, circled their wagons, and shoveled earth against the wagon wheels as barricades, thus foiling the planned second wave of the attackers. As it was understood at the time (although later investigations have cast doubts on various aspects of the story now known as that of the Fancher party), Native Americans had been incited to attack the emigrants by the promise of blankets, clothing, guns, and other goods. Fomenting the violence was John D. Lee, a Mormon zealot, who conducted the massacre as retaliation against President Martin Buchanan for removing Brigham Young as governor of Utah. For nearly a week, the emigrants held out despite intensifying hunger and thirst. Surprised at the effective resistance by the emigrants, Lee mustered a militia from Cedar City and said that the order had come from headquarters to massacre every damned one.The smooth-tongued Lee, speaking under the American flag, told the emigrants that a military guard had been assembled to escort them to safety.The emigrants accordingly laid down their weapons and came out of the corral as directed, the men, women, and children in separate groups. The men were shot down in cold blood. The women were violated and killed. The murdered numbered 120, survived only by seventeen children deemed too young to remember what had happened. Although the text of Mountain Meadow Massacre was not published, it is clear from the reviews that it deployed the usual appeals of the melodramatic genre: pathos, sensational effects, and comic relief. In the 27 September 1877 performance at the Adelphi, Mr. Love played Soltaire [sic] Long and Nellie Maskell played Edith Harlin to perfection,“while Willy Hamilton and Mamie Russell were irrepressibly funny in the lines of Index Blaisdell and Hannah.”7 Love later moved into the leading role of the Mormon. Love actually staged the melodrama at Coates Opera House for a benefit matinee performance on 8 June 1878. For the upscale patrons of the Coates, Love’s ad in the Times called it “the sublime play of the Mountain Meadow Massacre! ” That ad suggests that the accurate presentation of historical events within living memory constituted a strong appeal: “Illustrating the life and death of the great Mormon leader,  . . The play abounds

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in startling incidents, is thoroughly truthful, refined and historical—running through a period of 20 years, from the time of the Massacre to the execution of  . , March 21, 1877.” The Times theater column on 7 June offered further reassurance that Manager Love would take pains to present the story “in a style worthy of general patronage.” A measure of Love’s success during his first season or so in Kansas City was the respect with which he was regarded by his employees. In February 1878 the members of the Comique company offered him a complimentary benefit. For this event, which the Times on 26 February touted as “a genuine Love feast and indispensable treat,” Love chose his old standby, “the Great Realistic Drama of the Mountain Meadow Massacre! concluding with the Execution of John D. Lee.” Besides the benefit given at Coates Opera House, Love demonstrated his civic involvement with a grand double bill at the Comique on 7 June 1878 to benefit the people of Richmond, Missouri, who were left homeless by a tornado the week before.To assure the public that the entire proceeds of the evening would go to charity, Love worked with the city council to set up a committee of aldermen to run the box office that evening. Valentine Love’s managerial genius was evident also in his readiness to tap into local interest with the productions he mounted, some of which he apparently wrote himself to suit the market. Buckskin Charley was described as a “thrilling Border Drama,” an obvious reference to the Kansas-Missouri border skirmishes during the Civil War. A month later, in March 1878, he was offering “the New Local Drama,” The Belle of Grand Avenue. As St. Patrick’s Day approached, cognizant of Kansas City’s large Irish-born population and taking advantage of interest generated in the Emmet centenary by Father Dalton’s public lecture on 5 March, Love mounted the Irish drama Robert Emmet and played the title role himself. Love understood the importance of advertising, not only in the newspapers but also on the streets. The Theatre Comique’s new advertising wagon began attracting attention downtown in March 1878. According to the Times of 6 June, Love also generated publicity by brokering an equestrian feat with a horsewoman calling herself Miss Adah Isaacs, obviously capitalizing on the name recognition of the notorious equestrian actress Adah Isaacs Menken, who had died in Paris ten years earlier. Similarly, Love announced that he was booking at great expense the production of The Black Crook that had been doing landslide business in St. Louis.To that end, he enlarged the stage and procured some extravagant scenery from Chicago. The news reports and advertisements contain names and references that sound something like those featured in

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the famous 1866 musical extravaganza The Black Crook, at Niblo’s Garden in New York, which is often signaled as the beginning of American musical comedy.The original was known, for example, for its scantily costumed French ballet troupe woven into a fantastic tale of a sorcerer, fairies, demons and other infernals. For The Black Crook as presented at the Comique, Love advertised in the Times on 2 July 1878, among other attractions,“20 Ladies in the Ballet 20,” a magician who called his wonder act “Soirée Le Diable,” and Master Charlie, the Demon Fire King. Whether or not The Black Crook presented at Kansas City’s Theatre Comique bore any relationship to the famous show by Charles M. Barras, Love’s management of the Comique is noteworthy for his presentation of quite a few scripted plays along with the variety bill. For Christmas Eve 1877, he spent $300 on new scenery and a new and elegant wardrobe to enhance “the grand fairy extravaganza” Cinderella, in which Love played the comic role of Clorinda in drag. Despite “the great outlay attending this production,” he advertised, prices remained the same as ever. Ed J. Connelly, who at nineteen persuaded Val Love to let him act at the Comique and eventually went on to a respectable career in legitimate theater, years later recalled that each performer was “obliged to take a part in the bloodthirsty melodrama before going on with their specialty. . . . When I became a stage director of the Comique, salaries were very attenuated, and were not punctiliously regular. Many times we got up our own plays, cribbed them from some big show that came to the Coates.” Connelly’s reminiscences included an anecdote about how he costumed himself for the plays in which he performed at the Comique. One of the clerks at Hammerslough’s clothing store near the theater helped him out: “I remember when we put on The Ticket of Leave Man I created a sensation by appearing in a white plug hat and a new suit of corduroy.With the assistance of Hammerslough’s clerk, I borrowed this outfit from the shelf every night and returned it after every performance. In exchange for this courtesy, I put whiskers on the clerk and let him go out in the ensemble and he felt very well paid.”8 Very few of the play titles advertised by Love appear in the Readex Corporation’s microprint collection of 4,500 American plays from 1831 to 1900. Works such as Broken Banks and Broken Hearts (week of 1 January 1878), Kiula; or,The Hunting Grounds of Cochise (week of 7 January 1878), and Forgery (week of 14 January 1878) seemed to credit Val Love as the creator. Certainly, Love had seen a lot of plays during his New York years, and it was not unusual for theater people to borrow plots after one or two hearings and pass them off as one’s own under another title. Still Love must be

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credited with creative enterprise when—two weeks after Coates Opera House presented Madam Rentz’s Female Minstrels in a great-sensation burlesque translated from the French, Forbidden Pleasures (7 January 1878)—he offered what must have been a burlesque of the burlesque, Forbidden Pleasures!; or, Charge It to Muldoon (week of 21 January). A dozen years after Love’s departure, the Comique was still at it, presenting Under the Gas Pipes with a character named Snorkey and “an engine crossing the stage under a full head of steam at lightning speed,”9 which we recognize as either a parody or a plagiarism of Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight. There were plenty of other sources of material. W. N. Griffiths had already made a reputation as the John Brown character in Pink Dominoes when he opened it at the Comique on 28 January 1878.Playwright Leonard Grover used to crank out “melodramas full of comedy and blood for the Comique stage.” Sensitive to the hard lot of actors, Grover would write important banqueting or picnicking scenes into his plays, and the performers loved him for those free meals. When the management caught on and switched to papier-mâché food, Grover would find a way to hinge his plot upon the realistic eating of a single slice of pie. Ed Connelly recalled another playwright, J. Holmes Grover, who “wrote the life of the James boys, who were still in the country, and we played it at the Comique.The papers gave it a great send-off, and every day they printed the rumor that the James boys were going to ‘drop in’ on the show some evening, and there would likely be ‘something doing.’ They never came, however, and I played the part of Quantrell [sic] in a pirate make-up. After that J.W.Wallack, the famous New Yorker, bought the only copy of the play in existence for a few dollars, changed its name to ‘The Bandit King’ and made thousands out of it. Grover died penniless in the wilds of Montana.” With or without a play on the bill, it was always the variety that counted most. Years before Val Love came to town, clog dancer Billy Hale had developed a Kansas City following. He and his brother Lon, brothers of fire chief George Hale, had taken time off from their jobs as firemen and toured the Midwest under the stage name Hayle. In 1876 Billy Hayle got a New York booking at Tony Pastor’s first Broadway theater, where a bevy of New York dancers turned out to taunt the “Kansas grasshopper” for a talent similar to tap dancing but performed in wooden clogs. As recalled in the Star twenty years later (26 January 1896), Billy came down to the footlights and said:“Where I come from, it is customary to wait for a man to show what he can do before condemning him. All I ask is that you will wait and see. Then if my act does not please you, you may hiss me all you please.” Billy’s

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

The Hale family that headed Kansas City’s Fire Department for many years also produced the nation’s leading clog dancers. Using the stage name Hayle, brothers Lon and Billy toured nationally during the 1870s heyday of clog dancing.Their disciples performed at the Theatre Comique under Val Love. Kansas City Star, 26 January 1896.

clog dance brought such a storm of applause that he had to break the oneencore rule and return five times.Tony Pastor extended the engagement to three months, always declaring Billy Hayle to be the greatest clog dancer who ever lived. Clog dancing became a short-lived fad in the 1870s, and dancers including the Hayles,Charley Queen,and Willy Pickett—all Kansas Citians—competed nationally for gold medals and silver cups.The earliest clog dancers would tap the clogs once or twice to each musical note, but Billy Hayle achieved three taps and then originated a “roll” of taps. His disciple Charley Queen perfected the pedestal clog, dancing on a small marble slab on top of a pedestal. Besides creating steps that sounded like the roll of a snare drum, he added an acrobatic feat: flipping over to land with his hands on the pedestal while keeping the clog beat with his feet in the air. In addition to clog dancers and clog dancing teams, Valentine Love’s

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Comique bills featured artists such as song-and-dance lady Miss Nellie Zoe, the wonderful Egyptian Jugglers, the armless song-and-dance artist Charles Perham, celebrated song-and-dance artists Jem and Dan Powers, the sweet singer of charm songs Miss Flora Marcey, the champion equilibrist Happy Dave McCoy, acrobatic song-and-dance artists Fairchild and Hendle, comedian Nick Morton, the ever-popular singer Carrie Avery, the patriotic flag waver Ceni Havre, Irish sketch artists Donnelly and Drew, Mason and West doing Dutch songs and dances, jig dancer Jennie Oates, the transformation trapeze artist John L. Manning, the seriocomic vocalist Jennie Southern, Miss Mollie Somers doing Dutch songs and dances, Miss Hattie Ellis and her troupe of trained dogs, contortionist Charles Omeveg, the champions of the world among delineators of German character Morris and Fields, character change artist La Belle Estelle, the charming operatic singer Miss Elsa Carnissa, the juvenile jig dancer Master Burnett, the vivacious misses Flora Belle and Belle Fostelle, violinist Professor Kischoehoffer, energetic dancers Gilmore and Gibson,ballet dancer Ida Maussey,Ducrow and Lamont doing grotesque songs and dances, Matt Morgan’s living art pictures, Grace Rallia in her sword dance, Little Lottie the queen midget of the air, Miss Ella Hellin the ne plus ultra of Lady Song and Dance Artistes,Viola Stanley in unique specialties, and many more. During his first summer in Kansas City, Love kept the theater going as long as possible in the hot months. It was reported by the Times on 2 June 1878 that “when Val Love gets his new fan rigged up, this will be the coolest place of amusement in the city.” Two weeks later the device was in operation.The enterprising Love had taken out part of the roof of the building and installed a large fan, in those days before electricity “worked by machinery,” according to the Times of 18 June, to generate a bit of a breeze in the auditorium, which continued to be crowded despite the hot weather. That date is noteworthy also for the earliest mention in Kansas City of a young unknown performer who would soon rise to celebrity as Eddie Foy. At the Comique he was part of the blackface song-and-dance duo Foy and Thompson, whom Love had spotted performing at Hamlin’s Academy of Music in Chicago. Love apparently booked them for two weeks in St. Louis to hone their skills before bringing them to Kansas City’s Comique. Although Foy and Thompson regularly earned plaudits in the Times, Love knew that his audience needed variety, and he obliged with frequent changes of bill.Thus he sent the song-and-dance team off to Dodge City, Kansas, where they performed in a rowdy saloon until that town’s newly constructed Theater Comique opened. According to Eddie Foy’s biogra-

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pher, Armond Fields, Love oversaw their bookings there and into the fall when they moved on to the Comique in Leadville, Colorado. In Kansas City, the summer heat finally obliged manager Love to suspend operations. As announced in the Times on 17 July 1878, the Comique had achieved “the most successful season ever accorded to variety in our city. Of course its success depended alone upon the management, and each member of the worthy corps of managers deserves and merits praise.” The article went on to commend Love as general manager, Fred Warren as business manager, and Will H. Smith as stage manager, all in tones suggesting that Love himself might have provided the copy. Of course Love was a spinmeister in those days when puffery was the norm, but his management style surely drew upon his strong people skills.The number of benefit nights accorded his employees appears to have been considerably more generous than usual among theater managers. Although the Theatre Comique’s fall season reopening was originally scheduled for 26 August 1878, Love had his operation under way again by 10 August with several improvements to the facilities. Meanwhile Nellie Maskell had taken an engagement at the Globe Theatre in St. Louis, giving “her rendition of The Mountain Meadow Massacre.” She was back at the Comique in Kansas City by the first week of September for a revival of The Two Orphans. Later that month she performed as Nancy Sykes in Oliver Twist with Love as Fagin. On 7 October 1878, Mr. and Mrs. Love invited friends to their home at 515 East Fourth Street to celebrate their crystal wedding anniversary (their fifteenth).The Loves provided a huge spread for the invited guests and they received “a large number of elegant presents.” Just two weeks later, around one o’clock in the morning of 22 October, the Loves returned from the theater to find their house on fire.The alarm brought firemen from the Missouri Avenue station, but the dwelling and its contents were a complete loss. The Journal’s estimate of the loss came to over two thousand dollars ($1,200 on the value of the house, $1,500 in personal property, and $300 in cash), while Mr. Love carried only $700 in insurance.The Mail’s city gossip column for 23 October contained two cryptic notices. First,“Mr. Love found some of the Kansas City money and some of the United States bills that were in his house which burned a few nights ago.There isn’t much more of the bills left than there was of the house.” Similarly odd:“Fred.Warren, who has for so long been connected with the Theatre Comique as treasurer, wishes it now distinctly understood that he is no longer connected with the show, and so requests the  to state.” On a happier note, about fifty

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The corner building in this drawing stood directly across Walnut Street from the Theater Comique, which dominated cow town night life until Hank Clark opened the Coliseum (shown to the right) on the southwest corner of Third and Walnut. Around 1880 pleasure seekers could gather in the street to watch aerial dancing on a tightrope stretched across the street between second-story windows. Kansas City Star, 7 February 1909.

individual citizens and a dozen commercial establishments signed a public letter to Mr. and Mrs.Valentine Love, tendering them a benefit in gratitude for how hard the Loves had worked for the city. The Loves named the evening of Friday 8 November for the benefit. Many local favorites tendered their services on that occasion to an appreciative standing-room-only audience. Going into the summer of 1879, there were actually three variety establishments operating simultaneously. In addition to the Comique, Love was now the proprietor of the Tivoli Summer Garden at the south end of Main Street; its grand opening on Sunday 4 May featured the Comique Brass Band, a tightrope artist, Edison’s wonderful talking machine, and other attractions. At the theater on Walnut Street, meanwhile, the Comique presented its novelty stars, magnificent olio, sparkling specialties, and splendid orchestra, with a promise for next week: “40 Artists 40.” The third variety theater was Clark’s New Coliseum Theatre, which opened on Monday 5

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May 1879 at the corner of Third and Walnut.NowValentine Love was faced with serious competition, as Hank Clark undercut Love’s prices while drawing upon some of the same talent that had graced the boards of the Comique.On 30 May,the Coliseum advertised “The Great Wrestling match between Lucien Marc, Champion of the world, and Andy Kassimer, champion of Kansas City” to be undertaken in the German style on Friday evening and in the Greco-Roman style on Saturday evening for a purse of $250.Two months later the same names pop up at the Comique with additional styles of wrestling scheduled besides German and Greco-Roman: collar and elbow, side hold, rough and tumble, and Lancashire. Furthermore, there was to be a grand fencing match with swords between Lucien Marc and Charley Cooper. Love closed his summer season on 18 August with a grand complimentary benefit for Nellie Maskell and the announcement that the theater would be thoroughly remodeled and repainted. Meanwhile, Clark’s Coliseum offered a succession of attractions free of competition throughout the rest of the summer. It was in the fall of 1879 that the streetcar stables were removed from the Comique building at Fourth and Walnut, allowing Valentine Love to remake the entire building into a concert saloon theater. Although the Comique’s press coverage declined from this time, we know from various reminiscences that there was a continuing lively competition between the Theatre Comique and the Coliseum, across the street from each other at opposite ends of the same block on Walnut.The city was wide open for the pleasure of cowboys, farmers, and gamblers, so the theaters attracted attention by keeping a rope stretched across the street at the second-story level. Each night the band would play, and above the heads of the crowd would be a “grand tightrope walking exhibition.” To see more, one could patronize a free-and-easy. John P. Gilday looked back on the Kansas City of 1880 and recalled that “night life was made vivid and quite often riotously hilarious by Clark’s Coliseum and Valentine Love’s Theater Comique, two burlesque show houses of the ‘free and easy’ variety.They were much frequented by the tired businessmen of the ’80s, though they didn’t always tell about it. ‘Minstrel fronts’ and ‘olios’ were the main business of the stage, but the revenues were derived from the bars attached to the rear of the house. At the end of each act the curtain was lowered and the admonition displayed,‘Do not forget to patronize the bar.’ The frequenters seldom forgot.”Kansas City was, in the words of another commentator,“the best town this side of hell.” Hank Clark was operating a free-and-easy “with the accent on the easy” in a rented cellar on Fourth between Delaware and Main even before Valen-

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tine Love came to town.10 With the money from that venture, Clark built the Coliseum in 1879.When he earned enough from the Coliseum, Clark opened the Ninth Street Theatre in March 1887, at which point he began to be called H. D. Clark instead of “Hank.” Henry D. Clark (1849–1907) had been born in Brookfield, New York. At thirteen, he was big enough to pass for eighteen and enlisted in the Thirteenth New York Artillery to fight for the Union. After the war, he held a series of jobs, including four years as a sailor on the Great Lakes. In Chicago, he worked for a hotel and then for a theater on the west side, where he gained some experience in theatrical management while performing as a song-and-dance man. After dabbling in real estate near Independence, Kansas, Clark came to Kansas City in 1876 or 1877 with a dance partner billed as Zoe Clark. Seeing a market beyond billiards and saloons for the after-dark entertainment of the numerous cowboys in town, Clark found his place in a booming economy. With no more investment than the first month’s rent of the cellar on Fourth and a keg of beer, Clark quickly made enough money to quit performing, while Zoe turned to operating a boardinghouse for variety performers. Clark’s careful investments allowed him eventually to leave show business and turn his full attention to the lucrative residential real estate market. When he died at fifty-nine, H. D. Clark left his wife and five children well provided for and was regarded as a pillar of the community. Clark’s rise to respectability could not have been easy. One of the scandals associated with the Coliseum was the death of a variety actress, Kitty Wood, who performed under the name Daisy De Ome. She and her husband boarded at Clark’s boardinghouse on the corner of Third and Walnut. According to the front-page story in the Star on 4 February 1881, she had been feverish and delirious for two weeks before she was found dead nearby.When her husband, Billy De Ome, a song-and-dance man at the Coliseum, returned from his performance near midnight on the thirteenth, she was missing and her outer garments had been left in the room. In the morning her nearly naked body was found lying in the snow in the backyard of Mr. Hugh Lynch at Fourth and Oak; from the marks on her neck and wrist she appeared to have been brutally handled. According to various testimonies, Daisy De Ome had gone barefoot into a saloon and had been put out on the street, where bystanders heard her praying and talking about her parents. A black woman started to help her but became fearful and left her. Authorities soon arrested a man whom various witnesses claimed to have seen with her. Hank Clark, as proprietor of the Coliseum, where the De Omes had worked, generously provided a beautiful casket and underwrote

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the cost of sending her remains, accompanied by her husband, to the care of her parents in Cincinnati. In another incident, reported in the Star on 16 April 1881, a dissolute young woman named Georgie Kirk was sought by authorities for having fleeced “a guileless stranger named Cook.” Cook was a saddler who had come to Kansas City looking for work, met Georgie on the street, and accepted her suggestion that they go to the Coliseum.There “a box was engaged and the pair proceeded to have what is termed in the locality ‘a great time.’ As the evening wore on, Cook became tipsy and the girl, seeing her opportunity, plied him with more liquor, until he was stupefied and then robbed him of $140, all the money he had, and skipped out.” Since Georgie could not be found, it was believed that she had traveled west with her illgotten gain. By the fall of 1881 the competition from Clark’s Coliseum proved too much for Valentine Love. On 3 November 1881, the Star reported that Val Love of the Comique had left town the previous evening. The establishment had been experiencing financial difficulties and a number of accounts were in arrears. Love had been paying installments through Constable Taylor, but the owner of the building, J. Q.Watkins, lost patience and directed his agent to terminate Love’s lease and take possession of everything in it against the $150 owed in rent. A reporter found Mrs. Love at home, but she directed him to talk with Love’s associate Mr. Allen at the theater. Allen staunchly defended Val Love, saying he “did not slide out of town, but went to fill an engagement in New York.” The building’s landlord had raised the rent to $250 per month, which Love found virtually impossible to meet. He left all he could, $25, to be divided among the employees,“and you will not find one who will say a hard word against him.” Thus ended the four years during which Valentine Love made his mark on Kansas City.Val Love did indeed turn up in New York, performing in The Stranglers of Paris at the Standard Theatre in Brooklyn in mid-December 1881 and in Reddy’s Luck at the National Theatre in the Bowery in June 1883. After that,Valentine Love drops out of the historical record. His wife, Nellie Maskell, appeared sporadically in New York until the mid-1890s, including a reprise of her role as Edith Harland in Mountain Meadow Massacre. By 1889 their nine-year-old child, Ray Maskell, had begun playing the title role in Little Lord Fauntleroy on tour, including a week at Coates Opera House in December of that year. His mother, too, played Kansas City again, at Gilliss Opera House, 30 October to 5 November 1898, when she toured with the Davis and Keogh company production of Heart of the Klondike.

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Two years after Valentine Love’s departure, the Theatre Comique’s manager, George Fredericks, was killed in the major scandal associated with that venue.The story—front-page fodder for all the local newspapers for several days—stemmed from a quarrel on the evening of Friday 8 June 1883 between Fredericks and a twenty-one-year-old journalist from a prominent family in Indiana. Orth Harper Stein had become a reporter at seventeen in Lafayette, Indiana, then spent three years as city editor of the Leadville Chronicle in Colorado, where he began dabbling in theatrical activities under the name John Bell. He briefly ran a variety theater in Pueblo, Colorado, then came to Kansas City about six months before the sequence of events that changed his life. He got a reporting job with the Kansas City Star and very quickly advanced to the position of city editor. Meanwhile, he spent evenings at the Theatre Comique and became friendly with its manager. George Fredericks, about thirty-five, was one of three brothers in the variety theater business. Fredericks had been running the Theatre Comique in St. Joseph until September 1882, when he came to Kansas City to take charge of the Comique at Fourth and Walnut. Fredericks introduced Orth Stein to Mattie Hartlein, a buxom blonde twenty-two-year-old widow, whom Fredericks had rescued from poverty and kept as a mistress in rooms at the Clemmons and Cloon building across from the Theatre Comique. Stein began visiting the woman regularly and even took her driving, and they became intimate.Whether Fredericks knew or not, he showed no jealousy. On the evening of the eighth, Orth Stein had gone to the Comique and chatted with Fredericks, then crossed the street for his customary evening visit to Mattie Hartlein. A boy from the Comique soon knocked on the door with a message from Fredericks asking Hartlein to come over to the theater; she sent the reply that she was not feeling well and would not go. Fredericks himself soon came in person to Mattie Hartlein’s room.There was no anger in the exchange between the two men, but Stein, who was in shirtsleeves and unholstered, expressed concern that Fredericks could pull a gun as his hand kept moving to his coat pocket. Fredericks then slapped Hartlein and ordered her to choose between them. She chose Fredericks. Stein said he would abide by the decision and invited Fredericks to have a drink with him.The two went down to the street and across to the Comique together, but Fredericks quickly decided to return to Hartlein’s room. Stein accompanied him, then they again descended the stairs together. When Fredericks turned suddenly and angrily, Stein pulled his gun in self-defense and fired one shot. Fredericks crumpled to the bottom of the stairs. Stein then went back upstairs to leave

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his revolver with Hartlein before turning himself in to the police. People in the street were certain that they heard two shots, but only one chamber of Stein’s revolver was empty. Fredericks’s revolver was not found. Shot in the head by a 45-caliber bullet, Fredericks was taken to a room in the Clemmons and Cloon building. Because the wound was so disfiguring, his wife was not allowed to see him there. After two days he was taken to his home to the care of his wife and children. From his jail cell, Stein was confident that Fredericks would vindicate him upon returning to consciousness, but Fredericks died on 14 June. The Comique band played a dirge as it marched in the funeral procession accompanying the body to Union Depot for shipment to St. Joseph and burial there. Meanwhile, Orth Stein’s difficulties had scarcely begun. On 9 June, the Star staunchly defended its employee,“one of the brightest and most promising young journalists in the country,” whose rash action was “the result of evil associations, and a strange fascination for a lewd woman.That a man of the intellect and culture of   should become fascinated with such a creature is past all comprehension.  is the proprietor of the Comique, a hot-bed of sin, where lewdness, ribaldry and night revelry dominate.” On 25 July, Stein was found guilty of seconddegree murder. He began serving his sentence of twenty-five years in the penitentiary.The Star helped him out by commissioning him to write short stories for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which it published on 29 November and 24 December 1883.These heartwarming stories contributed to the popular impression that one so talented could only have acted in self-defense. In December came the authorization for a retrial, and Stein was soon free on bail. Reportedly, his fellow prisoners—including Frank James— were delighted for him. Although still under indictment, Orth Stein was able to resume his newspaper career in Leadville and was ultimately acquitted. Unfortunately, Stein did not use his second chance at life wisely. On 15 September 1891, even the Star recanted its support after receiving the news of his escapades involving women and money in St. Louis and El Paso. For twelve more years the Theatre Comique catered to a certain kind of cultural need, alternating bursts of prosperity with desperation, under constantly changing management.When it burned down on 9 October 1895, an article in the Star reviewed the high points (Val Love) and the low (Orth Stein’s killing of Fredericks). In the 1870s, according to the retrospective, “Kansas City was a screamer with its cowboys and gamblers and sports and all sorts of interesting characters who were handy with pistols.” In those

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days, occupants of the boxes had to buy wine at five dollars. But the wine era gave way in the 1880s to the beer era—a dollar a bottle or fight—and so the Comique declined from glory. Still the ramshackle building on “Battle Row” had a show running—a rather shabby minstrel company—up to its last night, playing to “a mob of tough men, dotted with tougher women, in a theater with floors like a camel’s back and sodden with the muck of notorious years.” The cause of the Comique fire was unknown, perhaps from a carelessly abandoned cigar. The flames were spotted and an alarm sounded around three in the morning, about an hour after the building had closed. It was the successive explosions of the four overheated gas cylinders for the calcium lights that brought down all but the back wall. A fireman, Alvin E. Canaday, was killed when the front wall buried him under hot bricks and burning timbers.The minstrel company lost its trunks, costumes, and music. Although the Comique continued in business for nearly fourteen years after Valentine Love’s departure, the Coliseum clearly moved to the fore in the variety saloon business from that point. As noted in a Times retrospective of 15 January 1899, the Coliseum “always had the advantage of being a modern house,in that the theater proper was located on the ground floor.” The entertainment was never refined, yet the Coliseum could boast the best clog dancing in the city, as well as outstanding acrobatics on the horizontal bars. After the curtain came down at the legitimate theaters around eleven o’clock, some of the men from those audiences would mosey over to the Coliseum for an extra hour or so of entertainment.The decline of the Coliseum resulted primarily from the decline of the cattle trade, for visiting cattlemen with ready cash to throw around had long sustained it.The Coliseum closed for a time and then reopened as the Newmarket, a seedy dive. When the police commissioners decided not to relicense the theater to sell liquor even as the building’s owner raised the rent from $35 to $40 per month, manager Jacobs bowed to the inevitable and closed the theater on 14 January 1899. Mention must be made also of Martin Regan’s ventures into variety entertainment. Hired as foreman for Kansas City’s original gashouse, the enterprising Irishman soon became a Democratic ward boss, then a policeman, and then an alderman. During his many years on the city council, Regan formed a partnership with Frank Monroe to open the Fountain Theatre in a former skating rink at Sixth and May streets. From its opening in the late 1880s until it burned down in 1891, victims succumbed to the “va-

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riety shows and short skirted girls who begged patrons to buy beer at $1 a bottle and so-called wine at $5 a bottle.”11 The Fountain employed not only the girls but also some hefty men to prevent the patrons (mostly transients) from objecting to the prices or to the amount of change they got. Alderman Regan’s investment was paying off very nicely until a patron shot and killed a bouncer named Voiceless Mike. The public outcry would surely have closed the Fountain if the flames had not got it first. Undaunted, Regan opened the Novelty Theater on the second floor of the building where the public library had been housed at Eighth and Walnut. But it closed early in 1896, as the honky-tonks finally gave way to the popular-price theaters that had begun to dominate the entertainment scene in the 1880s. As amusement-seeking men began to shy away from the Fourth Street dives, growing numbers of working-class women sought entertainment outside the home. Both groups were either intimidated by Coates Opera House or could not afford it, and thus there was a need for a venue that would provide legitimate drama at popular prices. Gilliss Opera House opened in 1883 as a first-class theater charging first-class prices ($0.50 $1.00, $1.25, compared to Coates Opera House’s $0.50, $0.75, and $1.00), but it gradually found its most devoted clientele after it became a purveyor of ten, twent’, thirt’ melodrama (admission ten, twenty, or thirty cents). H. D. Clark’s Ninth Street Theatre originally presented legitimate drama, including some Shakespeare, but moved to more popular fare within a year of its 1887 opening. The Auditorium Theatre’s management used a stock company to sustain legitimate theater at popular prices (see Chapter 4). Abraham Judah—whose ventures included a dime museum and a cyclorama before he constructed the Grand Opera House in 1891—knew his audience from the beginning (see Chapter 5) and presented low-priced moral entertainment for the whole family. Gilliss Opera House had a long, complicated history even before it opened its doors to the public in 1883. It was built with a bequest of $140,000 from Mary A.Troost to honor the memory of her uncle William Gilliss (ca. 1795–1869), an early settler who had once owned a trading post on the Kansas River and land extending several miles to the south. Among other ventures, he built Gilliss House hotel overlooking the steamboat landing.Gilliss was the oldest inhabitant of Kansas City when he and Col.Kersey Coates shared the honor of driving the final stake to open the Hannibal Bridge across the Missouri River on 3 July 1869. Sixteen days later, on 19 July, Gilliss died. A lifelong bachelor, Gilliss left his entire estate, valued at about $400,000,

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Located in the heart of the city when it opened in September 1883, Gilliss Opera House enjoyed a brief reign as a first-class theater rivaling Coates Opera House. However, as the city moved southward, the Gilliss gradually depended upon cheaper fare to draw audiences. From the Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

to his niece Mary, the wife of Dr. Benoist Troost.Then began a thirty-fiveyear-long legal battle, as other potential heirs came forward, two partPiankeshaw men who claimed that Gilliss had married their grandmother Kahketoqua, two part-Delaware girls named Sophia and Mary who received bequests of ten dollars each, and two African Americans. Mary Troost died in 1872, long before the case was finally resolved in her favor. Meanwhile a portion of her will went forward, granting the land at Fifth and Walnut to the city along with the money to build an opera house. It was further stipulated that a percentage of the proceeds from the opera house would go toward the creation and support of a Gilliss Home for Children. A permit for construction of Gilliss Opera House was issued in August 1881, but construction stretched well beyond the anticipated year, while the city spent some of the money on street paving and sidewalks near the site and while—as deplored in the Star on 21 November 1882—great artists of

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the stage bypassed Kansas City for want of another first-class stage whenever Coates Opera House was already booked. Gilliss Opera House had its long-awaited opening on 10 September 1883.The southwest corner of Fifth and Walnut was considered an excellent central location, convenient to several streetcar lines and within five blocks of fifteen major hotels.The commercial spaces at street level on two sides of the building were quickly leased.Twenty-two-inch-thick walls supported the four-story red brick building. Double-door entrances on both Fifth and Walnut streets gave access to a spacious hall with the box office, administrative offices, and a twenty-foot-wide grand staircase leading up to the promenade hall and the main floor of the auditorium on the second floor of the building. From that level another staircase led to the upper hall and balcony.Those who purchased seats way up in the gallery used a separate staircase, thus segregating them from the more fashionable people.The blue, pale yellow, and pink color scheme of the auditorium was calculated to show the ladies in the audience to advantage. A modern feature of the auditorium was its inclined floor, on which nine hundred pretty chairs (Andrews patent folding seats, with hat racks and umbrella attachments) were placed far enough apart not to crush dresses. Draperies, curtains, and Brussels carpets enhanced the boxes. About seventeen hundred could be seated in all sections of the house. The chandelier suspended from the dome had 135 gas jets, set off against the ceiling painting of four peacocks in full plumage. Additional light in the auditorium came from forty-five hanging chandeliers and fifty bracket fixtures. Local companies took pride in their installation of the gas light fixtures, plumbing, and steam heating. Beneath the auditorium floor had been laid four thousand feet of steam pipes; holes in the floor along each row allowed the warm air to rise.Windows on three sides of the building provided ample ventilation. Heating registers and water fixtures in the dressing rooms (as well as “convenient water closets attached”) suggested that the comfort of the actors had also been considered. (Newspaper accounts varied on the number of dressing rooms, between seventeen and thirty-five.) Stationary washstands in the public water closets further testified to the effort to provide the most up-to-date conveniences. The stage itself was illuminated by four rows of scene lights, each containing fifty-two burners, and there were fifty-two burners in the footlights. According to the Journal of 2 September, a total of 220 lights could be “lowered and regulated at will by the man whose station is by that collection of brass faucets at the east side of the proscenium opening.” Here too was lo-

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A card on the back of this photograph of the interior of Gilliss Opera House indicates that it was “taken by Electric Light on the evening of June 27th, 1884, during the engagement of Evans, Bryant & Hoey’s Meteors.” The photographer was J. H. Scotford. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

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cated, the Star reported on 8 September,“the machinery for controlling the lights throughout the entire house. From this point the operator can turn off or on every light, or turn them low or full at pleasure.” Electricity was used for the exterior lights at the Walnut Street entrance, for igniting the gas lights, and for signal bells connected with the dressing rooms. At 127 feet wide by 43 feet deep, the stage may well have been, as the news stories boasted, one of the largest in the west. Certainly, it could accommodate spectacular effects.That Sarah Bernhardt had such trouble with the deep apron in 1887 is not surprising, for the curtain line was fully nine feet back from the footlights.The proscenium opening,forty-four feet wide, was provided with a handsomely painted drop curtain depicting a rocky Scottish coast. A gridiron thirty-two feet above the stage floor held twentyeight-foot-high scenery. Also above the stage, as the Journal reported on 2 September, was “the great inundator”: a grid of pipes with nozzles though which, at the opening of a single valve, the stage could be quickly flooded with water in case of fire. To inaugurate Gilliss Opera House, manager Corydon F. Craig—who had been hired away from his management position at Tootle Opera House in St.Joseph—booked a full-week engagement by the French actress Mademoiselle Hortense Rhéa (1845 –1899). This was the first of her ten engagements in Kansas City, where she became a favorite. She would usually underwrite a banquet at a local hotel for her company one evening during each engagement. Her radiant vivacity and sweetness of temper infused her characterizations in many roles. The fact that Hortense Rhéa enjoyed greater success on the road than in eastern cities was attributed to middle American appreciation of her personal qualities of decency and good character. Indeed, it is noteworthy that a number of Kansas City girls born after the star’s 1883 visit were named after her; for example, David Austin Latchaw’s daughter Hortense (b. 1884), singer Hortense Morehart, and Rhéa McMurray,who danced professionally as “Mademoiselle Rhéa”in the 1910s. The original Mademoiselle Rhéa tested the acoustics of Gilliss Opera House with a preinaugural performance on the ninth of Much Ado About Nothing, a staple of her repertoire, for it was by memorizing the role of Beatrice that she had begun learning English only two years earlier. For the gala opening on 10 September 1883, Rhéa performed Adrienne Lecouvreur. Carriages crowded the streets to the extent that many of the fashionably attired ladies and gentlemen were late getting to their seats. Mayor James Gibson and Maj. William Warner spoke from the stage between the first and sec-

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Mademoiselle Hortense Rhéa’s French accent made much of her line delivery unintelligible.Yet Kansas City audiences received her so favorably that she played nine more engagements in the city over the years after she inaugurated Gilliss Opera House in 1883. Kansas City Star, 31 December 1892.

ond acts, prolonging the suspenseful build to the title character’s first entrance in act 2. For the entire week—which also included performances of The School for Scandal, Frou Frou, and Camille—much interest centered upon Rhéa’s wardrobe, for she wore an impressive range of Paris gowns and hair ornaments. For her 1892–1893 tour, Rhéa engaged a young actor named William S. Hart, who later attained stardom in silent cowboy films of the 1910s and 1920s. Although she was more than twenty years older than he, they played Beatrice and Benedict (in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing) opposite each other in January 1893 at the Coates. At that time and on a return engagement in December 1893, they performed Josephine, Empress of the

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Rhea was notably kind of heart, too kind sometimes for her professional good. If someone in her company had native talent, but little experience, she would tolerate crudeness while trying to overcome it.When she played “Nell Gwynn” at the Auditorium she had as her leading man a young Kansas Citian whose real name, I think, was Bernstein, but he had taken the stage name of Edmund Breese. He had been a grocer’s clerk out on Twelfth street. . . . He came into a leading position because of a vacancy. In “Nell Gwynn” he was called upon to play King Charles, a part of laces and graces. He did about everything to Charles except dethrone him. . . . In private Rhea deplored the young man’s crudeness, but she would say,“But he has much ability; he will learn; some day he will show what is in him; I want to give him this chance.” Breese became one of the conspicuous leading men within a few years. He excelled in heavy dramatic roles. Later he went into the movies, where he had considerable success to the time of his death a few years ago. (EY 28)

French, with Rhéa in the title role and Hart as Napoleon.The Kansas City critics generally found Hart attractive but limited in expressiveness. Latchaw later recalled that Hart “took very much to heart what I said of his acting. He sent word—at least it came to me—that if he didn’t thrash me before he left town, he would the first thing the next time he came to Kansas City. Every time I have seen this mighty man of the lariat in the movies I have been rather glad we never met” (EY 28). When Mel Hudson took over the lease and management of Gilliss Opera House in 1886, he put his brother-in-law Charles Thomas in charge of dayto-day operations while Hudson kept his center of operations at the Coates. At that time, the Gilliss was run very much along the same lines as the Coates, offering standard fare that could be presented at either house.Thus the Gilliss could boast some major players on its boards, including Sarah Bernhardt, Joseph Jefferson III, James O’Neill in The Count of Monte Cristo, and many others who also played engagements at the Coates. Little Minnie Maddern (later Minnie Maddern Fiske), who had been on stage since infancy,made her Kansas City debut at the Gilliss in April 1885,returned there the following season ( January 1887), then played two engagements at the Warder Grand (1887 and 1888), then played the Gilliss again in October 1889.

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One of Latchaw’s anecdotes about the Gilliss while it was still under Hudson’s management hints at the complex interplay of class consciousness and literary genre in late-nineteenth-century American theater. Latchaw noted that the plays written by Victorien Sardou for Sarah Bernhardt— La Tosca, Gismonda, Cleopatra, Thermidor and others—earned international renown as powerful historical dramas as long as they were performed in French. However, when American stars began acquiring the rights to present these plays in English, it became clear that they were simply “glorified melodramas” supported by sumptuous sets and costumes. The renowned Fanny Davenport kept up the illusion of prestigious fare with several of them at Coates Opera House, playing Fedora there in 1884, 1887, and 1894, Cleopatra in 1891 and 1894,and Gismonda in 1896.When a rising star named Lillian Olcott (1861–1888) acquired the rights to Sardou’s Theodora, it looked as though she was on her way to the top. However, her resources were too limited to supply the expected production values for the Byzantine Empire setting, so Hudson booked her into the Gilliss, which had its own stock of attractively painted backdrops. Latchaw attended Olcott’s opening there on 16 January 1888 and was disappointed. He remembered how Bernhardt had used a real lion in the cage on stage, and he deplored the “ludicrous” papier-mâché beast behind the bars in Lillian Olcott’s production. It occurred to Latchaw that a friend of his owned a Great Dane that looked somewhat like a mountain lion. Latchaw took his friend and the dog to interview the company manager, and the dog was hired for the remainder of the Kansas City engagement. At the Wednesday matinee, the dog prowled the cage convincingly until Olcott’s entrance. Having become fond of her, the dog easily got out of the cage that had been constructed for an inanimate lion.When Olcott sat down on a tree stump, the Great Dane crossed to “put his weighty head into her lap and refused to budge.” She stood and “abandoned her lines and business long enough to make the dog leave her; whereupon he walked over to the stump, turned around a time or two and let himself drop against the unrooted remnant of a forest tree. But the stump resented the intimacy and moved away.The amusement ‘out front’ had been well restrained up to this point, but here it gave way to hilarious merriment, Miss Olcott joining in the laughter.” Sadly, the twentyseven-year-old actress became ill in Kansas City, canceled her immediate dates, returned to New York, went into a hospital, and died there (EY15). Little by little, Gilliss Opera House compromised on quality to attract a broader audience base.The city’s rapid growth in the late 1880s nudged the commercial district farther to the south, along with new residential areas,

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all encompassing the once-isolated Coates Opera House, while stranding the Gilliss Opera House in the declining market district. Hudson relinquished his Gilliss management in favor of various other interests in partnership with Abraham Judah (see Chapter 5). E. S. Brigham, who owned the building in 1890, announced that melodrama would henceforth dominate the bill, because “people like excitement.” Minstrels also played the Gilliss with increased frequency. And it was at the Gilliss that boxer John L. Sullivan, exploiting his celebrity in a turn as an actor, played the hero in Honest Hearts and Willing Hands in May 1891. The Gilliss gallery gods responded to his persona (certainly not to his acting) with “boisterous cheering” and “thunders of applause,” reported the Star on the fourth. Renovations in the Gilliss auditorium during the summer of 1894 failed to draw the best patrons back to the river market area, and so the management aimed lower, combining thrills and suspense with cheap novelties. That fall the New Gilliss was presenting variety olios between the acts of its melodramas.The 1895 –1896 season saw a stock company ensconced in the facility, but the fare presented by the Gilliss Stock Company and Vaudeville shows little change from the previous season. Although the heyday of melodrama in the American theater at large had passed, there was still a die-hard market for strong plots and sensational effects like real fire engines and performing animals, especially when offered at popular prices. For example, The County Fair culminated in an exciting horse race on stage,“a race of startling naturalness”( Journal 25 March 1891). Under the Dome’s sensational effects included a re-creation of the horrible hurricane of 1889 in the harbor at Apia (Star, 4 March 1899). In The Span of Life a troupe of acrobats formed a human bridge across a chasm, enabling the heroine and her child to cross to safety ( Journal, 15 January 1899).The “stirring situations” in John Martin’s Secret “lead up to the sensational climax at the end of the third act, where Martin leaves his discarded mistress in an unsafe diamond mine, the ground of which is slipping away, so that she, who is the only one who knows the secret of the murder, shall not give evidence against him. She is saved by making a leap of twenty feet, and being caught by the wife of the accused hero, who is traveling to safety in the elevator of the mine” (Star, 18 February 1899). In The Tide of Life the villain was electrocuted when he jumped from a second-story window and clutched a trolley wire; there he hung, twenty feet above the stage floor, “with flashes of light from all parts of his body, and the hissing and crackling which tell of the deadly work of the electric force” ( Journal, 18 November 1900). The Way of the Transgressor featured several Landseer dogs:“The noble specimens

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of this black and white breed were cheered and cheered yesterday by two full houses as the dogs a dozen times performed the heroic deed at the critical point” (Times, 16 February 1906). In The Burglar’s Daughter, “the race between a trolley car and a powerful automobile is a scenic and mechanical marvel” ( Journal, 10 February 1907). The Boy Behind the Gun re-created “with commendable accuracy” a battle in the Russo-Japanese war, with Gatlings, three-pounders, eight-inch guns and automatic pistols belching fire and smoke “something fierce. Boys and men in the gallery stood and yelled with excitement. . . . And the smoke was thicker than the plot. . . . The story is too long to tell.The noise is what counts” (Times, 12 November 1905). A good example of a thrilling plot twist that did not depend upon scenic effect or mechanical marvel comes down to us via a retrospective published in the Journal on 8 March 1927 by a Kansas Citian who used to “supe”— that is, serve as a supernumerary when extras were needed to fill the stage— at all the local theaters. The greatest applause in his experience occurred during a melodrama at the Gilliss in 1902 (31 August–6 September): George Klimt and Frank A. P. Gazzolo’s The James Boys in Missouri, with “Klimpt himself impersonating the indomitable Jesse, while a tall actor with a nasal twang was brother Frank.” In a climactic scene, twelve supers played men in a posse that surrounded Jesse and held him at gunpoint.The bandit stood with his hands in the air while the posse leader took Jesse’s six-shooter. On the posse leader’s cue line, “It’s all right, boys,” the supers lowered their guns and their guard. Quickly, Jesse “whipped two six-shooters out of his boot-tops and covered us with a command to ‘throw up your hands, you dirty curs!’ . . . As soon as the audience realized that Jesse had turned the tables, it stood up and howled. There were old ‘Crackerneck’ yells intermingled with whistling, stamping of feet, hand clapping and shouts of approval, and the pandemonium lasted several minutes.” That show was memorable also because the real Frank James tried to get an injunction to stop it.“There was quite a flutter of excitement behind the scenes that was not rehearsed due to reports that Frank James, Cole Younger and other living members were going to take drastic action to stop the show if the injunction failed. Upon legal advice Klimpt changed the name of the play to The Blue Cut Train Robbery, and the names of the James brothers to Edward and Frank Gorman,” the super recalled. Elsewhere on the road—safely distant from the James brothers’ stomping grounds—the names were changed back to the original version, and The James Boys in Missouri played with great success for several seasons.

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On 21–26 September 1902, a melodrama titled Queen of the Highway featured a live wolf on stage at the Gilliss.The action took an unexpected turn when the wolf bit the prompter and then came onto the stage, where the players were thrown into a panic. Only actress Alberta Lee, who played the Indian Maiden, remained cool enough to face the beast. She grabbed one of the pistols used in the play and fired blanks into the wolf’s face. Luckily, a stagehand lowered the fire curtain before the wolf could leap into the audience, which was thus deprived of seeing its capture. The Journal’s drama critic vividly evoked the entertainment needs fulfilled by the Gilliss at the turn of the century: Now, there be those who disdain the Gillis, and are accustomed to speak of this playhouse of ancient lineage with tip-tilted noses, and with that peculiar expression which betokens a sort of contempt.These—and they are few, be it said in gratitude—do not know. If they did, they would realize that the [season] opening of the Gillis is of concern to more theater patrons in Kansas City than is the coming inaugural of the Willis Wood, and for the simple reason that far more, numerically, will go to the Gillis in one season than will visit any other one theater in town.They won’t spend as much money in going, but they will go every week; they will not duplicate their visits, for the Gillis clientele is a once-a-week attendance; but numbers for numbers, the Gillis will hold more separate identities in a season than will any other house in town. It was a good start that the Gillis got, too.The house was packed; the villain was thoroughly hissed and the poor but virtuous maiden was rescued just in the nick of time, in the regulation fashion.The real steam launch sputtered its way back and forth across the six-inch-deep ocean, and the hero was vindicated in appropriate fashion. Hurrah for the Gillis, with its virtue triumphant, and its villainy thwarted, in the way that is all too seldom in real life!12

Occasionally the Gilliss boasted a real headliner as a brief respite from the thrills and tear-jerking. A notable instance was the full-week engagement of the Black Patti Troubadours, beginning 17 February 1901.The African American singer Sissieretta Jones had been dubbed “the black Patti” in recognition of the beauty and power of a voice that could only be compared to that of the reigning soprano Adelina Patti.The Black Patti company’s mixture of ragtime and classical music, including operatic selections, drew “record-breaking audiences” to the opening matinee and evening performances at the Gilliss, according to the Star on 18 February.The return

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We once had a Negro maid at our house named Fanny. She used to tell us about a friend of hers named Rose, whose switch always was slipping, to her great embarrassment. I sent Fanny to the Gillis once to see a company of Negro minstrels.The leading comedian was “Billy” Kersands, who, by the way, held all records for mouth expansion. . . .The other comedian was telling “Billy” about his girl’s long hair. When she loosed her hair, he said, it would fall clear to her waist.“Dat’s nothin’,” said “Billy.”“When my girl looses her hair it falls to de floor.” On this line our Fanny jumped to her feet and exclaimed,“Bless God, dat’s Rose!” She was so uproariously funny in her performance that she got a bigger laugh than “Billy.” But the comedian was equal to the occasion; he took a step forward, looked in Fanny’s direction, and said:“You’s right, sister; dat’s just who it was.” (EY 10)

of the Black Patti Troubadours to Kansas City in 1903 (playing the Auditorium Theatre) got front-page coverage on 6 February in the African American newspaper, The Rising Son, which declared it “the greatest colored show on earth.” On the whole, however, it was the melodramas (and the low prices) that kept the Gilliss going with working-class audiences for more than two decades until motion pictures lured them gradually away during the 1910s. By the mid-1910s,Gilliss Opera House declined into burlesque:chorus girls in beads with stale comedians between the dance numbers. It was rumored that Florenz Ziegfeld would occasionally visit Kansas City to look over the beauties at the Gilliss, and that some girls did make it to the Follies in New York. On the night of 25 June 1925, the first two stage shows of the evening were followed by the screening of a motion picture called Flaming Passion to bridge the lull before the midnight stage show. During the movie, fireman Ben Berkowitz could leave his post backstage and visit the hot-dog stand on the ground floor.With plenty of time before the arrival of midnight patrons, Berkowitz was crossing Fifth Street to the fire station when a flaming blast threw him against the wall of the fire station. A rain of bricks and glass fell on the street in an explosion that brought down most of the four-story Gilliss. Fireman Berkowitz ran back and rescued two boys hanging from the fire escape on the alley side.Then he went to look for the film projectionist. Later reports suggested that the explosion had originated in the projection booth and that Ben Berkowitz—having fortuitously escaped

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injury in the blast—died as a result of inhaling fumes from the burning nitrocellulose films. It was estimated that thirty or more people might have died in the Gilliss, but an exact count could never be determined. Because of the terms of Mary Troost’s will, there had to be a theater on the land at Fifth and Walnut. In 1926 a two-story structure was built, with a small theater space incorporated. Again the Gilliss presented burlesque, but World War II closed that operation. Several times in the 1960s and even in the 1970s, short-lived theater groups used the space.The River Market Brewing Company moved into the building in 1995. Popular prices prevailed also at H. D. Clark’s Ninth Street Theatre from its opening on 14 March 1887 with an extravaganza called The World. That theater, however, will be covered in Chapter 5, for it was leased by Abraham Judah, who operated it for several years along with a number of other theatrical ventures.

Chapter 4 THE IDEALIST WHO REFOUGHT THE CIVIL WAR AND THE STOCK COMPANY REVIVAL

Col. George W.Warder was, David Austin Latchaw wrote, a “lawyer, poet, social leader and insatiable playgoer” (EY 2). He was also a southerner by disposition, though he had not fought for the Confederacy. Perhaps it no longer mattered, for Kansas Citians were quick to heal the rancorous divisions of the Civil War, so that they could get on with the business of building a great city. Still, no one could erase memories of the infamous Order Number Eleven issued by the Union army’s brigadier general Thomas Ewing on 25 August 1863 as a drastic measure to undermine guerrilla activity along the Missouri-Kansas border.According to Order Number Eleven, the rural settlers of three Missouri counties were forced to vacate their homes, many of which were subsequently looted and burned. Even within Kansas City and Independence, those who could not prove their loyalty to the Union had to leave the district, and this effected the banishment of such prominent citizens as William Gilliss, John Calvin McCoy, and Mattie Lykins, wife of the eminent Dr. Johnston Lykins. George W.Warder (1848 –1907) came to live in Kansas City fifteen years later, when the community had come together again in its own best interests even as the losses and injustices still smarted. Born in Richmond, Missouri, a descendent of Virginians,Warder spent part of his youth in Lexington, Kentucky.The precocious young man graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia, was admitted to the bar, and—as a partner of J. H. B. McFerran in Chillicothe, Missouri—began practicing law at the age

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of nineteen. Among the many poems he wrote during his college studies was “The Rolling Years” (1864 –1865), in which his southern sympathies are evident. In the published version, a footnote indicates that the following lines got a total of fifteen black marks from his university professors “for disloyal sentiments”: O justice! throned on high, is this the wisdom you unfold, That half a nation by force of arms the other half should hold— That freemen should to freemen bow, and kiss the uplifted hand That’s raised to rob them of their rights, their chattels, and their land? Shall theft and arson belt the South, and noble lives be hurled In self-defense against the tattered paupers of Europe and the world?

The note adds that unconstitutional acts of war like robbery and “the wreckless [sic] plundering and burning of Southern homes,” in his opinion, only lengthened and aggravated the war, instead of shortening it. He explained also that “tattered paupers” referred to “the immoderate haste of enlisting in the army the poor emigrants of every country, and the colored troops.”1 In Richmond, Kentucky, in September 1868, George Warder married Miss Virginia D. McWilliams, whose brother Sidney McWilliams was a prominent Kansas City banker.Their son, Alexander, died at five months; their daughter, Virginia, was a newborn babe when her mother died.After his wife’s death on 27 May 1878,Warder moved to Kansas City and began his law practice there on 23 December.Thus his daughter could be raised in the home of her aunt, Mrs. Sidney McWilliams, at Ninth and Locust, where Warder came every week to Sunday dinner.Warder dedicated his next two books of poems to his “sainted wife” and continued to write poems about her. By the time he was twenty-six,Warder had earned $25,000 as an attorney in Chillicothe. He was said by the Journal on 26 October 1887 to have “one of the best paying practices in the state, having at times no less than 100 cases a term.” He saved his money during those early years, and that— along with an inheritance—enabled him to become “one of the town’s capitalists,” “an enthusiastic boomer.” Kansas City’s real estate boom made Warder a very wealthy man, one who always gave generously to charities. It was said that he built as many houses as anyone in the city, and at one

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time he owned rental properties worth nearly half a million dollars. In fact, it was Warder who sold investment properties near Admiral Boulevard and Grand to the actress Lotta Crabtree. In 1885 he sold the entire block of buildings at Eleventh and Main for $15,000. It is not clear when he began to be called Colonel Warder, for the appellation was not based upon military service but in the nature of a “Kentucky colonel,” an honorific for successful wheeling and dealing. George Warder invested virtually his entire fortune in the construction of the Warder Grand Opera House, motivated at least partially by lingering Civil War resentments. Certainly Warder was an avid, almost nightly, theatergoer, and it is possible, as rumored, that he felt slighted by Melville Hudson in some instance and vowed to retaliate by building his own opera house. (It is noteworthy in this respect that Warder’s 1878 book of poetry was published by Hudson’s printing company,whereas his subsequent books had other publishers.) It is more likely, however, given what we know about Warder’s idealism, that such a monumental undertaking stemmed primarily from his desire to create a cultural anchor and identity for the east side of town where the southerners clustered. At the extreme west side stood Coates Opera House, proud bastion of the civic leaders who had come from New England states, fought for the Union, and now lived on Quality Hill. But the postwar decades saw the city’s eastward expansion, and by the mid1880s quite a few impressive residences were being built on east Ninth Street and out Independence Avenue.The rivalry between northerners and southerners—or in more politic terms, west side versus east side—involved business interests as well as social ones. In any event, Colonel Warder was able to bring together a number of east-side investors to help underwrite construction of his opera house. Warder’s friend A. A. Tomlinson later recalled that he and Warder were boarding at the same place when the architect’s plans and estimates came in.Warder proudly displayed the materials to his friend, who cautioned him that the prospectus failed to include a number of items that would drive up the cost.The original estimate of $150,000 eventually escalated to $350,000 and, as Tomlinson feared, drove Warder into bankruptcy within a few years. The theater itself certainly was designed on a far grander scale than either the Coates or Gilliss opera houses. Furthermore, the building incorporated an elegant family hotel, and another hotel was constructed across the street for touring theater company members. The hotel component of the investment would ensure that nobody needed to patronize the west side’s Coates House hotel. Groundbreaking for the Warder Grand Opera House on the northeast

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Edwin Booth (1833–1893), perhaps the finest actor in American history, played Kansas City three times, at Coates Opera House in the spring of 1887 and at the Warder Grand in 1887 and 1888. From Montrose J. Moses, Famous Actor Families in America (1906).

corner of Ninth and Holmes took place in mid-April 1887,the same month as Edwin Booth’s first Kansas City engagement. The news that Booth, America’s premier actor (in most estimations the greatest in American stage history), would give four performances at the Coates Opera House beginning 28 April unleashed a frenzy of ticket speculation unprecedented in the city. Coates manager Mel Hudson came in for considerable criticism for not taking greater precautions against ticket scalpers and counterfeiters.The Star printed a mock classified advertisement on 28 April that spoofed both the Booth speculation and the real estate boom: “ —    seats for Friday night. For sale cheap, or will exchange for property on South McGee Street.” In any event, the gross receipts for the four performances at the Coates totaled $13,000, an exceptional figure both for Booth and for Kansas City. Thus it could be no surprise when Colonel Warder, seeking the most prestigious possible attraction to inaugurate his theater, thought first of Edwin Booth. It was Warder’s good fortune that Booth at the same time was forming a partnership to tour with Lawrence Barrett. A full-week engagement of the Booth-Barrett joint-star company

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would certainly outshine Booth’s earlier half week at the Coates. In June 1887 Colonel Warder and his theater manager, Corydon Craig, negotiated the contract. Given the success of Booth’s April engagement, Barrett—who oversaw business arrangements for their tour—considered asking a percentage of the gross. Given the unexpected turn of events that would surround the opening of the Warder Grand, Barrett did well to accept instead a guarantee of $3,000 per performance for a seven-performance (six evenings, one matinee) week. The gala inaugural performance was set for 24 October 1887. By midAugust concerns were being expressed about whether the Warder Grand could be completed on time. Excavations for the foundation were protracted by the solid bedrock on the site. A strike of brick-makers put the work further behind schedule.Then railroad congestion brought more delays as freight cars carrying iron from foundries in Chicago and St. Louis were sidetracked in favor of unusually heavy passenger traffic.2 Arthur B. Chase, director of the Booth-Barrett tour, considered rebooking the company into Lincoln, St. Joseph, and Des Moines, even though those cities would bring only $2,700 per performance. Colonel Warder and his opera house lessee, Frank C. Hamilton, also had a way out, for L. M. Crawford, who managed theaters in several Kansas towns, offered to assume their contract for Booth and Barrett.Warder and Hamilton, however, both remained unrealistically optimistic and assured everyone that all would be well.What they could not anticipate was the frigid weather that would hit in the latter half of October. A week before the scheduled opening, tickets went on sale at the library. Business was brisk, despite multiple distractions including the continuing Crystal Palace exposition as well as the afterglow of the visit of President Grover Cleveland and the Priests of Pallas ball on the thirteenth. Much of the four-story exterior of the new opera house looked good, with cut stone in place on the south facade.Those who saw the interior,however,expressed reservations, as scaffolding still stood in the auditorium and the plastering had barely begun, which meant that there would be insufficient time for frescoing. Nor were any doors in place. Asked what Booth and Barrett would do if the Warder Grand failed to pass the safety inspection, Hamilton responded testily:“They would do as they pleased the entire week. Our contract with them says that they are to play at the Warder Grand, and no place else, and if the house, through some unforeseen accident, should be unfit for occupancy, we will be obliged to pay the tragedians $18,000 in cold cash without getting any benefit from their visit. Neither Booth nor

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Barrett would play in any place except a theatre, and there is none that we would rent. As far as their playing at the Board of Trade building or the Priests of Pallas ball room is concerned, there is not the least truth in it.The idea is absurd.”3 The work of installing the traps and other mechanical devices kept stage carpenter Claude Hagen so busy that he could spare no time to build scenery for the opening. Civil War battle lines were drawn again when Hamilton attempted to rent scenery from the Coates or the Gilliss; the southerners of Kansas City’s east side were not going to get help from the northerners on the bluff overlooking the west bottoms.Thus, on the Thursday before the scheduled Monday opening,Warder and Hamilton sent Augustus Thomas (who was then editor of Hamilton’s weekly Kansas City Mirror and would later become a well-known dramatist) by train to St. Louis to rent scenery there.Thomas pleaded the case well to Charles Pope, veteran of the Coates Opera House’s inaugural season and now manager of the firstclass Pope’s Theatre in St. Louis. Indeed, Lawrence Barrett had inaugurated Pope’s Theatre seven years earlier, and thus the use of the Pope’s scenery in Kansas City would put Barrett “amid old familiar scenes,”reported the News on 24 October.Thomas recalled in his memoirs that he “started back Saturday morning with a baggage-car full of scenery attached to a freight train.”4 On Sunday afternoon he arrived in Kansas City, and by Monday morning the scenery had been transported to the Warder Grand stage. Monday morning also marked the arrival of the passenger train carrying Booth and Barrett and their company.“By the gods, it is cold!” was the great tragedian’s exclamation upon stepping off the train at 10:30 a.m. at Union Depot. According to the Star reporter, Booth “shivered and struck an attitude like Hamlet assumes when awaiting his first interview with the Ghost at Elsinore. He was well muffled about the neck, but the eager and nipping air increased his natural pallor and caused blue rings to form under his eyes and round his classic nostrils.” He and Barrett were escorted through the crowd of star-gazers and into a waiting carriage for the drive to the Coates hotel. Around noon the company members assembled at the theater for the usual pickup rehearsal to familiarize themselves with the facilities. With the dressing rooms unready, the theatrical trunks had been deposited on the stage, although neither on the stage nor in the auditorium was the flooring complete. Stoves were placed around the auditorium as temporary substitutes for the steam-heating apparatus that was not yet operational.Two days earlier the building inspection committee had pronounced the structure

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safe for the public. Even tour director Arthur B. Chase expressed confidence that the show would go on, for it was understood that a new theater is rarely finished in every detail when it opens; indeed, Booth and Barrett had recently inaugurated a theater in Milwaukee that had been deemed unready and yet it yielded the region’s largest grosses to date. If Colonel Warder appeared less than ebullient, it was only a bit of fatigue from two weeks of virtually round-the-clock presence on the site to encourage the workers. Ever optimistic, he still fully expected to open the theater that evening. Barrett overcame Booth’s reservations and confirmed to Warder that they would indeed perform as contracted.They and their company, without rehearsing, returned to the hotel to rest for the performance. The big problem was that the theater had no roof. Nor had doors been fitted into the loading dock and other apertures. As icy winds swept into the space, one wag commented that clearly the house was already open. Late on Monday afternoon an inch of snow fell onto the stage and main floor of the unheated interior. Warder and Hamilton had no choice but to cancel the performance. A group of volunteers informed theatergoers as they arrived that their tickets could be used for a special added Wednesday matinee performance or they could be refunded the next day. And all through the night, work on the theater continued.The snow was cleared, the stoves heated full blast, and tarpaulins were stretched across the iron rods that would eventually support a roof and dome. How poignant that programs were printed on silk for a performance that did not take place! The cover of the beautiful souvenir program for Monday 24 October 1887 features an illustration of the Warder Grand Opera House’s impressive exterior and beneath that a now-ironic quotation by renowned theater architect J. B. McElfatrick:“The Most Complete Theatre in the World.”The program was to have been given “compliments of Corydon F. Craig and Frank C. Hamilton,” lessees and managers. On the next page came a six-stanza poem by George W. Warder, “On the Opening of the Warder Grand Opera House.” These verses invoke the creation of the universe, the world stage on which humans act their parts, the moral purpose of the drama, and lofty hopes for the new theater.5 The next silken page is headed “To Our Patrons:The Managers take undisguised pleasure in presenting to the theatre loving public the distinguished Tragedians, Mr. Edwin Booth and Mr. Lawrence Barrett, And their Superb Company, in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedy in five acts, entitled Julius Caesar.”The cast list followed,including Booth as Brutus,Barrett as Cassius,E.J.Buckley as Mark Anthony, John A. Lane as Julius Caesar, Edwin Royle as Cinna, and Miss

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Minna K. Gale as Portia. The infamous date, “October 24, 1887,” stands alone on the last page. Considering the rigors of touring in those days, even under the optimal conditions enjoyed by a prestigious company such as that of Booth and Barrett, the two stars and their supporting actors surely welcomed the unexpected opportunity for a good night’s rest when the performance was canceled. In his book Trouping, Philip C. Lewis looked at train schedules for the itinerary followed by Booth and Barrett on their 1887–1888 tour. Leaving Buffalo, New York, at 6:45 a.m. on 15 September 1887, the company traveled the 258 miles in seven and a half hours to perform that evening in Detroit.After four performances there, they played a full-week engagement in Minneapolis;then three consecutive one-night stands in Duluth,Eau Claire, and Oshkosh, followed by a full week in Milwaukee; then twenty-one performances in nineteen days in Chicago.The 488-mile jump from Chicago to Kansas City is listed as a journey of twenty-one hours and forty minutes. When they stepped off the Hannibal train on the morning of the twentyfourth, they were expecting to perform that evening. In any event, Booth and Barrett did give their contracted seven performances at Warder Grand Opera House: Othello on Tuesday and Friday evenings, Julius Caesar for the added matinee on Wednesday as well as on Saturday evening, Hamlet on Wednesday evening and as the Saturday matinee, and Macbeth on Thursday evening. In the end, director Arthur B. Chase pronounced the Kansas City engagement a success, and Warder invited Booth and Barrett to return the following season. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, however, the picture still did not look rosy, for the bitter cold persisted along with the frantic labor in the theater.When Booth and Barrett came at noon to check on the progress, scaffolding still stood in the orchestra circle while the stage area was a hive of activity. As Booth and Barrett conferred on stage with their fur collars turned up against their faces, they didn’t see an inexperienced stagehand struggling to move a wing flat, which he let fall. Luckily,Augustus Thomas was on stage, having come to help Claude Hagen, and saw the flat—“dropping as a knife-blade, it had lethal possibilities.” Reacting quickly,Thomas jumped toward the two stars and shoved them apart just in time to prevent their being struck.Thomas recalled,“Mr. Barrett, in real tragedian fashion, said indignantly:‘Don’t put your hands on me, fellow!’ Mr. Booth lifted his gaze from the broken scene and said,‘Thank you.’” Thomas contemplated writing a story for the weekly Mirror about Barrett’s ill-tempered rebuke, but Barrett later apologized and attributed the outburst to nervousness.6

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The decision was made to go ahead with the scheduled performance of Othello, but to perform it in a single enclosed setting—a baronial hall with a ceiling—that would minimize the drafts. Each player would wear his or her heaviest costume from any of the plays in the repertoire, and in some cases they layered several costumes. As the two thousand or so ticket holders began arriving around 7:30 p.m. for the performance, they were asked to wait outside just a little longer. Those in carriages huddled under their carriage robes with heated bricks. Others had to stand and watch as the workmen—who were still in the process of dismantling the scaffolding from the interior—periodically pitched the heavy beams into a pile outside the theater’s main portal, on Ninth Street. Inside the theater, it was after eight o’clock when the last beam came down, eliciting a cheer from Warder, Hamilton, Craig, and all the workmen. Then the elegantly clad ushers with satin badges on their spade-tail coats scurried to set up temporary seats.The temporary doors opened to the audience at nine o’clock.Treasurer Mort Craig created a temporary box office in a cubbyhole, illuminated by a brakeman’s lantern. True to the Kansas City spirit, the Warder Grand’s first audience took the situation in stride.“Send up a rocket, Craig, and let them know down town she’s open,” said one gentleman. Still the auditorium was “as cold as Greenland,” so gentlemen declined to remove their hats, and ladies kept their colorful satin evening dresses hidden beneath their wraps. One gentleman declared that having spent ten dollars for tickets and three dollars for his wife’s flowers, he was determined to stick it out. Another left the theater and returned with a horse blanket, which he wrapped around his fair companion, as the audience rewarded him with cheers. Despite chilled fingers, the orchestra managed to play a rousing overture, which also served as a pretext for the audience’s rhythmic stamping of chilly feet. When the music ended, there were calls for Colonel Warder.“The genial poet stepped on the stage,” reported the News the next day, complimented Booth and Barrett, begged the audience’s patience, and assured them that the steam heating would soon be operational.An usher presented him with a lyre made of flowers with his name emblazoned in purple immortelles, and Warder returned to his box. Augustus Thomas had been delegated to explain that the scenic arrangement was intended to protect the ladies of the company from cold drafts. His speech went over well with the audience, though it soon became chillingly evident that the “enclosed chamber” concept afforded little protection from drafts for either actors or audience. Standing at the back of the auditorium,Arthur B. Chase watched and

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smiled and expressed astonishment at the entire sequence of events that would actually culminate in a performance; the only words he could find to describe it were “Wild West.” The performance of Othello began at nearly ten o’clock.Theatergoers in the expensive orchestra seating kept their places as long as they could bear the cold, but most of them gradually and discreetly migrated to the boxes to be closer to stoves that had been set up. Some gentlemen slipped out at intermission to purchase liquid fortification for the remainder of the evening. Meanwhile, dwindling numbers in the audience gave evidence that some did return to their warm homes before the performance ended. Most newspapers focused on conditions in the audience and the incomplete facility rather than the performance of Othello. The most generousspirited reporting on the evening of the twenty-fifth appeared the next day in the Evening News: But after all the audience had to endure, no one thought of grumbling when the curtain parted and Mr. Booth came on the boards as Iago.The action of the play once being under way, cold and discomfort were forgotten in admiration of the wondrous powers of the two masters. . . . There was much that was ludicrous about last night’s performance, it is true; but it was enough to establish the fact that a Kansas City audience is good natured and admires pluck; that Booth and Barrett are not only great actors but great-hearted gentlemen; and that Colonel Warder and Managers Craig and Hamilton are plucky, enterprising and energetic and fully deserve the success which they will doubtless attain.

Warder told the Journal reporter that evening: “I had two objects in view—one was to provide the east side of town with a metropolitan house and the other to break up the existing pool. I believe in competition. I have leased the house for five years to Messers. Craig and Hamilton for $24,000 a year. I have labored under every disadvantage in erecting the building. It has been a hard year to get laborers and a terrible one for brick. It took two months to build my foundation.”To complete the opera house to perfection,Warder said he would spare no expense,and yet the civic-minded,charitable donor also looked forward to his next project: a home for friendless women and newsboys. Wednesday brought the matinee performance of Julius Caesar to make up for the one missed on Monday. Warder insisted that the boilers were sending hot air into the auditorium, but the small audience remained bundled up and the actors kept the enclosed setting. That evening’s Hamlet

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[T]he presence of Booth and Barrett in Kansas City had a peculiar effect.These exponents of the drama were esteemed, not merely for their personal worth and admired for their great attainments; they inspired a measure of affection, even idolatry. It was the habit of the two, when they played the Warder Grand, to walk over there from the Coates House in the morning for their mail and then leisurely to make their way back, with detours through the shopping district. It was not uncommon to see them followed at respectful distance by admirers who were fortunate enough to encounter them in these walks. (EY 4)

marked the first time in the engagement that all the scene changes were executed. Moreover, the comfort level in the auditorium allowed the removal of furs and overcoats—at least until one of the portable steam pumps broke down during act 4.The performance itself elicited encomia. For example, the Journal’s report of 27 October: “Both Mr. Booth and Mr. Barrett handle their rapiers like men trained in the old school, Barrett with added youth—Booth with excellent grace.” Improvements in the theater continued to be observable at each performance. At Thursday evening’s Macbeth, the drunken porter elicited waves of laughter and applause with his line,“This place is too cold for hell.”The remainder of the week brought warmer temperatures and larger audiences. Still the box office receipts came in $11,000 short of the $18,000 guaranteed to the Booth-Barrett company. Hamilton had to liquidate his assets, including the Mirror, to help raise the cash. The Warder Grand’s first season went forward with fine attractions. Stars who played there with their own companies that season included Vernona Jarbeau, Helena Modjeska, Minnie Maddern, and Mademoiselle Rhéa.The theater acquired not only a roof and doors but all the refinements necessary to make it one of the most impressive opera houses west of the Mississippi. Booth and Barrett did return in September 1888, with virtually the same company as the previous season, and rehearsed their productions on the Warder Grand stage preparatory to launching their new tour. Painters were putting the finishing touches on the interior decor when the BoothBarrett company arrived, and an awning was added from the main entrance to the curb, so that patrons could alight from their carriages and be protected from rain. Moreover, the walk was carpeted.7

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One eyewitness account of Booth and Barrett at the Warder Grand has not hitherto been noted by theater historians, perhaps because it appears to conflate aspects of both the 1887 and 1888 engagements. Burris Jenkins (1869–1945), who grew up to be a nationally prominent liberal Protestant minister and head of the Linwood /Community Christian congregation in Kansas City, was in high school when his cousin Carl arranged for him and a few others to serve as “supernumeraries for the great Booth and Barrett engagement at the new Opera House.The ‘Warder Grand’ planned to celebrate its opening with a week of Shakespearean plays acted by this great team, perhaps the greatest in American history.The Opera House, not yet quite complete, had no roof; tarpaulins stretched across the top. It happened that the night when The Merchant of Venice was performed was a moonlit one; so the management removed the tarpaulins, turned out the lights, and let the moonlight pour down upon the stage for the garden love scene between Jessica and Lorenzo. Standing in a corner backstage, I saw the two beautiful young people who played the parts rehearsing, in their costumes, the business of shifting Jessica from one arm and shoulder of Lorenzo to the other, with each repetition of ‘On such a night as this—.’ Very lovely, both the rehearsing and the scene. But on another night of the engagement it rained. The tarpaulins proved of no use at all, and many in the audience raised umbrellas. Not so lovely. But the show must go on.” Although this passage from Jenkins’s memoir exhibits either faulty or creative memory (for the roofless theater was 1887, but The Merchant of Venice was 1888), it is worth including it here as writing that conveys the spirit of those times: We kept guard at Elsinore and stood round the throne. We yelled and shouted with the Roman mob while Antony made his splendid oration (Carl almost led the populace).We moved with Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. We stood in the court at Venice. I was within ten feet of Edwin Booth when, as Shylock, he whetted his knife on the sole of his shoe preparatory to cutting the heart out of Antonio.We stood in the wings while Iago (Booth) poured the poison of jealousy into the ears of Othello (Lawrence Barrett), and finally when Othello smothered the lovely Desdemona.We saw the great pair of tragedians on and off the stage, and often heard Barrett nervously calling his more dilatory partner:“Edwin! Edwin! Where are you, Edwin?”Altogether it proved a great week of study for all of us.8

The completed Warder Grand Opera House was indeed magnificent, “the largest and handsomest playhouse in the West,” according to the Times

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of 21 December 1897.The Kansas City Journal published the most detailed descriptions of it, both for its original opening (26 October 1887) and for the second opening at the time of Booth and Barrett’s return (11 September 1888).The foundation walls, built on bedrock, tapered from seven and a half feet thick at the base to five feet at ground level. Cement, used instead of mortar throughout the structure, contributed to its sturdiness.The outer shell of the red brick building measured 132 by 144 feet. Inside the five-story rectangular building, a semicircular brick wall sixty feet high enveloped the auditorium and also served as a fire wall between the theater areas and the hotel.Twin towers flanked the arched entrance on the stately south facade of cut stone. Through those doors the theatergoer entered a fifty-foot-wide hall, which opened into the spacious foyer that wrapped around the auditorium. The seating capacity may have been as high as 3,046 ( Journal, 26 October 1887) or as low as the 2,131 later reported by the Times (21 December 1897). A tally of Warder Grand seating by sections yields a total of 2,571: ground floor seating of 678 in the orchestra or parquette, loges, and dress circle, plus 204 in the six ground-floor boxes, each of which seated 34; 495 in the family circle (lower balcony) plus 204 in the six boxes on the second floor; 495 in the balcony plus 16 in each of the two boxes on the third floor; and 500 in the gallery. In any case, the Warder Grand’s capacity easily exceeded the capacities of the Coates and the Gilliss, each of which seated between 1,500 and 2,000.A great improvement over the old “flat-floor” opera houses was the seating on a slope, which allowed a good view even from the back row. Seventy feet above the parquette, a circular art-glass dome thirteen feet in diameter glowed in jewel colors with electric lighting behind it. The elegantly upholstered plush chairs with numbers well visible were made by M. R. Stiles of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Most remarkable for such a large-capacity auditorium was the “feeling of coziness.” Several sources mention the excellent acoustics. A combination of gas and electricity provided illumination, “the same fixtures answering either purpose.”The colors in the auditorium, however, were chosen “to suit a gaslit theater.” A system of ventilating fans and air wells to the top of the house circulated the heat and created a change of air every eight minutes.The ladies’ parlor and cloakroom and the gentlemen’s smoking room were designed to be “the handsomest . . . in the West.” The elaborate plans for the Warder Grand Opera House also included a summer garden theater on the roof, along with a café, refreshment tables, shrubbery, and fountains. That “aerial garden,” served by three elevators,

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would have a capacity of 2,000, for the roof was deemed “strong enough to bear the weight of a railroad train.” Presumably this phase of the plans did not come to fruition, as no advertisements for it ever appeared in the newspapers. The vast stage measured 105 by 55 feet, with a proscenium opening approximately fifty feet wide by fifty feet high. Indeed, it was said that a horse and rig could travel a complete circle on this huge playing area.With twelve feet of space beneath the stage, a gridiron sixty feet above the stage floor, and a paint bridge at the rear of the stage, the most elaborate productions could be accommodated.The St. Louis firm of Nixon,Albert, and Toomey created original scenes, each twenty-two feet high. Mr.Toomey, who had “furnished over 700 opera houses,” spent more than two months in Kansas City to supervise the scenery and make it “the most perfect in America.” The drop curtain, designed by Albert, depicted Cleopatra’s barge coming ashore where Antony awaited her under sunny skies.Theatergoers, knowing their history, were expected to read into the happy scene a premonition and warning against false ambition. Corydon Craig and Frank Hamilton soon learned that they had overreached their financial powers.To earn a profit on their $24,000-a-year lease they would have to draw capacity houses all season. No manager could have booked a steady stream of blockbusters like Booth and Barrett—or Helena Modjeska, who played two weeks later in the still-unfinished theater. Even before the second Booth-Barrett engagement, the management of the Warder Grand had passed into the hands of J. L. Buford, whose tenure lasted scarcely two months. On 19 November 1888, the Kansas theater entrepreneur Lester M. Crawford signed a five-year contract to lease and manage the Warder Grand. Crawford was a competent manager. Besides having fewer dark nights during his seasons, he brought in such luminaries as Rose Coghlan, Minnie Maddern, Henry E. Dixey, Booth’s nephew Creston Clarke, Fanny Janauschek, Frederick Warde, Lawrence Barrett on his famous Ganelon tour (with William S. Hart as a supporting player), and other attractions that proved appealing to Kansas City audiences. Unfortunately for Crawford, George Warder suffered financial setbacks and became unable to meet the payments on the building. On 10 January 1890,Warder contracted with George W. Henry for Henry’s purchase of the Warder Grand Opera House. By October Warder was forced to bring suit against Henry for the amount due. Henry tried to use Crawford as the scapegoat, saying that purchase of the building should have allowed him to terminate Crawford’s lease. Press coverage of the complicated situation was

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The original drop curtain at the Warder Grand Opera House, installed in 1887, came from the St. Louis scenic firm of Nixon,Albert and Toomey. It depicted Mark Antony poised to greet Cleopatra as she arrives on her barge. Courtesy of Union Station/ Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

substantial.9 Henry finally succeeded in evicting Crawford in the spring of 1891. This was clearly a disastrous move, for the theater was then dark all during the autumn months of 1891 except for two nights in October (one amateur production, one minstrel show) and a seven-performance engagement of Julia Marlowe (30 November–5 December 1891). It should be noted that 30 November 1891 marked the official Kansas City debut of Julia Marlowe, who would soon be celebrated as the leading lady of the turn-of-the-century American stage and would play her next six engagements in the city at Coates Opera House. Few people realized that she had actually played Gilliss Opera House eight years earlier, in November 1883, under an interim stage name, Fannie Brough. In that company headed by Josephine Reiley and Frederick Paulding, Fannie Brough played small roles such as Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet. Yet she caught the eye of theatergoers, and Latchaw quoted in “The Enchanted Years of the

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Julia Marlowe (1866–1950) spent part of her childhood in the Kansas City area. Regarded as one of the leading lights of the American stage by the 1890s, she toured extensively from 1887 to 1915. She is shown here in the title role in Colinette, a light comedy adapted by Henry Guy Carleton from a French play for her 1898–1899 season. From The Illustrated American Stage (1901).

Stage” a review that mentioned her:“Fannie Brough, whose bright face and pretty figure so captivated the audiences at the Gillis the last few nights . . . is an extremely pleasant little lady and deserves success” (EY 60). In a burst of civic pride, Latchaw noted also that Julia Marlowe attended school for a year in Kansas City. In 1872 her family lived in the West Bottoms and the little girl was known by her birth name, Sarah Frost.

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During the same week as Julia Marlowe’s adult debut in the theater that George Warder built,Fanny Davenport was performing at the Coates Opera House, and the beloved Joseph Jefferson opened an engagement at the Gilliss on 3 December, with a company that included Viola Allen. Marlowe’s road manager, Fred Stinson, arrived in Kansas City to find disappointing advance sales for the yet little known Shakespearean actress. Certainly, the competition was exceptional, and it came at the height of a season during which audiences had lost the habit of going over to the eastside theater, which had been essentially dark since April. As a further complication, the bill-posting company (which, Latchaw discreetly neglects to mention, was owned by Coates manager Mel Hudson) had shunted the Warder Grand notices “into the alleys.” Stinson’s desperate remedy was to distribute a bundle of passes downtown to a well-targeted potential clientele to fill the house on Marlowe’s first two nights.Word-of-mouth took care of the rest, as the first-night pass-holders returned with guests to see the “ingratiating personality” with the “caressing voice and graceful movement” in her other vehicles.Thus began, according to Latchaw, Julia Marlowe’s “reign as our foremost actress of Shakespearean and kindred roles” (EY 60). It is sad to relate that Julia Marlowe’s official Kansas City debut cannot precisely be said to have taken place at the Warder Grand Opera House.That is because owner G.W. Henry callously changed the theater’s name. From October 1891 until it was demolished in July 1960, it was called the Auditorium Theatre. Warder’s friend, Dr. David R. Porter, commented for the Star at the time of Warder’s death on 8 February 1907 that “George felt very much hurt when the name of the Warder Grand theater was changed to the ‘Auditorium.’ George was so cheerful and optimistic that nothing could take the smile from his face, but the changing of the name of the theater hurt him more even than he showed.” Indeed, as recollected in the Times on 21 December 1897, it was “a change to which the people of the city did not take kindly at the time.” According to the Post of 8 February 1907, “a fine sentiment impelled Warder’s friends, for a long time, to call the theater by its old name because of their loyalty to its founder.” Over the next few years the Auditorium Theatre went through a number of different owners and managers. In the spring of 1892 manager William F. Blande kept the doors open by installing a stock company to perform during the long hiatuses between touring companies and musical events. Blande recruited his stock company in New York, selecting as leading lady and leading man Eleanor Carey and George Learock, both of whom had performed in Kansas City with reputable touring companies. The company never seems to have settled on an official name, for it appears

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Taking away Warder’s name always has seemed a cruel and needless humiliation for one who had put so much of his life as well as his fortune in a public institution, more especially as the theater was given the stupid name of Auditorium, which applies to only part of a theater. But whatever Colonel Warder’s disappointments may have been, and they must have been grievous, no one ever saw him in a depressed state of mind.The affability that was characteristic of him in prosperity did not forsake him in adversity . . . even when he was reduced to extremities. He might be seen at noontime, going in or coming out of a 10-cent lunchroom on Grand avenue between Tenth and Eleventh, his frock coat somewhat shiny, his silk hat the worse for wear, but carefully brushed, yet with his head high, his step quick, his spirit unsubdued. (EY 3)

variously as New Stock Company, the Stock Company,Auditorium Stock, Blande Stock Company, Kansas City’s own stock company, and Kansas City Stock Company. In any event, that company lasted only three months, until May 1892.During the fall of 1892 the Auditorium remained mostly dark. G.W. Henry sold most of the stock in the theater to his brother Robert L. Henry, who brought in a new lessee and manager, George Bowes. Auspiciously, Bowes began his tenure with three Paderewski concerts in April 1893, followed by a full-week engagement of Richard Mansfield before the summer hiatus. His fall season featured three major companies in full-week engagements: Kate Claxton, Milton Nobles, and Mrs. John Drew, culminating in a concert by Adelina Patti on 29 December. Latchaw recalled that Mrs. John Drew’s engagement at the Auditorium marked her last appearance in Kansas City and that she presented an old warhorse of a comedy, The Road to Ruin, in repertory with Sheridan’s The Rivals (23–28 October 1893). Although it was a strong company, including her son Sidney Drew, the show did not sell tickets. Latchaw dined with Mrs. Drew, her son, and her grandson Lionel Barrymore at the Midland Hotel, a very fine hotel not far from the Auditorium (on the east side of Walnut at Seventh Street), interviewing the grande dame about her illustrious long career during the meal.Afterward a minister, who had dined at a nearby table, asked Latchaw: “Who was that distinguished looking old lady?” Upon learning that she was an actress, the minister made disparaging comments. Latchaw was mortified and recalled that “in spite of what seemed to me a hopeless narrowmindedness, he became a bishop” (EY 9).

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Although Olga Nethersole (1866–1951) achieved her greatest notoriety as the French courtesan in Sapho by Clyde Fitch, Kansas City audiences found her Carmen quite sufficiently titillating. From The Illustrated American Stage (1901).

Prurient attitudes came to the fore also in connection with Olga Nethersole’s first Kansas City engagement, at the Auditorium in April 1896. Nethersole’s portrayals of women of questionable character were shocking for their realism. Her full-week engagement at the Auditorium comprised one performance each of Camille, Frou Frou, and Denise, but four performances as the baddest girl of all: Carmen. It was in Carmen, Latchaw noted, that Nethersole initiated a “controversy over her tropical love-making.” She refused to be bound by “the traditions in taste” and “gave Carmen a very bad reputation before she got through with her” (EY 58). When

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Nethersole returned to Kansas City in February 1897,she played the Coates and again gave three performances of Carmen but only one performance of each of the other plays in her repertoire that season. Clearly, Kansas City audiences were outwardly scandalized and yet expressed their real interests through ticket purchases for the shocking material. In this they differed little from East Coast audiences, for Nethersole’s performance in the title role of Sapho in New York City in 1900 got her arrested and brought to trial for indecency. The all-male jury acquitted her, and she benefited nicely from the publicity. Latchaw talked with Miss Nethersole between the acts of Sapho when she later brought it to Kansas City and was impressed with the profound sincerity of her understanding of the role. Another delicious anecdote from the Auditorium hints at the sweetness with just a touch of titillation that characterized midwestern Victorianism. On Thanksgiving night in 1895, following a Missouri-Kansas football game that afternoon, the two teams were given boxes opposite each other in the Auditorium Theatre. Missouri had won “one of its few victories over Kansas,” and a trophy was presented onstage after Camille D’Arville’s comic opera company’s performance of Madeline; or, Magic Kiss. Missouri governor William J. Stone happened to be in the audience and someone called for him to speak. Miss D’Arville crossed to his box and led him onto the stage.“I scarcely know what to do,” he began. Perhaps inspired by the title of the comic opera they had just seen, someone called out: “Kiss her.” As Latchaw recounted it: “The governor looked at the beautiful Camille in a quizzical sort of way, as if wondering whether he should do that sort of thing—in public. But Camille relieved the situation by advancing on the governor, implanting a firm kiss on his cheek.‘Now what shall I say?’ again began the characteristically deliberate Stone. Another shout: ‘Tell us who the next police commissioner will be!’” (EY 57). The Auditorium was dark throughout most of 1894. A new owner and managers in the fall of 1895 (National Bank of Commerce, proprietor; David S. Henderson, lessee and manager; W. S. McAllister, local manager) presided over a season that is quite reflective of transitions that were occurring in the American theater nationwide.While road companies headed by stars who presented plays in repertory continued to flourish in the 1890s, a growing number of combination companies were booked into the firstclass theaters of major cities.The combinations were companies assembled in New York City with all of the production elements for a single play. Most often the plays that were sent out under the combination system were new plays, either recent successes in New York or plays chosen for special appeal

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to hinterland audiences. Latchaw believed that it was the combination system’s emphasis on new plays that opened the way for a mini-revival of the old stock company system. In his view, the public yearned for its old favorites in addition to the new attractions, and a low-overhead resident stock company could present revivals of familiar works at lower ticket prices than the amount that touring companies needed to charge. We can see all three of those types of organization in the Auditorium’s 1895–1896 season. Among the road companies were several with Shakespearean or classic repertoires:Walker Whiteside (Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, and Richard III on 15 –16 November 1895; this was still more than five years before he would lose his Shakespearean wardrobe in the Coates fire and have to switch to a contemporary drama), Louis James (2–7 December), and Richard Mansfield (17–22 February 1896). Combination companies included a play called Silver Lining under the management of Tone Miller (16 –21 September 1895), David Henderson’s Company in Sinbad (23–28 September), and William Hoey and Company in The Globe Trotter (30 September– 5 October). Interestingly, Marie Wainwright seemed to be having it both ways, for she toured with brand-new material but performed her three new plays in traditional repertory (13–18 April 1896). Finally, in May 1896, the Auditorium hosted a Summer Dramatic Stock Company managed by William F. Blande. Henry Jewett, Daisy Lovering, and Rose Eytinge headed an ensemble that presented a different play each week for three weeks. With the revival of stock companies, even Coates Opera House accommodated one, if only during the summer months.The Kemper-Wagenhals Stock Company presented a sequence of eight bills there in 1894—each bill running one week in stock—from 14 May to 7 July.That company reappeared in 1895 to play the Coates in May and June, and then presented two Shakespeare plays outdoors in Fairmount Park in July. Collin Kemper and Lincoln A.Wagenhals had met when they acted with different touring companies playing a small town in Ohio at the same time. A year later, their chance encounter in a New York booking office led to their forming a partnership.They selected Kansas City for a stock company enterprise and enlisted the aid of the Kansas City Star’s managing editor, T. W. Johnston, to publicize their offerings. Although Kemper and Wagenhals made some money in Kansas City, they moved on to other theatrical ventures. Other stock companies popped up for brief periods too,like the Gillis Stock Company, which filled several weeks at the New Gillis Opera House in the fall of 1895, but none showed the staying power of the Woodward Stock Company at the Auditorium Theatre.

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In the fall of 1897, O. D.Woodward installed an ensemble at the Auditorium that lasted fairly continually until 1910.Woodward’s organization did not operate merely as summer stock during the months when most theaters stood empty because of the heat but was a resident, regular-season company having a long-term association with the Auditorium Theatre. Orville Delbert Woodward (1866 –1946) had gained his theatrical management experience on a midwestern ten-twent’-thirt’ circuit and had operated a stock company in Omaha.There he met W. J. Burgess, and they formed the Woodward and Burgess Amusement Company.When the Auditorium’s new owner,Alex Fraser, was casting about for someone to manage the Auditorium, he was impressed by the success of Paxton and Burgess in their management of the Boyd Theatre in Omaha.Thus Burgess and his partners expanded their enterprise to Kansas City. W. A. Paxton and W. J. Burgess would have liked to operate the Auditorium as a first-class theater, but the obstacles posed by the Theatrical Syndicate were formidable, for the Syndicate then controlled virtually every first-class theater in the nation.Thus Woodward and Burgess decided, against the advice of everyone, to offer first-class entertainment at popular prices.Woodward moved to Kansas City to take charge of the enterprise. Their judgment was vindicated, for the stock company was soon playing each evening to audiences of more than two thousand.The Auditorium’s huge capacity meant that a resident company could operate profitably with ticket prices as low as ten cents for almost any seat in the house—advertised as “Prices for the People” (with the first floor and first three rows of the balcony costing only slightly more, up to twenty-five cents). The initial season’s success allowed Woodward to strengthen the company, adding experienced players to cover the usual range of roles in familiar plays. One of those older plays drew William Rockhill Nelson, owner of the Kansas City Star (“A Paper for the People”), to attend a stock company performance at the Auditorium. Nelson, according to Latchaw, “was so delighted, not alone with the old play and the performance, but with what the privilege and the prices meant to many people ordinarily deprived of good theatrical entertainment, that he issued orders that everything that The Star consistently could do to help the Woodward enterprise be done” (EY 36). The Star’s support was surely a contributing factor in the Auditorium company’s profits, which averaged $40,000 a year over several seasons. Thus Woodward’s arrogance toward Nelson in later years—after Woodward expanded to other theaters as well as nontheatrical business interests—seems regrettable.That story will be told in Chapter 7.

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In this photograph of the south facade of the Auditorium Theatre, the poster to the right of the canopied main entrance tells us that the Auditorium Stock Company was in residence and that all seats were ten or twenty-five cents. From Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

The old favorites that so pleased the Woodward Stock Company’s followers included comedy dramas such as The Two Orphans and Private Secretary as well as melodramas such as East Lynne and even Ten Nights in a Barroom, all of which were presented in November and December 1897.With specialty performers enlivening the bill, the formula bears a strong resemblance to that of the Gilliss during this period.The greater success of Woodward’s effort must be attributed to the crucial difference: the melodramas at the Gilliss were still being booked in from the road, whereas the resident stock company at the Auditorium could be counted on for consistency of quality, as well as the pleasure of seeing familiar actors in different roles. Consistency of quality extended also to the production values at the Auditorium:“Nothing Cheap But the Prices.”

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“The Silver King” is especially a drama for the Christmas season, having so much wholesome sentiment, which makes especially strong appeals to the patrons of such a house as the Auditorium. It has become quite an ordinary thing for the villain to be roundly hissed at this theater, and Mr. Livingstone, who is so fortunate, or unfortunate, as to be cast as all the peculiarly red-handed, although highly polished villains, has come to expect a good measure of hissing at each performance. Indeed, he feels rather slighted if he does not get it, but he had no cause to complain yesterday.The large audience so completely disapproved of his remarks when he told Nellie Denver to “get thee to the poor house,” that it threatened to stop the play and do away with the villain at once.The drama is one which wears well, a play which has made fame and money for a number of prominent actors, which is ample testimony as to its worth.The merit of the piece is so great that even in the hands of actors who are not stars it cannot but be an interesting bill. [Neither the review nor the advertisements gives the names of the play’s authors, Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman.] (Kansas City Times, 20 December 1897)

Ten weeks into that first season of the Woodward Stock Company, every theater owner’s nightmare became a reality once again. Fire broke out on the night of 20 December 1897 and destroyed the theater that George Warder had built.The fire was first noticed at around one o’clock on the morning of the twenty-first, when Howard Parker left the saloon on the southeast corner of the theater’s basement level. Seeing a flickering flame pattern on the snow, he looked up and spotted a small tongue of fire near the roof on the southeast corner. Parker ran to the hotel office, where the night clerk telephoned the alarm.Although the precise cause was never determined, the fire’s origin could be pinpointed to a hotel servant’s corner room on the fifth floor.The porter who occupied the room,Albert Brown, was awakened by the flames, and soon all the hotel employees were vacating their rooms on the fourth and fifth floors of the east side. Chief Hale’s fire company arrived by 1:30 a.m., and by 2:00 there were fifteen companies combating the blaze. Firemen carried hoses up the stairs to fight the fire from inside while others tried to get streams of water high enough to reach the flames from outside. Meanwhile it was strangely quiet inside the theater auditorium. There was time to take the performers’

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trunks from the dressing rooms and pile them up near the stage door on the Holmes Street side, “ready to be moved the moment the fire chief announced that the building was doomed,” reported the Journal of 21 December. Ultimately, the fire moved across the top of the building, amid the crisscross jungle of wooden joists and posts in the space between the roof and the lighted dome over the auditorium. Around 2:30 a.m. the flames started to burn downward into the scenery and could be seen from outside through the balcony-level windows.When the calcium canisters in the basement began to explode, stones and bricks were thrown off the building, and it was clear that it could not be saved. Although the west side of the building where the hotel was located did not at first appear to be in danger, the 105 guests were awakened and asked to evacuate. Many took the time to gather up their possessions and even to take large items down in the elevators. However, several who maintained permanent residences in the hotel lost valuable items: fine pianos, china and silver, paintings, libraries.The manager of the Victoria and other nearby hotels quickly sent word that Auditorium Hotel guests would be taken in for the night. Remarkably, no life was lost. Alex Fraser, owner of the Auditorium Theatre, lived with his family in a second-floor suite at the southwest corner. Not only did he lose all his personal possessions, but he estimated his business losses at $500,000. As Fraser stood “watching his money burn all night,” he sighed:“They will not be able to save anything and it is the first time since the building was built that it was ever paying anything” (Times Extra, 21 December 1897). Fraser commented further: “There was not a theater in this country so well watched as this was. Only last week we went through the entire building and overhauled all the electric light wires, taking extra precautions to make them safe against setting a fire.The lights were always turned off at midnight, and from that time till morning a night watchman patrolled the building. It was because I had taken such precautions against fire that I reduced my insurance a short time ago” ( Journal, 22 December 1897). W. J. Burgess, contacted in Omaha, took the next train to Kansas City. Even before Burgess arrived, O. D. Woodward acted quickly to make arrangements with the new lessee of the Gilliss, J. L. Buford, to move the Woodward Stock Company to the Gilliss Opera House as a stopgap measure.Amazingly, within minutes of Woodward’s telephoning the news that they would perform at the Gilliss that very evening, the twenty-first (thus not missing a single performance), the trucks with the stage properties and wardrobe of the Woodward Stock Company pulled up at the Gilliss and fans

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of the stock company came into the box office there to buy tickets.A sign was placed on the Auditorium ruins directing the public to the Gilliss and stating that tickets already purchased for the Auditorium would be honored. As reported in the Journal on 22 December: “When the curtain rang up, there were cheers, and the performance went with an appreciation that bespoke the most friendly consideration for the management and the company.The theater was cold,as there had not been enough time to get it properly heated; but the audience was warm and the players worked manfully under the trying circumstances of a chilly stage and a hasty readjustment.” At the Gilliss, the Auditorium company finished its weeklong run of The Silver King, followed by a two-performance revival of its popular production of The Lost Paradise. A long-term arrangement for the use of the Gilliss could not be negotiated, so Woodward and Burgess took the Woodward Stock Company to Omaha to perform in their new Creighton Theatre there. On 26 December 1897 Latchaw, then writing for the Journal, expressed the loss felt in Kansas City: “Thousands of people in this city will regret the withdrawal from Kansas City of the managers and the company who offered such meritorious plays at such low rates as to make their house the family theater of the city.While it is not impossible that this management may secure a theater in this city at some future time, the prospect is too indefinite to be of much comfort to those who found so much pleasure at so little expense during their stay.” At first it was speculated that the Auditorium would not be rebuilt. Some suggested that the city buy the land as the site for the projected convention hall. However, buoyed by the public’s loyalty, Fraser, Paxton, Burgess, and Woodward conferred and on 29 December announced, the Star reported, that construction would begin within a month on a new Auditorium Theater.Burgess and Woodward agreed to an eight-year lease of the theater from Fraser, with a view to presenting the same type of entertainment as before the fire. The planned seating capacity of between 3,000 and 3,500 would make the new Auditorium the largest in the west after Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. The new theater would be larger, having no hotel within its walls (although one was eventually built adjoining the theater).The exterior would resemble the original, even incorporating two still-standing walls. The interior construction, however, would now be supported with iron trusses as opposed to the old method of weight-bearing outer walls. Thirteen months later the Auditorium once again received its public.This was said to be the eightieth theater designed by architect Col. J. M.Wood.

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Not everything conformed to the originally announced plans, for the seating capacity was not augmented but actually decreased by three hundred in the interest of providing roomier chairs with more space between rows for the comfort of the audience. Much of the layout looked familiar with the wide encircling foyer on the ground level, but now there was also a similar foyer on the balcony floor, and the curving red walls on both levels made welcoming spaces for intermission strolling or resting on the settees. The biggest changes were less visible: fire walls dividing the building into four sections that could be isolated from each other in case of a fire in any one of them: first, the outer public areas, including foyers, stairs, exits to the street, and rest rooms (referred to in the Star of 15 January 1899 as “retiring rooms on every floor, a comfort to which this city’s other houses are strangers”); second, the auditorium; third, the stage, with an asbestos curtain and an automatic sprinkler system over it; and fourth, the work areas (dressing rooms,scene shop,baggage and property rooms,heating and power plant with a fire pump able to “furnish high water pressure in a jiffy, something new in Kansas City theaters”). As an added precaution, “all wood, that in the rigging loft as well as the trusses, is covered with asbestos paper. The ceilings consist of overlapping sheet steel, under which there are two layers of asbestos.” A capacity audience—2,300 people—attended the rebuilt Auditorium Theatre’s opening on Saturday 21 January 1899.The Star reported the attendance figure the next day with the assertion that the Auditorium would “never have more than that, as the management will sell no standing room, complying strictly with the law. None was sold last evening, though scores demanded it. Scarcely a finer audience would have been found in a higher priced play house at its opening than that which saw the 10, 20, and 25 cent house christened.”The walls and ceiling were painted a pale bluish green to match the upholstery of the chairs; yellows and ivories with gold ornamentation graced the boxes.The effect was light, fresh, and airy with dark red carpeting underfoot. A fan system of heating and ventilating obviated the need for center aisle registers in the floor. Both the ushers and the water boys (who served water to the thirsty) wore uniforms “as gorgeous as those of Pullman car conductors,” according to the World for 22 January. The Times described the ushers’ uniforms as having “enough gold braid to make a major general salute with profound respect.” Like its predecessor, the stage of the new Auditorium elicited vivid descriptions of its size:“acres of room”( Journal ),“large enough for the switch-

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ing of a train of freight cars” (Times).At 8:15 conductor John Behr led the orchestra in “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and then—to the cheers of the public—the white fire curtain rose to reveal the new drop painted by Chicago scenic artist Thomas J. Moses, depicting a restful landscape in the subdued hues of the auditorium. Only the Times critic expressed nostalgia for the painted drop of the original Warder Grand: Cleopatra was gone. Cleopatra, who used to look so dreamily and so carelessly at the thousands of people who looked at her carefully and not dreamily; Cleopatra, who showed such a disregard for the state of the weather, and whose attire was made up largely of necklaces and regal pomp, was not there. She had vanished, just as the world had been told, in smoke, and in her place was a scene in which there was not anything more alluring than meadows and woodlands. The old and the famous drop-curtain, with its Antony, its Cleopatra and its royal barge, had been replaced by one which showed a pastoral scene which might be labeled, “A Summer Day in Swope Park.”

Chosen for its cast of twenty, Men and Women by David Belasco and Henry C. DeMille allowed virtually every member of the Woodward Stock Company to be introduced that evening.The new ensemble, though somewhat uneven, won approval. Stage director Wilson Enos stood out in his portrayal of the Governor. Reviewers also singled out Bertha Creighton, native Kansas Citian Carl Smith Seerle, light comedian Hal Davis, eccentric comedian Harry Beresford, ingenues Inez Macauley and Emma Dunn, and a character actress who would be associated with Kansas City theaters as late as the 1920s, Gertrude Berkeley (wife of Wilson Enos and mother of Hollywood choreographer Busby Berkeley). One of the brightest notes about the new Auditorium’s opening night was the pleasure it brought to Col. George W.Warder.The Times noted that to observers he seemed “as young in spirit as ever. With the same pride which he showed on that opening night years ago, Colonel Warder conducted his friends through the house which has come out of the ashes of the former theater, and pointed out the many beauties to be found. It was not his, in any sense of the word, and yet if it had not been for George W. Warder, the Auditorium would not stand where it does today. There may have been consolation in the thought.” During the remaining seven years of his life,Warder eked out a shabby genteel existence, surviving on the royalties from his books of poetry and philosophy.A rented room at 902 Main served as both living quarters and law office, where he “wrote poems while

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he waited for clients” (Star, 8 February 1907).A familiar figure on the streets in his threadbare frock coat and silk top hat, this “quaint, courtly and lovable man” ( Journal, 31 October 1909) would readily engage in conversation with anyone on any topic. He was “the personification of the gentleman and good citizen always” ( Journal, 9 February 1907). “There was probably no man in town who was more generally liked or who was a more picturesque figure than Col. George W. Warder” (Post, 8 February 1907). Every theater admitted him free of charge, and he attended virtually every lecture, concert, and theater production. On the day after he died of a blood disease,Warder was to have been a speaker at the Greenwood Club on the subject of Kansas City authors.There is an odd poignancy in the fact that Warder’s death on 8 February 1907 came only thirty-six hours after that of his westside rival,Melville H.Hudson,who died late on 6 February.Warder’s friends took up a subscription to purchase a portrait of him to be placed in the public library as one of the city’s outstanding citizens. Woodward’s players—the Woodward Stock Company—became so closely identified with the theater that they were also known as the Auditorium Stock Company. Regular patrons of the Auditorium developed strong affection for members of the stock company as they watched their favorites perform a variety of roles each season, and looked forward to welcoming familiar players back for the new season each fall. At the season’s opening performance in 1900, the audience whooped with delight at each entrance onto the stage of a familiar player.When Miss Macauley appeared, it was “as if a skyrocket had shot into the crowd,” the Star reported on 2 September.The charming Emma Dunn was beloved of many. Lester Lonergan as Hamlet, Jane Kennark as Trilby, and Wilson Enos as Cyrano de Bergerac were all deemed to hold their own against remembered performances of those title roles by the great touring stars. For the 1902–1903 season Woodward hired a company of mostly new players. Marion Convere and Howell Hansell, the new leading woman and man, came with excellent credentials, as did the other new company members. The few familiar faces included Wilson Enos and his wife, Gertrude Berkeley; the latter had been absent for much of two seasons due to illness, and the public delighted in the originality of her protean character roles. According to the Journal for 24 August 1902, applause repeatedly punctuated the performance of the season opener Hearts Are Trumps each time Gertrude Berkeley appeared. One month later, front-page stories in all the newspapers expressed shock and outrage at the news that Woodward had discharged six new members of the company, including both the leading

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Col. George W.Warder (1848–1907) lost his fortune on the construction of the Warder Grand Opera House, later called the Auditorium. His many friends remembered his perpetual optimism despite adversity and after his death commissioned this portrait of him for the Kansas City Public Library. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

woman and man, with only one week’s notice. In addition,W.A. Farris, head scenic painter and a longtime employee, was fired, along with one of his assistants.Woodward refused to give an explanation and had already left town when the news became public. Howell Hansel’s comment to the press, as reported in the Journal on 25 September, typifies the bewilderment that all felt: Woodward brought us here for a forty weeks’ engagement, and now turns us out without an explanation of any kind.The only way we can look at

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the matter is that the stock company is to be disbanded and regular attractions booked at the house. I am inclined to believe that stock companies have seen their best days in Kansas City. It won’t last forever, you know, and Kansas City has had it just about long enough to get tired.Another thing is the difficulty to get plays.Those which have been offered this season have been wretched. But, of course, Mr.Woodward cannot be blamed for this. Plays have simply run out, and good ones are not being produced fast enough to supply the demand, so there is really nothing to put on.The management has gone to a lot of expense with several of the big productions, but as plays these productions have been awful. I am as much in the dark as anyone, but am inclined to believe that a number of light comedies are to be played with small casts after “Phroso,” and then there may be no more stock company.

The situation was certainly problematic for the discharged players, who would return to New York too late in the season to get good engagements. During October 1902 the Auditorium, still advertising itself as “Home of the Woodward Stock Company,” booked in first-class touring companies or stars and used the remnants of the stock company as supporting players or extras. However, on 8 November those remaining stock players were given two weeks’ notice, and, as the Star reported the next day, it was announced that the Auditorium would henceforth present only traveling combinations. Gertrude Berkeley reacted by forming her own stock company, Miss Berkeley’s Players, which presented a different play each week at the Century Theatre (as the Standard or Folly was then called).Despite some big hits like the Black Patti Troubadours (week of 8 February 1903), the Auditorium lasted less than a season as an exclusively combination house. In March 1903,Woodward reassembled a stock company, bringing back “many old Kansas City favorites” (Times, 27 March 1903), including Lester Lonergan,Wilson Enos, Harry Long, and others, most of whom had been performing with Miss Berkeley’s Players at the Century. Woodward proclaimed that he had done pretty well with combinations at the Auditorium, considering that he had started late in the season and could not get all the shows he wanted;“So, as the people seem to want stock, we are going back to it” ( Journal, 22 March 1903).This return to stock did not, of course, mark the end of upheavals at the Auditorium, for Woodward constantly experimented with various formats—and shuffled them among the various theaters he controlled (see Chapter 7) over the years. In 1906, for example, Woodward presented several weeks of stock to supplement a “season of combination attractions” (Times, 12 April 1906).

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Of all the beloved stock company players at the Auditorium, Eva Lang (ca. 1885 –1933) remained foremost in the hearts of theatergoers.Although born in Columbus, Ohio, Lang grew up in Kansas City and trained for her stage career under O. D.Woodward and Georgia Brown. She began playing minor roles with the stock company when she was seventeen and so captivated the public that she quickly moved into ingenue roles.Woodward then tried her in a leading role in Under Two Flags; from that time on, as far as Kansas City was concerned, Eva Lang was a star. She toured in Under Two Flags and performed with Woodward’s stock companies in Omaha, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Denver. At the Auditorium when she was in her twenties, the beautiful actress starred in a long series of comedies and dramas in weekly changes of bill. She was a quick study and letter-perfect in roles that carried the show. Matinee girls regularly waited outside the stage door after her performances to glimpse her, perhaps even to shake her hand. Then they would go home to practice in front of their mirrors the Eva Lang walk and gestures as well as phrases they remembered hearing her speak in the play just performed. In 1907 she made a huge impression as Mary Magdalene in The Holy City. Although still young herself, she was generous in her encouragement of younger performers. During World War I, Eva Lang toured with the Daniel Frawley company in China, Japan, and India. After her marriage to actor John Halliday in 1918, Lang lived for a time in New York, appearing on Broadway in Main Street in 1921. But she also returned to Kansas City in 1920 to perform at the Grand Opera House, and in 1930 to perform with the OberfelderKetcham Stock Company in Her Friend, the King at the Orpheum.The latter one-week engagement, coming after a period of retirement, gave Lang some nervous moments. “Theatre styles change and they may think I’m passé,” she said to friends in the wings.“Do you think they’ll like me a little?” Kansas City still loved her—very much. Some said that they had not attended the theater at all since her days at the Auditorium, and it took Eva Lang to draw them to a play again. Flowers inundated the stage at the end of the second act while the applause went on endlessly. Finally someone called for her to speak, the first curtain speech at the Orpheum since its opening. It was an emotional moment for both actress and audience, and tears flowed freely. Eva Lang worked for O. D.Woodward one more time, when he engaged her in 1932 to perform with his O. D.Woodward Players at the Orpheum in the title role of Stella Dallas. Once again,“she made a sympathetic and responsive audience laugh and cry as she was wont to do in Woodward productions a generation ago,” the Journal-Post noted on

The Idealist Who Refought the Civil War

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Eva Lang (ca. 1885–1933) acted professionally from the age of seventeen with the Woodward Stock Company at the Auditorium Theatre and gained a huge following in Kansas City.The sculptural pose shown in this photograph, taken between 1905 and 1910, displays the “plasticity” of form that was considered important for an actress. From the Patricia McIlrath Center for Mid-American Theatre.

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1 February. Eva Lang died in Los Angeles on 6 April 1933 at the age of fortyeight. Mention must be made of a few other Kansas City actors who performed at the Auditorium, some with the Woodward Stock Company, who also earned recognition in the profession at large. Mary Hall (née Mary White, 1876–1960) showed an aptitude for Shakespeare as a child performing scenes in private homes.Her parents’home at Eighth and Troost hosted their distant relatives, members of the theatrical Holland family, who played the city sporadically.Mary,the daughter of criminal court judge Henry P.White, married Kansas City newspaperman Smith Hall, who encouraged her interest in the stage. After gaining some experience elsewhere, she returned to join Woodward’s stock company as leading lady.While keeping the name Mary Hall, she changed husbands with some frequency, becoming in private life Mrs. Pierce, Mrs. Bryan, Mrs.Antisdel, and Mrs. Urbain Ledoux. Robert Conness (1868 –1941) had been employed as stenographer to a railway company executive at the downtown headquarters but spent his evenings ushering at Coates Opera House. In 1894 he played utility roles with Mademoiselle Rhéa, then quit the corporate job to try his luck on stage in New York, where he quickly advanced to leading juvenile parts.10 After proving himself there, Conness returned in 1901 as leading man for a season with the Woodward Stock Company.Latchaw recalled that Conness’s last Kansas City appearance was with Alla Nazimova in a sketch titled A Woman of the Earth at the Orpheum. Robert T. Haines (ca. 1868 –1943) grew up in Kansas City; while studying law at the University of Missouri in Columbia, he “suped” one night for Thomas W. Keene, resulting in an overnight career change.With Keene, Haines played Coates Opera House in 1892 and 1893. In 1895 he was touring with Walker Whiteside and played the Auditorium Theatre. Jeanne Eagels (1894 –1929), who went on to fame as Miss Sadie Thompson in Rain, appeared on the Auditorium stage as a child; she is buried in Kansas City’s Calvary Cemetery. Jeanne Eagels, Eva Lang, Marie Doro, Mabel Hite, Hale Hamilton, and many others who went on to fine professional careers on the American stage got their start in the classes taught by Georgia Brown (d. 1932), for many years in association with the Auditorium Theatre.Indeed,when Jeanne Eagels came to Kansas City on tour with Rain in August 1925, Georgia Brown proudly sat beside Eagels’s mother at the performance. Born Georgianne Valentin in Quebec, the future drama teacher came with her parents to Cleveland when she was three and made her debut at six in Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Academy of Music, which her

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Georgia Brown (d. 1932) began staging lavish productions performed by children in Kansas City in the 1890s. Later she choreographed ballets for the Priests of Pallas and ran an acting school at the Auditorium Theatre until opening her own Georgia Brown Dramatic School. Courtesy of Union Station/ Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

father managed. After her father’s death, the twelve-year-old girl went on the road as Georgia Morrell.Actor Charles Evans spent many hours teaching her to dance the buck and wing, the double shuffle, and other popular steps. Her specialty was a melodramatic tear-jerking song called “Dorkin’s Night,” which even got her on the bill at Miner’s Bowery in New York. Then she and her mother toured as the Morrell Sisters. Eventually her mother married Edwin Brown, and they all settled in Lawrence, Kansas. Georgia took her stepfather’s name; Georgia Brown remained her professional name even after she married Charles A.Vaughn. The education of their daughter, Evelyn Vaughn, kept Georgia Brown in Lawrence after her husband died, though she began visiting Kansas City in the 1890s to stage youth theater productions there. She gained particular attention in November 1895 with her spectacular presentation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe performed at Coates Opera House by 150 children between the ages of four and ten.

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In 1900, giving up her positions as head of the dramatic arts department at the State University of Kansas and director of the university players in Lawrence, Georgia Brown moved to Kansas City to become director of the Woodward School of Acting at the Auditorium Theatre. In one of her most lavish productions at the Auditorium, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in October 1901, she directed 150 “embryonic players” in the fairy roles in support of the principals from the Woodward Stock Company.The surviving program in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection shows that the nine speaking fairy roles were triple cast (contrary to later reports that Brown had assigned seven children to each speaking role) and the color of costume listed for each child would indicate to spectators which child played the part at any given performance. By 1902 Georgia Brown was also in charge of all the ballets for the Priests of Pallas, as we saw in Chapter 3. By 1913, when she married Maurice Quincey, she was advertising Miss Georgia H. Brown’s Dramatic School at the Auditorium Theater. Within a few years she opened her studio at the Little Theatre, 3212 Troost Avenue, and expanded her range of classes to public speaking, ballroom dancing, and French for men and women of all ages. But she always loved best working with children, and the Georgia Brown Dramatic School continued until her death in October 1932. O. D.Woodward’s many theatrical enterprises made him a key figure in the development of several other theaters in Kansas City, notably the Willis Wood and the Shubert (Chapter 7). A number of the actors who were brought to Kansas City to work in his stock company remained committed to the city through other ventures in other years. For example, as soon as the stock season ended at the Auditorium in June 1901, company members Lester Lonergan and Harry Beresford put together an open-air Shakespeare production: As You Like It was presented in Troost Park for four performances beginning 24 June. With electric lights twinkling like fireflies against the greenery provided by nature, and an orchestra hidden in the shrubbery to accompany the charming songs, the production proved enchanting.11 Besides Lonergan as Orlando and Beresford as Touchstone,Alice Hunt (Rosalind) and Georgia Brown’s daughter Eva (Celia) were singled out for special praise. The Orpheum circuit purchased Woodward’s lease of the Auditorium in 1910, but various managers failed to make it profitable.The most sustained enterprise was that of the dauntless Miss Meta Miller, who organized her own Auditorium Stock Company and kept it going, against the odds, for two seasons, 1913 to 1915. John W. Dillon bought the building in April

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The Auditorium Theatre that rose from the ashes of the Warder Grand Opera House remained a Kansas City landmark at Ninth and Holmes long after its last theatrical performance. Its demolition in 1960 was a terrible loss to the city’s cultural heritage. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

1927 with plans to remodel and reopen it as a motion picture theater, but in 1930 it again, briefly, hosted a stock company featuring Mary Hall. By 1935 the space was being used by the Great Western Stage Equipment Company as a warehouse and scene shop.Announcements of plans to raze the theater appeared intermittently in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but the twenty-inch-thick walls defied such threats until the roof caved in on 27 June 1945. Still the Auditorium walls stood firm.Another section of the roof and the north wall collapsed on 13 March 1947. A fire gutted the interior on 20 July 1960. Finally, on 24 July 1960, the bulldozers came to topple the last publicly visible remnant of George W. Warder’s dream.The site is today a surface parking lot.

Chapter 5 OUR MR. JUDAH, BELOVED COAST TO COAST

“Mr. Judah is perhaps the best liked showman in the West. He also holds so high a place in the amusement calling, that one would imagine he had a multitude of theatres, whereas, at no time has this firm, or either member of it, been extensive holders of theatrical property. It is in the conduct of their Grand Opera House in the big western city that Hudson and Judah have achieved their greatest renown, and this house is known all over this country as ‘the best dollar house in America.’” Those words were high praise indeed coming from the eminent impresario Robert Grau in his 1910 book, The Business Man in the Amusement World.1 But Grau’s sincere regard for Abraham Judah and his management of Kansas City’s Grand Opera House could well be echoed throughout the American theatrical profession. Judah earned his peers’ respect for his business acumen and fair dealing, while artists and audiences appreciated the warmth of his generous spirit and engaging personality. If Coates Opera House catered to the fashionable elite, and Gilliss Opera House pandered to the working class,and the Auditorium Theatre reconciled intellectual and entertainment needs of smart young people of the middle class, then the Grand Opera House might be said to have found common ground among all of those, embracing whole families as well. Standing at the door of the theater every evening of the week to welcome his audiences to a show that he personally guaranteed as wholesome entertainment,A. Judah truly made himself a part of the fabric of the community.

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Abraham Judah (1849–1915) arrived in Kansas City in 1883 and worked hard at various enterprises. His partnership with Melville Hudson and his successful management of the Grand Opera House were instrumental in Kansas City’s development as a theater town. His managerial acumen and fine personal qualities earned him the warm regard of theater people nationwide. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

Abraham Judah (1849 –1915) was already thirty-four years old when he came to Kansas City. Born in Cincinnati, Judah gained his first business experience in the clothing industry there. Later he worked with the Joseph Brooks clothing company in Memphis.When he was twenty-two, the theater lured him and he learned the management side of the business through association with various traveling companies in the south, working his way up from the “kerosene circuit” to a troupe headlined by comedian Harry Rainforth. In 1873 he married Miss Delia Samuels of Memphis.Then he was hired to manage the People’s Theatre in St. Louis. During his years in St. Louis, Judah experienced the only serious financial loss of his career; he

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agreed to back the then unknown actor Richard Mansfield in a new play, but the production failed, both at the People’s Theatre and on the road. In 1883 Judah came west to Kansas City, bringing a single attraction to exhibit: The Wild Man of Borneo. He found employment as secretary to Mr. Sackett, who had been operating Sackett’s Dime Museum at Ninth and Delaware during the winter. In September 1883 the newspapers announced a new Kansas City Dime Museum, again at Ninth and Delaware, but now under the management of A. Judah. “Refined and First-Class Stage Performance in Theatorium. Everything First-Class. Everything New,” proclaimed the advertisement in the Times on 2 September.The ad in the Star six days later provided specifics:Col.R. A.Steere and Wife,the smallest married couple in the world; J. C. Braden, famous Nebraska skeleton; Hannah P. Bettersby, jumbo woman, weighing 728 pounds; Zana Zanobia, the cannibal fan child; Senator Frank Bell, in his original speeches; Nelsoni the juggler; George Jennier, premier equilibrist; Annella’s performing birds; Sig. Patti, educated monkeys; Dickason’s mechanical wonder, and others. The Dime Museum was open daily from one to ten p.m. for ten cents admission and continued to draw crowds day and night, the Times reported on 19 September, with attractions that included Captain George Costentenus, the original and only Tattooed Greek, sole survivor among a group of Tartary prisoners who had been covered head to toe with tattoos, according to the Journal for 23 September.The week of 7 October featured a daily exhibition of high-rope walking from the top of the Museum Building. Curiosities of the following week included Miss Ella Harper, the young lady with four arms. A special offering on Sunday 18 November, according to the Times, was a Grand Sacred Concert “by a company of Vocal and Instrumental Artists, especially engaged for this occasion.” By October 1884 the Dime Museum had expanded into three separate halls in the three-story building at Ninth and Delaware—the Museum, the Menagerie, and the Theater—with admission to all for only ten cents.The daily performance in the third-floor auditorium of a drama, a comedy, or occasionally an operetta, with a weekly change of bill, perhaps justified the later claim that Judah had “organized the city’s first stock company.”2 During the week of 17 November 1884, for example, the stock company performed H.M.S. Pinafore in the Theater, while Herr Hagg, the elastic skin man, displayed himself in the Museum.“Hairy Haig,” as he was called in a retrospective, “won the hearts of thousands” by “his amiability in permitting visitors to take a handful of his skin and snap it back at him.”3 In the spring of 1885 the Dime Museum moved to a new location, at the

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corner of Ninth and Walnut. Soon it took the more respectable-sounding name Kansas City Museum, although still charging only a dime for admission to all attractions. There the stock company performed standard fare such as Two Orphans (week of 18 October 1885) in the Auditorium, while in the Lecture Hall one could view such curiosities as Madame DeVere, the bearded lady;The What Is It, a newly discovered Missouri wonder; George Lippert, the three-legged man; Little Flora, child snake charmer; Charles Adams, handless phenomenon; Fred Howe, mammoth fat boy; Che-Mah, the celestial dwarf; nature’s famed freak Turtle Boy; Belle Boyd, the famous rebel spy—all in all, an endless parade of human and animal wonderments, some undoubtedly recycled under different names. In late November 1885 Judah left the management of the Kansas City Museum to its proprietor David T. Keiller, who continued to run it successfully, following the established format. Judah went to Philadelphia for several months and managed a Cyclorama there.This was Judah’s only extended absence from Kansas City for the rest of his career. Returning to Kansas City in 1886, Judah opened on 11 September the Cyclorama of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, “the greatest battle and landscape painting in the world,” at Eighth and Broadway. A similar enterprise, a depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg, had opened only five days earlier at the Panorama at Seventh and Walnut. Since a rival businessman had stolen his thunder, Judah needed an attention-getting feature for his opening. He invited Maj. William Warner, former mayor of Kansas City and congressman, to speak, and thus Judah’s Cyclorama got front-page coverage in the Star. The two circular vistas of Civil War battles must have stirred poignant memories for those whose lives had been scarred by the conflict little more than two decades earlier. Latchaw found the “realistic landscape constructions” between the viewing platform and the dome sky “wonderfully impressive” (EY 6). It might be noted that the Judah family’s Philadelphia sojourn spared their daughter Blanche from the horrifying experience of the 11 May 1886 tornado that toppled the bell tower on Lathrop School on the southeast corner of Eighth and May streets. Fifteen of the children in the top-story classroom were killed. Blanche normally attended that school, and it was there that a childhood romance blossomed between her and Seymour Rice, whom she married in 1900. Judah next formed a partnership with William H. Thomas, and they leased H. D. Clark’s Ninth Street Theatre. Clark himself was pulling back from active involvement in theater, which he now regarded only as one of

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Two Civil War panoramas opened within a week of each other in Kansas City.Abraham Judah operated the one at Eighth and Broadway. This one, located at Seventh and Walnut, lasted three years and then was remodeled to open as a theater in 1889. Hudson and Judah obtained the property and constructed the Grand Opera House on the site. Kansas City Journal, 12 September 1886.

several kinds of property investment. As one source put it, recalling his early days with the Coliseum, “the things he knew about running a frontier place of amusement did not suit the public when taken out of the original setting and sold to them at uptown prices in a regular theater.”4 “Billy” Thomas, Mel Hudson’s brother-in-law, had been associate manager of the Coates Opera House under Hudson; his partnership with Judah put him in control of a theater. For Judah the partnership brought a definitive move from variety into legitimate theater.The Ninth Street Theatre was always a popular-price house, though not as cheap as the Gilliss would be when it descended from first-class house to the ten-twent’-thirt’. At the time of the theater’s opening in 1887, the Ninth Street’s format was regarded as an experiment in offering good plays at reduced prices.

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Ascending the spiral stair case to the circular platform from which the cyclorama is viewed, the visitor, in his relation to the painting, stands on the summit of the ridge, a little south of General Bragg’s position where the Confederate general stood on that memorable day in November, 1863, when the victorious Union troops scaled the steep mountain sides and routed the enemy in one of the most daring and memorable charges in history. Not a detail is omitted.The effect produced upon the mind is exactly the sensation of looking down the side of a high mountain into the valley beneath. Nothing mechanical is employed to create an illusion—and yet, so realistic is the effect produced, by the artist’s work, that excited spectators could not be convinced that they did not see the water in the Tennessee river move and notice the clouds change position and the smoke of the guns dissolve into thin air—a glowing tribute to the painters of the picture truly! . . . Generally when paintings of this magnitude are being painted one or two of the foreign artists are sent with them to build the foreground. In this case Manager Judah himself superintended the construction of the foreground and the result certainly does credit to his artistic taste and good judgment. . . . Captain John Cameron, the lecturer, explained for the first time the position of the different troops at the moment when General Grant ordered the six guns to be fired from Orchard Knob Battery, which was the signal for the general advance all along the line. It is this trying stage of the battle that is represented by the cyclorama. At 2:30 Congressman Wm.Warner arose to address the audience.The Major reviewed the history of the celebrated battle which the Cyclorama represented and paid a glowing tribute to the heroism of the different Union soldiers engaged. He spoke for half an hour and was frequently interrupted with applause. (Kansas City Star, 11 September 1886)

The new theater earned favorable coverage in the press on 13 March after reporters attended a preview reception the day before.The exterior featured a whimsical cupola—evoked in the Times as “a tinned balloon”— atop the main facade. From the spacious lobby, painted in the hues of the poppy and the sunflower and illuminated by four chandeliers, one ascended the ten-foot-wide staircase with carved oak railings to the auditorium on the main floor. Four separate staircases would allow a capacity audience of 1,500 to exit rapidly. Prices ranged from fifteen cents for the gallery to one dollar for a chair in one of the four boxes.The 530 orchestra seats each cost fifty cents, while the 800 places in the balcony cost twenty-five cents.

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The original Ninth Street Theatre, constructed by Hank Clark at Ninth and May, opened in March 1887, only seven months before the opening of the Warder Grand Opera House.This structure, with its distinctive balloon-like cupola on the facade, burned down in January 1893. From the Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

Every seat had a hat rack under the chair and “a convenient shawl rack for ladies’ wraps,” according to the Journal. The stage dimensions approximated those of the Coates and the Gilliss (though not, of course, of the enormous Warder Grand that would open seven months later): a seventy-foot-wide proscenium opening, thirty feet from footlights to back wall, and forty-six feet to the rigging loft. Manager Thomas looked forward to keeping a scene painter perpetually busy, so that each play would get appropriate settings. All dressing rooms were of equal size and opened into a large first-floor greenroom, from which two flights of stairs led up to the stage. The wildly successful opening of the Ninth Street Theatre on 14 March 1887 exceeded all expectation with every seat filled twenty minutes after the doors opened, money refunded to those who could not find standing

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The whimsical decor of the original Ninth Street Theatre charmed its popular-price audiences when the theater opened in 1887.This rare photograph shows the house curtain painted with a desert island and a seascape. From Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

room, and hundreds turned away. The orchestra’s range of selections included something for every constituency. The World, a spectacular melodrama that had been popular with audiences of all social classes for a decade, was deemed an appropriate choice for an enterprise intended to give the city “a theater combining elegance, first-class plays and economy,” as the Times had described it the day before. Among the scenic marvels, according to the advance notice in the Journal on 6 March 1887, were the authentic portrayal of the harbor in Australia in the first act, an immense ocean steamer sinking entirely out of sight in act 2, the “world-famed raft scene with its 10,000 feet of canvas” in act 3, followed by a hideous lunatic asylum, a revolving stage, and a beautiful moonlight panorama. The Ninth Street Theatre continued to do well. Following the weeklong run of The World came “society star” Lillian Lewis with her New York cast

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[At the Ninth Street Theatre] Mr. Judah was able to book many standard attractions along with those of lesser value, while continuously the low prices were strongly inducive to the public.There were no dark weeks or half weeks or days at this theater. If it happened once in a long time that no regular traveling company was booked or available for a certain week, Mr. Judah would go out on the small-town circuits and book a 10–20–30-cent show. . . . Hollis Cooley was the treasurer. Cooley also was press agent for the theater most of the time. He was a hustler, almost a genius in his way. He was not a man of scholarly attainments, but he knew something about more things than almost anybody in town. He had picked his knowledge and a rough and forceful philosophy largely from wide travel, widely varying associations and through uncommon observative powers. His resourcefulness as well as his personal characteristics made him very popular among the newspaper boys, and they would do almost anything in reason for him. (EY 1)

in a five-play repertory with seven evening and three matinee performances. Even the single performance of Frou-Frou drew a good house, despite the Journal’s assertion on 25 March that “everyone knows the worthless character of the play.”As a redeeming feature,“Miss Lewis showed some more of her pretty dresses.” Other interesting attractions of that first season include Charles Erin Verner as Shamus O’Brien (“Irish wit! Irish pathos! Irish love!” week of 4 April), Edwin F. Mayo in Davy Crockett (week of 11 April), and E.T. Stetson in half weeks of Ingomar, the Barbarian and the picturesque American idyll The Olive Branch (commencing 2 May). Such attractions were playing successfully against the first Kansas City engagements of Edwin Booth at Coates Opera House and Sarah Bernhardt at the Gilliss, as well as appearances by other stars. When William Thomas retired,Mel Hudson bought out his interest.Thus began the legendary partnership of Hudson and Judah (officially, the Kansas City Amusement Association). Together they controlled the Coates, the Gilliss, the Ninth Street, and, after 1891, the Grand Opera House. Hudson, of course, maintained his primary focus on Coates Opera House, and he ran his own bill-posting business, with his offices at Music Hall, 911 Broadway. Judah excelled at direct contact with his public, and his personal management of the Ninth Street Theatre adumbrated the approach that would lat-

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er achieve such success at the Grand Opera House, where he located his office. During his six years at the Ninth Street Theatre,Abraham Judah missed only three evenings there; that is, he attended approximately twenty-one hundred performances. A little more than a month before the expiration of Hudson and Judah’s lease on the Ninth Street Theatre, it burned down. A fire alarm was turned in around 3:20 a.m. on 18 January 1893.The theater’s night watchman had been asleep and barely escaped with his life. By then the theater could not be saved, so Chief Hale focused on preventing the spread of flames to the Le Grand Hotel, which filled with smoke.The theater’s brick walls fell at around four o’clock in the morning, taking down an adjacent saloon and part of a restaurant.The fire appeared to have originated in the boiler room under the stage. H. D. Clark carried $22,000 insurance on the building, which he valued at more than $100,000.Hudson and Judah owned the stage machinery and scenery, which was uninsured, a loss of $5,000.The Leonzo Brothers estimated the loss to themselves and their company at $14,000. Judah promptly designated a performance at the Grand Opera House to benefit the Leonzo Brothers. H. D. Clark had been planning to remodel the Ninth Street Theatre after the expiration of the Hudson and Judah lease. Indeed, Clark had turned down Hudson and Judah’s offer to renew the lease for three years, and in the Star’s same-day coverage of the fire Clark was already describing the new theater he would build on the site. The new and larger Ninth Street Theatre opened on 23 September 1893 with a naval drama, The Ensign. The touring company carried its own elaborate scenery, and, unfortunately, the train was late getting into Kansas City, so the opening matinee was delayed; the orchestra played its overture again and again while the gallery grew impatient, but the ensuing spectacle gratified all anticipation. Clark listed himself as owner and manager, but the actual running of the theater was left to his business manager,T. H.Winnett. Two years after opening the New Ninth Street Theatre, H. D. Clark brought suit against A. Judah for $55,000, claiming that the fire had been caused by the lessee’s negligence. A point of interest, though it had no actual bearing on the case, was that during the previous season or two Judah had been booking a somewhat lower class of attractions into the Ninth Street Theatre, and this had the effect of driving some patrons away from there to his Grand Opera House.The trial, closely reported in all the newspapers during the week of 24 – 31 October 1895, culminated inconclusively, for the jury could not reach a verdict and Clark did not insist on a new trial.

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In January 1898, Clark leased the Ninth Street Theatre to Gustav Walter, who changed its name to the Orpheum and brought in the Orpheum circuit’s high-class vaudeville. In 1914, on the initiative of the Orpheum circuit’s Martin Lehman, a newly constructed Orpheum Theatre opened at 1212 Baltimore Avenue. Clark died in 1907, and without him to protect it, the old Orpheum on Ninth Street stood neglected and vandalized. In 1922 the Clark estate brought suit against the Orpheum circuit and had the old theater at Ninth and May razed.The new Orpheum was razed in 1962.This continuing saga of the Ninth Street Theatre after Abraham Judah’s association with it is explored in more detail in Chapter 6. The crowning achievement of the Hudson and Judah partnership—and where A.Judah really made his mark on Kansas City—was the Grand Opera House.The site, on the southwest corner of Seventh and Walnut (belonging to the Nathan Scarritt estate), had been that of the Panorama of the Battle of Gettysburg. In 1889 the Panorama was remodeled for theatrical use, placing a stage and auditorium within the confines of the circular brick walls. It opened on 1 September 1889 as the Midland Theatre (not to be confused with the later Midland Theatre on Main Street) with comicopera-singer-turned-character-actor Richard Golden in the title role of Old Jed Prouty. The Yankee sketches with realistic rural scenes pleased the public, as did subsequent comedies with impressive scenic effects. David Keiller, Judah’s former associate at the long-disappeared Dime Museum, was manager.The Midland Theatre lasted two seasons, and then the building was sold at auction. Hudson and Judah bought the property and razed the building on 15 March 1891. The March-to-early-October construction period for the five-story redbrick Grand Opera House corresponded roughly to the April-to-lateOctober timetable that had been allotted to build the Warder Grand four years earlier. Many in the Grand’s opening-night audience on 3 October 1891 were reminded of the Warder Grand opening,for the Grand still lacked interior paint and ornamental work. Moreover, as the Times reported the next day, “the sudden change in temperature found the new play house without steam and many sat with wraps and overcoats about their necks. The warmest feature was the sunny smile of Patti Rosa,and the many laughs created by the clever comedy and good company kept the blood in constant circulation.There was certainly enough good cheer about the opening to flatter Managers Hudson and Judah.” The shell of the Grand Opera House still stands,for it escaped being razed in 1926 when it was found that the twenty-eight-inch masonry walls could

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function in tandem with a modern steel framework encased in concrete to make a parking ramp for three hundred cars.Thus one can still stand in front of the one-hundred-foot Walnut Street facade and get a sense of the theater’s scale, although the tower has been removed from the roof.The north side of the building, where the stage entrance was located, extends 130 feet along Seventh Street, which slopes downhill.This downhill grade allowed placement of the main floor of the auditorium at ground level—as opposed to the more usual second-floor auditorium accessed by a grand staircase. Entering by the main doors on Walnut Street, the spectator could purchase tickets at the lobby box office to the right of the entrance, cross the “spacious vestibule” that opened on “a neat foyer, the latter separated from the auditorium by bright curtains” ( Journal, 4 October 1891), and proceed directly into the orchestra seating that descended “at a slight pitch toward the stage” (Star, 3 October 1891). By comparison with other local theaters, this auditorium had greater breadth than depth, thus placing spectators closer to the stage.The terra-cotta and blue interior decor struck some observers as insufficiently ornate by comparison with existing Kansas City theaters, yet others appreciated the avoidance of gaudiness. Electric lights furnished all illumination in the building. Seating capacity was about 1,800.The chairs in the parquette had leather seats and plush backs. One row in the orchestra circle was made up of silkplush upholstered settees (double chairs). Four boxes with chairs, veneer chairs in the balcony, and “the usual undivided seats in the gallery” completed the seating choices for prices ranging from twenty-five cents to one dollar. Standard practice was followed in providing an exterior ticket window and separate entrance (on Seventh Street) with its own staircase for those taking the cheap gallery seats. The stage measured thirty-six feet from footlights to back wall and eighty feet in width with a forty-foot proscenium.With sixty feet from stage floor to gridiron, the largest scenic elements could be flown. From its opening, the Grand Opera House stocked twelve complete sets of scenery as well as many set pieces. Eleven dressing rooms were located under the stage, others a short flight up from the stage. Brussels carpets, upholstered chairs, and stationary washstands furnished the three star dressing rooms. Patti Rosa was a popular choice to inaugurate the Grand Opera House, for the singing, dancing comedienne had earned a Kansas City following as she performed in the spirited tradition of Lotta Crabtree.The play Dolly Varden, written for Rosa by Charles T. Vincent, not only gave her some sparkling dialogue and latitude for her talents but also provided good parts

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The Grand Opera House faced Walnut at Seventh Street. From its 1891 opening until the death of its beloved manager A. Judah in 1915, the popular-price theater drew a steady clientele of loyal theatergoers seeking family friendly entertainment. From Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

for others in the company, notably Joseph Cawthorne, a dialect comedian who was another longtime Kansas City favorite.The Journal reported on 4 October, “He brought a new song, ‘That Night,’ which is being sung in every farce comedy company in the country, and which will doubtless be heard here many times this season. He also did a concertina specialty a la Dutch Daly, which the audience was loth [sic] to let go of when it was finished and worn out.” Latchaw noted that Cawthorne “could pronounce any word seventeen ways and play the concertina horizontally, vertically, upside down or in circles and never miss a note. Joe was a merry soul, a source of constant amusement, and it was not more than a few years after he appeared on this dedicatory occasion that he was made the head of a musical comedy company” (EY 27). The Hudson and Judah partnership thrived partly because the personalities of those two dedicated men complemented each other well, and each

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was suited to the needs of the theater under his personal management:Hudson at the first-class Coates for standard attractions and Judah at the popular-price Grand for shows with less emphasis on literary merit. According to Latchaw,“Managers Hudson and Judah prospered and deserved to prosper. Both had worked hard and with little relaxation” (EY 1). After Hudson died in 1907, Judah became sole owner of the Grand Opera House, but he made certain that Hudson’s widow retained an interest in it, saying simply that “Hudson would have done as much for me.”5 One of Latchaw’s anecdotes provides a good example of the contrast between the highbrow legitimate drama presented at Coates Opera House and the popular attractions at Grand Opera House. It happened that the respected tragedian Frederick Warde was playing James Sheridan Knowles’s 1820 tragedy Virginius at the Coates to small audiences, while the chief attraction at the Grand was the comedy duo Ross and Fenton’s travesty on Virginius. Warde quipped to Latchaw that he wanted to slip over to the Grand to pick up some pointers on the role: “I am out of date or something.” Latchaw spoke also with Charles Ross of the comedy team that week, and Ross told him: “You know, I have had such success in this travesty of Virginius that a lot of my friends have urged me to give up comedy for a while and play Virginius ‘straight.’ I am half inclined to do it. I think I’ll try to get over to the Coates before the week is out and see Frederick Warde. He’s a fine Virginius, they tell me.” However, according to Latchaw, Ross never followed through with going legitimate (EY 26). Although the story cannot be tied to verifiable performance dates by those performers, it does convey a notion of the way theatrical fare conformed to social expectations that were partly determined by the venue itself. According to a 21 January 1912 Star profile of him as one of the city’s prominent self-made men, “Mr. Judah early made it his rule to give the public a little more for its money than it expected.” The fact that the Grand Opera House was a popular-price theater meant not only that tickets sold for less than at the first-class theaters but also that performers were paid according to a lower scale. Yet the Grand unfailingly made money for Hudson and Judah as well as for the companies that played there. The theater’s reputation for playing to excellent houses meant that top attractions would accept the lower pay scale only there and nowhere else in the nation. As Robert Grau explained it in The Business Man in the Amusement World: “Mr. Judah has reduced to a science his policy of catering to the public, with a result that is best illustrated by the statement that really all of the attractions which play the ‘Grand’ at a dollar scale for the

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best seats, play in other cities at $1.50 and even at $2.00. Yet, at the lower schedule in the popular ‘Grand,’ receipts of $10,000 for a week are common, year after year. The same attractions repeat their achievements here, too.”6 Under Judah’s management, the Grand annually cleared a profit of $40,000 or more. Judah’s son-in-law Seymour Rice recalled an incident when a star protested having been booked into a popular-price house. DeWolf Hopper was backstage shortly before his opening performance when he learned what kind of theater he was in.“Hopper was good and mad. He had never played at such prices in all his starring days.”After hearing Hopper out, Judah asked his name. This further enraged the star until Judah gently but firmly explained that the star’s name was not relevant in this instance, as Judah’s contract was not with Hopper but with the booking agency for the show. Hopper calmed down and went on, his tarnished pride much consoled by the excellent receipts.7 Steady audiences and the steady income they generated accounted for the success of the Grand Opera House, but the real foundation for the theater’s good business reputation was its outstanding management by Abraham Judah, who continued his practice of attending every performance. He would stand—often with the company manager or advance agent of the current production by his side—near the door to the box office in the lobby and would greet theatergoers as they arrived.Thus he built up a clientele that was said to be “the envy of every theater manager in the country.”8 Audiences at the Grand were loyal, many booking the same seats on the same night of the week, every week, season after season, no matter what show might be running.They got to know other audience members whom they saw regularly at the theater. They trusted Mr. Judah to ensure the wholesomeness and quality of the production. If he noted “an objectionable line or situation, it had to come out.This policy was not only in accordance with his personal taste, but he regarded it as an obligation to his public, which was made up largely of families.”9 Indeed, there were parents taking children to the Grand in the 1910s who had themselves been taken there as children in the 1890s. We recognize that while there may be aesthetic absolutes in art, standards of taste—what is considered socially appropriate—are embedded in the culture of a historical period. If the Grand Opera House audiences could see today’s popular entertainment, they would be horrified, not so much by the violence (for there was plenty of that in the melodramas) but by today’s profane language and the absence of a sense of personal honor and disci-

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The Grand became one of the most successful theaters in the country.The prestige Mr. Judah had gained at the Ninth Street was extended at the Grand. Bookings with him were sought by a good many managers who ordinarily played at higher prices elsewhere.The theater was regarded as “sure fire.” Not only did the theater have more than average capacity, but by including Sundays, ten performances were given weekly.Again there was no such thing as “open time.”The theater was booked solidly before the season began, and if there were any cancellations, the dates were quickly filled. (EY 1)

pline in the defense of virtue, womanhood, and the family. On the other hand, if today’s theatergoers could go back to the turn of the century and attend shows at the Grand Opera House—even if we could buy into the charm of individual performers who injected freshness into the shallow,predictable plots—we would be shocked and discomfited by what we would take to be racist attitudes in the depiction of African Americans on the stage. Setting aside the show business convention of blackface (a vast, complex subject that has been explored in numerous books, some of which are listed in the bibliography), we can see the “otherness” in the way blacks were portrayed by whites in legitimate drama and in the way “colored” performers were advertised when they accompanied musical comedy companies.The African American chorus, often called a “plantation chorus,” traveled in separate train cars and lodged in separate boardinghouses. It was the era eloquently described by syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. as “that strange half-life between free and not-free where African Americans had existed since the Civil War—a little progress, a little pain, and a whole lot of invisibility. Black life, black striving and black aspiration were conspicuous by their absence from the nation’s newspapers and magazines.”10 This situation applied also to the many southern-themed plays—Uncle Tom’s Cabin being merely the best known of such frequently revived works—presented at Coates Opera House, at the Gilliss, and at the Auditorium.The issue is raised in connection with Grand Opera House because of the phenomenal success of In Old Kentucky there for more than a quarter of a century.The ads and line drawings for this show most frequently feature the twenty-member “famous Pickaninny Brass Band.” The 1903 tour advertised, in addition, “50—Rollicking, Frolicking, Comical Pickaninnies—

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50.” The advance notice for the 1907 edition in the Post on 8 December promised that “an unusually large contingent of little darkey boys will add novelty to the presentation.” Year after year Judah would present the perennially popular In Old Kentucky by Charles T. Dazey. According to Latchaw, this touring production was enough of a crowd-pleaser around the nation that it broke a number of records, and it boasted two records in Kansas City. In Old Kentucky was the city’s most frequently booked road show (248 performances in total), and the Grand Opera House held the nationwide record for number of returns to the same theater in any given town. For the play’s one hundredth performance at the Grand on 28 November 1902, a program was printed on silk. According to the advance puff in the Star on 23 November, “the pickaninny band, always an important feature, has been enlarged by the addition of some of the cleverest and most amusing little ‘darkeys’ that could be found.” Why did the Grand audiences love this show? Latchaw cited the horse race that never failed to work the audience up to a fever pitch of excitement, the musical numbers, the quaint character types, the wholesome humor, and the realistic painting of Kentucky landscapes in the scenery. Latchaw hinted also at the nostalgic appeal of the setting for audiences only a generation away from the Civil War, in a region largely populated by southern sympathizers: In Old Kentucky had “a pervasive southern atmosphere, accentuated by hospitality and dialect” (EY 27).Then too there was the spunky mountain girl Madge Brierly, whose character must have tapped into latent sensibilities of the woman suffrage movement. Like other theaters, the Grand Opera House periodically booked in African American or integrated minstrel companies.The week of 18 December 1898 brought Bob Cole and Billy Johnson’s A Trip to Coontown to the Grand,with a cast of thirty-five Negro performers,including “the greatest living black tenor” Lloyd G. Gibbs. For New Year’s week 1902–1903, the Grand presented “the Peer of All Colored Organizations,” Bert Williams and George Walker with their company of fifty in the three-act musical comedy In Dahomey, “the most costly and colossal production ever given by a colored attraction,” according to the Journal of 4 January. Bert Williams sang his hit song “The Jonah Man.” Other numbers included “Emancipation Day” and “Every Darky Is a King.”Williams and Walker brought In Dahomey back to the Grand for the week of 13 November 1904, followed by their production of Abyssinia for the week of 14 October 1906. (For their December 1908 visit to Kansas City,Williams and Walker played the Shubert in New Bandanna Land.) Ernest Hogan,“the premier of all colored co-

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The tenth anniversary engagement of In Old Kentucky at Grand Opera House in 1902 also marked the one hundredth performance of the show at that theater.To mark the occasion, according to the program, Kansas Citians could enjoy “A Rag Time Concert given in front of the theatre each evening by the Pickaninny Band.”

medians,” played Rufus Rastus at the Grand in March 1907 with a company of fifty,“the Best and Largest Colored Company on Earth.” In November 1908 the Grand presented Bob Cole and Rosamond Johnson in their own musical comedy, The Red Moon. Williams and Walker, as well as Cole and Johnson, were among many paired comedians whose shows could be counted on to fill the Grand Opera House.Weber and Fields, Ross and Fenton, Hallan and Hart, Matthews and Bulger, Donnelly and Girard, Happy Ward and Harry Vokes,“two real German comedians” Mason and Mason (as Adolph and Rudolph), the very clever Evans and Hoey, and the slapstick Murray and Mack were some who remained vivid in Latchaw’s memory (EY 15). Most of Charles Hoyt’s farces with specialty turns played the Grand Opera House: for example, A Midnight Bell (25–31 October 1891), A Stranger in New York (1–7 January 1899), A Texas Steer (1894 and 1895), and many others. A Hole in the Ground closed on 4 February 1893, and a week later came A Parlor Match, starring Evans and Hoey, who brought it back for another week in September that same year. Kansas City–born Mabel Hite played her hometown with A Milk White Flag in September 1899. It will be noted that all of the Hoyt titles begin with A, a practice the superstitious dramatist adopted early in his career after a The-titled play failed.

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The beloved singing comedian Bert Williams (1874–1922) worked his way up as a “two act” in vaudeville with George Walker, and in 1903 they starred in the first allblack musical on Broadway, In Dahomey, which they later toured to Kansas City. Performing solo in the Ziegfeld Follies throughout the 1910s,Williams made “Nobody” his signature song. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

Very popular in Kansas City were May Irwin and Peter F. Dailey, whom Latchaw saw as “incomparable foils for each other.” Pete Dailey was a fine comedian and an overweight yet graceful dancer.The buxom blonde May Irwin “fairly radiated fun, whether on the stage or off. It takes a lot of laughter to keep life sweet, and that’s why May Irwin was born.” Over the years this “irresistible singer of ‘coon’ songs” (EY 14) appeared at the Coates and the Gilliss, but most memorably at the Grand Opera House, where she

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George Walker (1873–1911) began performing with Bert Williams in 1895, but it took them a few years to find the characters that worked for them.Walker was the slick urban sport, while Williams became the shuffling, down-on-his-luck “Jonah man.” Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

played the title role in two full-week engagements of The Widow Jones in 1896. After his first Grand Opera House engagement in 1898, the great Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott (who had twice played the Coates) would perform at no other theater but the Grand when he came to Kansas City. Other stars who had also played Coates Opera House and then enjoyed bookings, often of the same shows, at Grand Opera House included Louis James, James O’Neill, J. K. Emmett, Jennie Yeamans, McKee Rankin in The Danites, and

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Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914) performed with her husband, George Walker, and Bert Williams on Broadway and on tour.When they played Kansas City, they stayed at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lafayette Alonzo Tillman.These three cartes de visite are inscribed by the performers to their hostess, Mrs.Amy Tillman. Courtesy of Union Station/Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

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Frank Mayo in Davy Crockett. Later stars included James K. Hackett, the Hanlons, Eddie Foy, Marie Dressler, George Sidney, Nat M.Wills, Raymond Hitchcock in King Dodo and Hitchy-Koo, and Eva Tanguay in The Sambo Girl. George M. Cohan made his Kansas City debut at the Grand Opera House with the Four Cohans in The Governor’s Son in 1902. Maude Adams was performing J. M. Barrie’s comedy Quality Street at the Grand Opera House in May 1915 when the news came of the sinking of the Lusitania on which her mentor Charles Frohman had been crossing the Atlantic. Frohman’s death was a terrible loss to the entire theatrical world, but perhaps most devastating to Maude Adams, who had built virtually her entire career under his genial tutelage and close friendship. She went to the theater for her three o’clock matinee on Saturday 8 May but asked that the audience be dismissed, as she was not capable of a performance under the circumstances. Mr. Judah went backstage and asked to see her. He expressed his sympathy. She told him she had decided to cancel the remainder of her tour. Judah spoke to her of a theater artist’s professional obligation above all to the audience. He said that a performer is enlisted in the profession as a soldier is in the military, and that both keep faith with the public. He reminded her that the custom in the theatrical profession was to close the theater for funeral services, but not otherwise, and that Frohman’s own Empire Theatre in New York would be playing its matinee on this day. Maude Adams took Judah’s words to heart; she did perform that matinee and evening as well as her entire tour. An interesting sidelight to the reports of Charles Frohman’s death is found in the papers of E. B. Garnett, who succeeded Latchaw as the Star’s drama critic.Garnett,called “Ruby”by his friends,worked as the Star’s night telegraph editor at the time of the Lusitania news. One of the wire services relayed the last words Frohman was heard to speak: “Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.” Many people subsequently attributed to Frohman some variation of a line from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which Frohman had produced:“To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Garnett and his friend Cameron Shipp discussed the controversy surrounding Frohman’s last words, citing Channing Pollock’s observation (in Harvest of My Years) that it would have been quite out of character for Frohman to quote from Peter Pan. Still the Peter Pan attribution seemed to have hardened into legend. As coauthor of Billie Burke’s With a Feather on My Nose, Shipp regretted not having put her view on the matter into the book. Billie Burke, a close friend of Frohman, surmised that he would have used as few words as possible and he that would have got them slightly wrong.11

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The downside to the Grand’s success at drawing steady streams of theatergoers was the impact on downtown’s older legitimate theaters. Coates Opera House maintained its aura of prestige, presenting star performers in serious drama for a fashionable clientele, yet the Grand was beginning to take a toll on attendance at the Coates before it burned in 1901. Indeed, the Coates’s orchestra conductor Z.T. Hulett left the Coates in 1891 to become the Grand’s first conductor. Certainly, the downward spiral of the Gilliss Opera House was hastened by competition from the Grand’s popular fare. Two remodelings kept the Grand Opera House fresh. During the summer of 1899,everything above the first balcony was cleared out and replaced by a new balcony seating five hundred and a new gallery.The ceiling lights were also improved with the addition of two hundred bulbs.The 1902 renovation was even more extensive; it was “all new but the walls, the roof, and the prices,” reported the Journal on 24 August.The door from the foyer into the auditorium was moved off center, thus eliminating the drafts in winter. Critics extolled the repainted walls, the new curtains and carpets, and the improved sight lines. The most striking new feature was the creation of a comfortable parlor in the prime space to the right of the entrance where Judah’s office had been.With “real mahogany furniture,” this new lounging room, “a compliment from the managers the like of which no theatre in these parts can boast,” was to be used for socializing before the play or during intermission.There, too, one could get a drink of ice water direct from cold pipes.The dressing rooms under the stage were eliminated in favor of new dressing rooms, each with two windows, on two upper floors on the Seventh Street side of the building. The Grand Opera House did not entirely escape the ever-present danger of a playhouse fire. On Friday 22 January 1904, Nat M. Wills and his company had nearly finished their performance of A Son of Rest when the electric cord that suspended a chandelier in the stage setting short-circuited.The burning wire dropped the chandelier several feet, and at least one of its electric globes burst, igniting a patch of scenery in full view of the audience. Nat Wills was alone on the stage, in the middle of his song parody of the big number from Florodora, “Tell Me, Pretty Maiden,” when he saw the flame and the audience’s reaction. Many rose from their seats to leave, but he quickly stepped to the front of the stage and appealed to the audience.The Journal and the Times reported his calming words in almost identical terms: “For God’s sake, ladies and gentlemen, keep your seats. Only a few weeks ago, 600 lives were lost in the Iroquois Theatre fire, because peo-

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ple were doing what you have started to do. After that fire, the backs of the seats were found to be unscorched.” (Many of the lost lives in Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre on 30 December 1903 occurred because of trampling in the panic.) As Wills spoke, an actor in the company,Thomas J. Grady, rushed in and grasped the live wire to pull it from the chandelier; he received a shock and his left hand burned to the bone. Meanwhile, one of the two firemen on duty—the Grand kept two trained firemen in the theater at all times— came on stage with a hose and directed a stream of water at the blaze.The flames were extinguished as the audience watched from its seats. Judah had done his part to quell the initial panic, for he and the head usher and the police officers on duty had walked down the aisles from the back of the house toward the stage, politely asking everyone to keep their seats. The Journal estimated that no more than “one minute” elapsed between the first sight of the flames and their being extinguished. It had not been necessary to lower the asbestos curtain or to turn on the curtain of water from pipes rigged behind the proscenium. But the Grand staff had done its job well, for the ushers had promptly opened every exit door.The scenery with the faulty wire belonged not to the Grand, but to the touring company. After the fire was put out,Wills declared that the danger was past and that an orderly exit would be possible if anybody wanted to leave, but cheers and applause interrupted his words.“Sing. Go on with the show,” someone shouted. And the company did go on to finish the performance.Wills declared later in an interview: “I must congratulate the Kansas City people for being cool-headed, quiet and intelligent.” In the theatrical profession at large, Kansas City became synonymous with Grand Opera House, and A. Judah was the human face of the Grand Opera House. He was noted for his personal attention to all the details of his operation. He never dictated a letter, but wrote his own correspondence with pen and ink. His integrity was such that company managers, who normally stayed at theaters on the road each night to count the receipts, would look forward to Kansas City as the engagement that would allow them to return to the hotel and get some rest, for they trusted Mr. Judah to provide accurate statements for them to sign in the morning. There are several variations of a story about a struggling theater company that barely made it to Kansas City following a poorly attended engagement in St. Louis, with the company almost resigned to going broke and getting stranded. But it was booked into the Grand where faithful theatergoers packed the house all week.After the Saturday night performance, the bills were paid, the company was caught up on salaries, and ample train fare

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would take all of them to the next engagement.The Journal reported on 2 March 1913 that as they were about to leave for the depot, one actor paused before the darkened theater, took off his hat, and saluted the Grand Opera House with a sweeping bow. As actor Harry Bulger told the Journal of 27 October 1915, Mr. Judah actually advanced the struggling company $700 when it was stranded in St. Louis, underwriting its fares to Kansas City where it played a boffo week at the Grand. The actor tried to express his gratitude to Judah, who wouldn’t hear of it, so the actor took off his hat to the opera house, saying:“Old theater, I salute you. You have the best manager in the world.” Judah could always be counted on to help an actor who was down on his luck. For the Journal story of 27 October 1915, one theater man opined that “if all the actors in the United States to whom Mr. Judah has given money when they sorely needed it were to stand in line, it would reach from the entrance of his theater to Twelfth Street.” After Judah’s death, the Star reported on 3 October 1926 that when his theater safe was opened, there were dozens of IOUs dating back over the years, apparently kept “as remembrances rather than convertible assets.” It became a point of pride for actors to be able to say that Mr. Judah had pulled them through when they were hungry. If they later played an engagement at another theater in Kansas City, they would still pay a call on Judah at the Grand, sometimes even before checking in at the theater where they were booked.The Grand Opera House box office was the place where artists loved to hang out during the theater season. On Judah’s birthday, 19 December, telegrams would come in from all over the country. He in turn had a phenomenal memory for the details of individual actors’ careers. Judah’s employees, too, loved him for his courtesy and fairness. As the Star reported after his death, Judah took pride in the fact that “more than a dozen men had been with him twenty years.” Judah kept his acts of private charity quiet; undoubtedly many were known only to him and the beneficiary. However, Judah also involved himself in public philanthropy. He helped to organize the Mayor’s Christmas Tree Fund, which he actively supported. Every year during the Christmas holidays, he would host a special performance at the Grand Opera House for poor children. He was local secretary of the Actors’ Fund of America. He exercised leadership in the Associated Theatre Managers of Kansas City to hold benefits for charity. In February 1899 he tendered the use of the Grand, heated and lighted, for a benefit performance and got 182 people from the various other theaters to donate their services to the good work. The event raised more than $1,000 to replenish the coffers of the Provident

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Mr. Judah, genial, considerate, optimistic, created in and about his playhouse a fine spirit of co-operation and an engaging attitude toward the public. His patrons, through certain undefined relations with them, were made to feel they were guests. Most of the bills were comedy, often hilarious. It was a jolly experience to go to the Grand and have an evening of laughter. Many of the players, stars and lesser members of the companies, became strong favorites, appearing season after season, sometimes repeating old and popular bills, sometimes returning in new ones.The regular patrons came to know one another in more or less intimate fashion, and the social aspects of theatergoing were a factor in the seasonal enjoyment. (EY 27)

Association to aid the poor. In 1901 Judah was president of the Associated Managers when they expanded that effort to presenting programs at two theaters. He also organized the local relief effort for victims of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Of course, it was not always easy. Late in 1907 Judge William H.Wallace began waging a relentless campaign to close the theaters on Sundays. Missouri had a long-standing but little enforced Sunday Work Law based upon the idea of Sunday as a day of rest, not necessarily as a day of worship, and Wallace—ostensibly out of religious conviction—wanted to interpret the law broadly to include theatrical performances as a violation. Public sentiment came out strongly in favor of Sunday theater, and certainly the lucrative Sunday matinee and evening performances figured significantly in any theater’s financial picture. Wallace tested the law to the limit, week after week bringing indictments against A. Judah of the Grand, E. S. Brigham of the Gilliss, Clinton Wilson of the Majestic, Martin Lehmann of the Orpheum, Joseph R. Donegan of the Century, and William Warren of the Auditorium, each of them fined $50 for working on Sunday and $100 for opening a theater on Sunday. On 7 December 1907, indictments were issued against 228 actors, managers, and other theater employees who had worked on the previous Sunday. Some performers suddenly left town on the eve of the indictments, resulting in a canceled performance at the Majestic. The Orpheum lost a few actors but managed to keep going. The Century performers decided to go to jail together. Judah simply arranged bond for all of the Grand’s actors, and they performed as scheduled. The Willis Wood had no problem, because The Squaw Man had played only a

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half-week engagement there (Thursday through Saturday evenings and a Saturday matinee). The Willis Wood avoided the problem the following Sunday, although The Grand Mogul was booked for a full week, because a telegram from Abraham Erlanger (of the NewYork partnership of Klaw and Erlanger, which controlled the touring company) directed that the scheduled Sunday performances at the Willis Wood be canceled in order to spare the company the annoyance of being brought into police court or having to give bond. As president of the Associated Theater Managers of Kansas City, Judah had the duty of appearing before the grand jury regarding the indictments that accrued each week.The weekly arrests of anyone on duty at a theater on Sunday (actors, musicians, stage crew, ushers, office staff ), bond payments for their release, and grand jury appearances began to take a toll on Judah, who was undoubtedly still grieving the loss of his partner Mel Hudson the previous February. Abraham Judah simply wanted to run a theater and please the public, not have to deal endlessly with a self-aggrandizing zealot. Clint Wilson of the Majestic declared,“I know when I’m licked,” and discontinued Sunday performances on 22 December. Judah did what he could; the Star reported on 27 December that “he was before the grand jury several times yesterday afternoon and was told to appear again at 10 o’clock to-morrow morning for further questioning.” But Judah capitulated a few days later, as the Journal reported on 30 December, and the Grand went dark on Sundays for the rest of the season, with a Tuesday matinee added to the usual Thursday and Saturday matinees to make up for the lost performance slots. Wallace, however, increased the scope of his attacks. On 30 December 1907 the Journal ’s front page headlined Wallace’s claim that “Theaters Make Criminals” and that “15 Untried Murderers Were Influenced Toward Wickedness by Seeing Sunday Plays.” In the course of his two-hour address to the Jackson Christian Church,Wallace declared that “any influence that is as pernicious and demoralizing to the human mind as the average theater show should be stopped on Sunday, at least.”A barber was fined for shaving a customer on Sunday.The billiard halls were closed. Cigar sellers operated clandestinely.Thus, claimed the Journal on 30 December,“there were practically no other places open excepting disorderly houses.” Throughout the spring of 1908, the grand jury returned up to two hundred indictments each week, while the theater managers turned to a long list of friends and local businessmen to supply bonds.Wallace came in for criticism for piling up around two thousand indictments without ever

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bringing a case to trial. On 13 February 1908,Wallace announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor, with a platform designed to appeal to rural voters’ suspicions about the wickedness of city life. The intolerance reached the point that a sacred concert conducted on Sunday 16 February 1908 by the renowned Carl Busch was interrupted by a deputy marshal.Walking out onto the stage of the Willis Wood Theatre, the deputy asked that the curtain be rung down so that he could write down the names of the musicians without being subjected to the glares and hisses of the audience.The deputy was politely reminded that the stage had been set for the concert on Saturday, because nobody could touch a rope or a lever on Sunday without breaking the law.The grand jury refrained from indicting Busch and his orchestra members but sent word, according to the Journal for 22 February, that his music was not sacred enough for a Sunday and that if his musicians played again in the theater,“indictments would be returned and Busch and his men would be brought in before the judge,who is a candidate for greater things. Mr. Busch says he will give no more Sunday concerts.” When the state primary election returns were announced on 20 August 1908, Wallace came in a distant third for the Democratic nomination for governor.The Sunday closing crusade quickly unraveled over the next few weeks. Assistant Prosecuting Attorney R. S. Kimbrell was given complete charge of the cases of those who had violated “the Sunday closing law as interpreted by Judge Wallace,” according to the Post of 3 September, and Kimbrell declared his refusal to prosecute.The Grand Opera House’s newspaper advertisements for the season opening on 30 August include the day of the week, “SUN.,” in huge block letters. As Latchaw summed it all up, “the managers finally won, but they paid pretty well in costs and annoyances” (EY 41). Just as Judah was said to be the only theater manager in the nation who could get away with offering first-class productions at popular prices, he was also the only one who succeeded in maintaining his independence during the years when the infamous Theatrical Syndicate or Trust took control of the big business that was American theater. The Syndicate, also known as Klaw and Erlanger, had since 1895 gained monopolistic power over the booking of attractions into theaters all across the United States. By offering the top attractions and controlling scheduling and newspaper advertising, the Syndicate was able to negotiate exclusive distribution rights for the firstclass theaters in every city. Only with the rise of the Shuberts early in the twentieth century was the Syndicate stranglehold on American theater

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loosened. But then the rivalry between two powerful entities seeking control of major theaters in every city created problems for local theater managers, who were pressured to align with one or the other organization. Judah stood firm on his obligation to his audience, and he booked only the shows he wanted from the Syndicate or from the Shuberts—and at his own prices. A 21 January 1912 profile of A. Judah in the Star as one of Kansas City’s successful entrepreneurs summarized the situation:“when there came to be two theatrical trusts fighting each other, it was not so easy.The pressure on a manager to turn his public over to one syndicate or the other was tremendous. Indeed, it might well mean that or shut one’s house up.A. Judah will tell you today that the proudest accomplishment of his managerial career was that he did neither. He kept his house open and independent, maintained his popular prices which he regards as a moral contract with his patrons and continued to book the best attractions he could get irrespective of their syndicate relations.” According to the Journal story on 27 October 1915, it was the high regard in which Judah was held throughout the theatrical world that enabled him to book his attractions through both agencies even at the peak of the conflict, and to remain on friendly terms with everyone. A 2 March 1913 feature story on Grand Opera House in the Journal celebrated its twenty-two-year run of fun-giving and trouble-drowning to a total of seven million theatergoers. The Grand was truly unique among Kansas City theaters for never having a single dark week during the theatrical season during all that time.The article provided a few additional statistics: 8,800 performances given, 35,000 times the orchestra had played and the curtain had risen, $5,000,000 in total box office receipts.And again the truism: “To the theatrical profession, Kansas City and the Grand are synonymous.” Along with his devotion to the theater, Judah was an avid fisherman. He would spend the summer months, when the theaters were dark, in Belgrade Lake, Maine, which was close enough to New York for visits with theatrical acquaintances. He is said to have invented a fly that continued in use by Maine fisherman and became known as the Judah fly (EY 27). Each February he would join his friend M. G. Heim on Heim’s yacht for some deepsea fishing off Miami, Florida, or off the Catalina Islands of California.These expeditions earned him several sportsman’s medals, but one of his really cherished possessions was a difficult to obtain permit from the Austrian government to fish in a certain small stream near Carlsbad.

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Apart from those trips, Judah continued to be at the Grand Opera House for every performance until illness kept him away for the two weeks or so before his death, of diabetes, on 26 October 1915. Indeed, it was his inability to oversee productions that caused him to book motion pictures during his illness. D.W. Griffith’s epic film The Birth of a Nation was playing at the Grand at the time of Judah’s death. Judah’s estate was estimated at a quarter of a million dollars, but the real legacy was the example he set as the honest businessman who always gave priority to his customers’ needs. His friend Robert T. Shannon wrote to the Star upon learning of his death: “Mr. Judah was a man who never went in for self-revelation. His many acts of kindness and charity were sub rosa, but I happen to know that no heart had a warmer beat for those in need of encouragement or assistance. In business I have seen him err, not to be fair, but to be more than fair to the other fellow.” After Mr. Judah’s death, his son-in-law Seymour Rice (1871–1933) took over management of the Grand, which Judah’s widow sold after all outstanding commitments had been honored. The remainder of the 1915 – 1916 season comprised the legitimate shows that were already booked, including the ever-popular In Old Kentucky, amid programming that largely featured motion pictures. Rice, who had married Blanche Judah (1874– 1965) in 1900, worked for a time for Judah, as treasurer of the Ninth Street Theatre and assisting in the management of Grand Opera House. Later he became a publisher of theater programs. From his years at Central High School, Rice enjoyed performing, usually playing the leading role. In adulthood he joined a community group called Epperson Megaphone Minstrels and often performed as one of the end men. Rice had a quick wit and a warm sense of humor that matched his personal generosity, so he frequently served as toastmaster or after-dinner speaker. One example of his readiness with a quip occurred when he was lunching with several other men in the Emery Bird tea room at a table not far from the swinging doors to the kitchen.A waitress, carrying a tray laden with two pitchers of milk and one of cream, collided with another waitress coming through the doors.The tray flew up and the dairy products came down, most of them showering Seymour Rice’s gray suit. Blinking through the cream that dripped down his brow, Rice expressed his concern:“But what became of the cow?” One year after Judah’s death, the Grand Opera House was leased in October 1916 to A. E. Elliott of Sapphire Amusement company for motion pictures, but it still hosted the occasional touring company.The Scarritt estate, which then owned both the land and the opera house, sold the build-

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Seymour Rice was one of the most interesting and likable men ever attached to any theater. He knew a vast number of people. He never lost his enthusiasm for the stage. It seemed he saw every play in town, yet he hardly could have, for many of them “doubled” on him, playing the same nights. He liked the theater and theater people. He liked to talk about them. He made friends among them, and his unexpected death was a shock to them as well as to the community in which he had lived. (EY 27)

ing on 1 June 1918 to Klaw and Erlanger, representing the Theatrical Syndicate, with a lease to operate it as a Syndicate house for ten years. Klaw and Erlanger remodeled the theater and sold it to Kansas City Amusement Company while retaining the management of it.They made Walter Sanford (formerly of the Shubert Theatre) manager. In 1920 Maurice M. Dubinsky and his brother Ed Dubinsky bought the controlling interest in Kansas City Amusement Company, which continued to honor the Klaw and Erlanger franchise. Despite a successful 1920 –1921 season, subsequent programming of attractions was haphazard.The operation fell into debt in the 1921–1922 season, to the point that musicians and stagehands walked out on Christmas Day 1921 in protest at not having been paid their overdue salaries. In January 1922, the Grand went into receivership under Ambrose E. Elliott, who had bought two-thirds of the stock at a foreclosure sale several weeks earlier. Elliott planned to reopen the theater while bringing suit against the Dubinsky brothers,who had run up $21,000 in debts.Still,the Grand Opera House was dark during much of the subsequent seasons, with occasional notable exceptions such as the African American musical comedy Shuffle Along (week of 1 April 1923), which had enjoyed a two-year run on Broadway. The announcement on 1 September 1926 that the Grand Opera House was to be razed and the site used for a parking garage brought a wealth of retrospective appreciations for the beloved theater in all the Kansas City newspapers over the course of the following month. The street-level tenants (a barber shop, a saloon, a fruit vendor) were given a month to vacate their spaces, and the tower was taken down from its place atop the facade. Fortunately, as noted earlier, the ensuing demolition was restricted to the interior, while the venerable walls were allowed to stand. Sam’s Garage operated inside the shell of Grand Opera House for several decades. With

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Kansas City’s downtown renewal under way by 2005, the building became a storage site for city vehicles and other equipment. Sometimes in the soft autumn twilight—when standing across Walnut Street from the main entrance to the Grand Opera House, that is, on the former site of the elegant Midland Hotel—one can almost commune with those generous spirits of the past and imagine A. Judah at his post next to the box office beyond the double-door entry. And then one thinks of making a sweeping bow to the Grand Opera House and saying, much as one actor did so long ago,“Old theater, I salute you. You had the best manager in the world.”

Chapter 6 BIG-TIME VAUDEVILLE AND BURLESQUE

In the 1910s and 1920s, vaudeville surpassed legitimate theater in sheer volume of attractions and at the box office. It did not happen quickly or easily in Kansas City, but as the result of a careful strategy partially orchestrated by out-of-town business interests.The rapid pace and range of novelties on a typical vaudeville bill had propelled the new entertainment form to readier acceptance in major cities such as New York and Chicago, where the public was accustomed to the constant barrage of new sensations: heavy street traffic and its cacophony of sounds, amazing displays of commercial goods behind the newfangled plate-glass windows of shops on streets now electrically illuminated at night, and a plethora of multiethnic cultural signifiers. On the other hand, people in the American heartland regarded vaudeville with suspicion, for they associated it with the old type of variety presented in concert saloons and honky-tonks. When Kansas City finally succumbed to vaudeville’s allures—visual spectacle, constant turnover of acts, inoffensive material that posed no mental challenge—there was no looking back.Thus, Latchaw must be accounted correct in his assessment that “the enchanted years” were coming to an end by 1912. Certainly, one could still see some good dramatic fare performed by Broadway stars into the 1920s. But the times were indeed changing. The concept of variety entertainment wholesome enough to be seen by women, and the corresponding substitution of the term vaudeville for variety, took hold in New York City and elsewhere by the 1880s. But it was

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not until 1898 that Kansas Citians got more than the occasional glimpses of vaudeville acts that padded the stock company bills at the New Gillis Opera House in the mid-1890s. In January 1898, H. D. Clark announced that he had leased his Ninth Street Theatre to Gustav Walter of San Francisco.When it had earlier been rumored that Clark was seeking a lessee for the theater, two locally invested partnerships—that of Hudson and Judah, and that of Paxton and Burgess—had expressed interest. Clark,however,chose the outof-town entrepreneur.Walter (or Walters, in some sources), owner of an Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, had joined with Morris Meyerfeld to acquire theaters in Los Angeles and Sacramento.The addition of a Kansas City house was another step in building a circuit of theaters “devoted exclusively to the vaudeville business” and all named Orpheum. According to the Journal of 17 January,Walter “engages the best talent in this line of business, many of his features being imported.”Walter was simply the business face that Kansas City saw when the deal was made,and so the Journal erred somewhat in crediting him as the one who had “ample means to ensure generous management on a large scale, and his entrance into the Kansas City theatrical circle will be a matter of importance, especially as he will have the only vaudeville house in town, unless some changes are made by the other managers.” The Ninth Street Theatre did indeed get its name changed to the Orpheum to match the other theaters in the chain. As the Orpheum’s director general,Gustav Walter visited Kansas City for the inaugural performance of “Kansas City’s Society Vaudeville Theater” under its new name, but he kept his own focus on San Francisco, where the Orpheum circuit was originally headquartered, and Chicago, where Martin Beck rose to become the circuit’s leading businessman. It was Martin Lehman who managed the Kansas City theater, assisted by James S. McQuade. It was Lehman who had taken the initiative to convince the Orpheum management that Kansas City would be a viable market for vaudeville, and it was Lehman who succeeded in making vaudeville an accepted entertainment option for conservative midwesterners. Lehman spent the rest of his career, from 1898 until his death, managing the Kansas City Orpheum, where everybody fondly called him “Pop.” Martin Lehman (1852–1917) was born in New Orleans.When he was three, his parents followed the gold rush to San Francisco, and Lehman attended school there.When the family moved to Los Angeles, he began acting with amateur dramatic clubs; there he first trod the boards in An April Fool in 1873 at the Turnverein Germania. In the early 1880s, Lehman tried

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acting professionally and even won acceptance into James O’Neill’s company. However, he discovered an aptitude for management, and for a time he ran the Los Angeles Grand Opera House. In 1893 Lehman opened his own vaudeville theater called the Imperial, the first vaudeville house in Los Angeles, which he filled with acts booked from a San Francisco vaudeville theater,Walter’s original Orpheum.When Meyerfeld and Walter decided to expand their Orpheum circuit to Los Angeles,Lehman was seen as the competition and no longer permitted to book their acts. In 1894 Lehman closed the Imperial and cast his lot with the Orpheum interests.When the Bostonbased Keith circuit sent a Chicago variety theater manager, John D. Hopkins, to scout the possibilities of expanding Keith’s vaudeville operations to the West Coast, Lehman was sent to Chicago to acquire a theater by which Orpheum could carry the competition into the rival’s own territory. Lehman set up an office in Chicago and made it clear that his company would invade the East Coast if the Keith circuit crossed the Mississippi. After negotiating an agreement by which the two circuits would respect each other’s turf, Lehman visited Kansas City to look at an act playing there for possible booking on the Orpheum circuit. It was in 1896 that Martin Lehman attended a show at Kansas City’s old Ninth Street Theatre. Its variety programming was then attracting a largely male audience, but Lehman saw the possibilities. His first challenge was to convince the Orpheum magnates—Gustav Walter, Morris Meyerfeld, and Martin Beck—that this would be a sound business move. It proved still more difficult to change the nature of the somewhat tacky Ninth Street Theatre into an Orpheum that would attract people willing to pay as much as fifty or seventy-five cents to see a bill of variety acts. The inaugural bill at the Orpheum (6 –12 February 1898) suggests a fairly cautious approach to programming, with the Knaben Kapelle as headliners, fresh from the West Coast.This was a Hungarian Boys’ Imperial Military Band, “40—Natural-Born Musicians—40,” under the direction of Niklas Schilzenyi. Also on the bill were Servais Le Roy, Europe’s greatest illusionist and magician in his American debut; the Vesuviano Operatic Quartet, direct from the San Carlo Opera House, Naples; Miss Ola Hayden, the famous contra-tenor; Matthew and Harris, mirth provokers; Prof. Gallandro, lightning clay modeler; Gruet, Beers, and Gruet, grotesque comedy acrobats; and realistic scenes in moving pictures. Nobody could mistake the intention to present a refined quality of material. Yet the Orpheum played to tiny houses for several weeks.Too many people remembered the Ninth Street as “a ‘variety’ house, which outdid burlesque in its worst days.

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

In 1898, Martin Lehman converted the popular-price Ninth Street Theatre into a vaudeville house in the Orpheum chain. It operated as the Ninth Street Orpheum until the new Orpheum was built on Baltimore Avenue in 1914.The exterior stairway leading to the third floor was used as a separate entrance for African Americans, who were allowed to sit only in the gallery. From Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

Respectable people did not go near it.”1 Nor did the new format retain the old Ninth Street clientele. Lehman lost $11,000 on his first season, but he persisted.Within a week or so after the opening, Lehman divided the city into sections and walked from house to house, starting in the best residential districts. He would ring the doorbell, introduce himself, explain the kind of entertainment he was

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The attaches of this house are not permitted to accept fees or gratuities of any kind. It is intended that the admission fees shall cover all advantages afforded by the superior equipment of the Orpheum. A ladies’ retiring room will be found in the rear of the Parquet.A matron is in charge to minister to the comfort of ladies and children. In the presentation of advanced Vaudeville, by the Orpheum Circuit Co., it is its constant aim to prevent the use of a single word, expression, or situation that might offend the intelligent, refined and cultured. Patrons are requested to report to the manager any inattention or incivility on the part of any attache of this theatre. The Management suggests that physicians and others in the audience who may expect a summons by telephone or messenger during the performance leave their seat numbers and their names with the box office clerk. Seats may be reserved by telephone.Telephone No. 695 Main, either ’phone. Inquire at the box office regarding lost and found articles. Children in arms will not be admitted to any performance. Full tickets required for all children. Ladies are politely requested to remove their hats during the performances. (Orpheum program, 11 March 1908)

presenting, invite the people he met to be his guests, and give them complimentary tickets. His preferred method was to hand the tickets personally to the ladies of the household, knowing that the women’s approval was crucial to building an audience. “Eventually he had covered the whole town,” Latchaw marveled. “At first he gave out tickets for alternate rows. Then, as the paid attendance increased, he gave out each third row; then the fourth. By this method he kept his house pretty well ‘dressed.’The net result of this advertising was prosperity”(EY 41).The second season just about broke even, and the third showed a profit. Kansas City’s Orpheum became widely regarded as one of the best houses on the Orpheum circuit, which numbered seventeen theaters by 1905. When Martin Beck visited Kansas City, he said to Lehman:“Pop, you’re the man who has made the Orpheum circuit.”2

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The second Ninth Street Theatre was built in 1893 and five years later renamed the Orpheum.This was where Martin Lehman presented high-class vaudeville from 1898 until he opened the opulent new Orpheum on Baltimore in 1914. In this rare photograph we see part of the stage, the orchestra and side boxes, and a glimpse of the balconies. From the Joseph Redmond Collection of Orpheum Photographs. Used by permission of the University of Missouri–Kansas City Libraries, Special Collections Department.

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Martin Lehman never ceased his efforts to provide the best of popular entertainment for his adopted city. He got to know his public and artfully balanced his bills to please. In 1901 Lehman surprised his audience when the title of the next act was spelled out in lights on a panel at each side of the proscenium arch; the Times on 10 February 1917 credited him as the inventor of this device. An Orpheum program for the week of 8 March 1908 reveals much about the operation in its tenth season in Kansas City. Two slogans top the masthead page:“Paying Particular attention to the Entertainment, Comfort and Convenience of Ladies and Children!” and “Presenting at all Times the Best of European and American Vaudeville Attractions.”3 The Orpheum circuit now comprised theaters in twelve cities, as well as some associated theaters that booked through the Orpheum company. The doors opened at 1:30 for matinees and at 7:30 for the evening performance, with ticket prices the same at all times: fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five,fifty,and seventy-five cents.The ticket office was open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and seats could be reserved by telephone. Further information appeared at the bottom of the page.This surviving theater program was annotated in beautiful penmanship by a theatergoer, who left no clue to his or her identity other than the note:“Louise and I—Wednesday matinee March 11—1908.” That person’s assessment of each act is worth recording here: *The Three Keatons, Joe, Myra, and Buster, Eccentric Comedy: “O.K. Cute.” *Barry and Hulvers (Charles and Hulda), late of Babes in Toyland and Wonderland: “Nit!” *Wilbur Mack assisted by Nella Walker in his one-act musical farce The Bachelor and the Maid, with musical numbers Mandy, I Love You, When I Go Automobiling, I’ve Been Told, and Boston Town: “So-So—but a stylish and nice young couple.” *The 3 Leightons presenting A One Night Stand in Minstrelsy, singing their Own Compositions, Bill,You Done Me Wrong, Honey, I Loves You, ’Deed I Do: “Passable.” *Flo Irwin,supported by Jacques Kruger & Co.in George Ade’s farce Mrs. Peckham’s Carouse: “Awful in my opinion.” *Commander-in-chief of the Army of Fun, Press Eldredge, singing a little foolishness, talking a little nonsense:“Very enjoyable.” *Dunedin Troupe,World Famed marvelous, artistic and acrobatic cyclists: “Best of the kind.” *Kinodrome, displaying the latest novelties in moving pictures: no note.

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On this bill, the Dunedin Troupe was placed in the headliner position, while the moving pictures had long since lost their novelty and been reduced to the chaser, that is, last on the bill and after the headliner, to clear the theater. However, the advertised headliner was Flo Irwin, sister of the more famous singing comedienne May Irwin. Since Flo Irwin’s act was a short play, it appears in the traditional midbill slot for one-act plays. The Dunedin Troupe (two girls and two boys) was touted as second in importance, and the two sprightly girls are pictured in the Post’s Sunday feature for 8 March. It is true, as hinted by this program, that during many years of touring together, the Three Keatons never became headliners despite favorable audience response. Buster Keaton (1895–1966), who later gained fame as a silent film comedian, would have been in his teens during this Kansas City engagement; he continued to tour with his parents until 1917. The Orpheum boasted the best theater orchestra in Kansas City.The musical selections played between the acts were regarded as an attraction in their own right. Yet those musicians were equally adept at accompanying the varied needs of the booked-in acts with “support of excellent soloists, sprightly rhythms for the dancers,explosives for broad farce and shivery stuff for the acrobats.” Conductor Michael Angelo Lenge even had a signature melody to accompany stagehand Frank Allan whenever he came out to sweep up the sand “after a shuffle dance” (EY 41). Fifteen years of prosperity at the Orpheum on Ninth Street motivated Lehman to build the New Orpheum,which opened on 26 December 1914. At a cost of $350,000, this beautifully designed edifice at 1212 Baltimore, near the Muehlebach Hotel, became a point of pride in Kansas City for its architecture, color scheme, and accommodations designed for the theatergoer’s comfort.The lobby featured a vaulted ceiling in terra-cotta and colored tile. Martin Beck, who was by then prominent in New York theatrical enterprises, attended the opening and pronounced the new Orpheum designed by G. A. Landsburgh “the finest theatre in the world,” according to the Post’s report of December 27. Coverage of the opening focused on the fashionable people who attended and on the classy entertainment more than on the facility. Some of the fine features of note were the excellent acoustics for Lenge’s orchestra, the soft colors and indirect lighting of the decor, the three tiers of boxes, and the speed with which the capacity audience of 2,400 could clear the house (though it was not so easy to clear the street congestion of limousines and fashionable motorcars that jammed Baltimore Avenue while “society’s chauffeurs” each tooted a distinctive horn that the vehicle’s owner should recognize). The Journal for 27 December

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The real story of vaudeville in Kansas City goes back to the old Orpheum. . . .The genial, considerate Manager Lehman was the spirit of the house. He knew his business from every angle. He knew how to arrange a balanced bill and he knew his public and how to cater to it. He gave Kansas City its best theatre orchestra, conducted by Michael Lenge.The orchestra became one of the most attractive features of the theater. It could play between-act music delightfully, but was especially skillful in the varying accompaniments, which included support of excellent soloists, sprightly rhythms for the dancers, explosives for broad farce and shivery stuff for the acrobats. (EY 41)

also reported that “the entire second balcony is reserved for negroes.They have the same accommodations as those on the lower floors, a private entrance and ticket sellers, doorkeepers, ushers, and maids of the same race. It is the first time in Kansas City, or in any city for that matter, where negroes may purchase their seats in advance and have them reserved just the same as others do. And last night they took advantage of this first opportunity.” The newspaper advertisement for the new Orpheum’s opening bill shows the precision of timing of a vaudeville bill.The overture commenced at 8:20 and ended at 8:35. From 8:35 to 8:51, the Orpheum Travel Weekly offered enchanting moving pictures of France and Italy. At 8:51 director Lenge raised his baton for the first act, Bankoff and Girlie, acrobatic modern dancers, which ended at 9:02. Little Cleo Gascoigne, a tiny (weighing only seventy pounds) prima donna from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, sang for twelve minutes in the styles of Tetrazzini and Fritzi Scheff, and was heartily applauded. At 9:14 Morris Cronin and his Merry Men provided “Many Mirthful Moments” by Indian club juggling with electrical effects, until 9:28.Walter S.“Rube” Dickinson went until 9:42 with his comic turn as an aged justice of the peace. He had the audience laughing hysterically before he said a word, and he built on that with his monologue about the Democratic national convention.Mayor and Mrs.Henry Jost were observed to be laughing as much as anyone else.The headliner began at 9:42 and lasted until 10:26: a musical comedy, The Bride Shop, featuring comedian Andrew Tombes, prima donna Lola Wentworth, and a host of pretty girls in gorgeous fashions. Old favorites Wellington Cross and Lois Josephine

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The day after the magnificent new Orpheum opened on 26 December 1914, the Kansas City Star published drawings of the lobby and the boxes.

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showed some new tricks in their classy song-and-dance act from 10:26 to 10:45. Finally, from 10:45 to 10:57, came a number called “Three Beautiful Types” that involved tableaux poses of a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead under stereopticon colors. The new Orpheum’s inaugural bill won favorable reviews but was marred by tragedy only two days later.Walter Dickinson stood out as a favorite with audiences at both matinee and evening performances on Saturday and Sunday.The Journal’s review on 28 December declared,“‘Rube’Dickinson’s true to life portrayal of the ‘ex-justice of the peace’ is so natural that everyone who ever lived in a small town recalled some village character as the original of Mr. Dickinson’s character creation. It was like a trip back home to many of the audience.” According to the Star of the same day,“there was a laugh in every word he spoke and in every slight change of his serio-comic face.” Unfortunately, the forty-year-old comedian never made it to his Monday matinee performance. From the Edward Hotel, where he was staying, he walked east on Twelfth Street, past the Gayety Theatre at Twelfth and Wyandotte, and then turned south on Baltimore Avenue.There construction was still under way on the Muehlebach Hotel next door to the Orpheum. Dickinson’s path took him under a hundred-foot-long wooden canopy erected over the sidewalk to protect pedestrians; building materials were deposited on top of it. Apparently a teamster’s wagon, loaded with marble slabs, backed up against two of the support beams and broke them, causing the entire passageway to collapse. A heavy beam struck Dickinson’s head, followed by an avalanche of building materials that buried him. Police quickly rescued the injured pedestrians. Dickinson was carried to a nearby drugstore for emergency treatment and then placed in a patrol wagon for transport to the hospital, but he died en route.Two others also died, and six were seriously injured. Cards and letters in Dickinson’s pockets linked him to the Orpheum, so a call was made to the theater. Manager Lehman took a taxicab to the hospital and identified Dickinson’s body. Dickinson had risen quickly in the profession during his last three years. He was popular backstage as well as with audiences. Performers at the Orpheum burst into tears upon learning of his death; they took charge of preparing a funeral service. Martin Lehman took to heart the interests of both his performers and the people of Kansas City. To every act that played the Orpheum, Pop Lehman served as a kindly adviser, and his suggestions often boosted an act’s place on the bill as it played the circuit. However, Lehman’s health was failing in the years following the opening of the new Orpheum. Increasingly

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The word new on this postcard distinguishes the Orpheum that opened in 1914 on Baltimore from the old Ninth Street Orpheum.The edifice on the right is the Muehlebach Hotel. Over the years, the classiest acts in vaudeville performed here as well as musical comedy headliners such as Eddie Foy and legitimate players such as Sarah Bernhardt. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

he left the management to his son Lawrence Lehman, while Pop and his wife, Amelia Long Lehman—whom he had married on 3 March 1882— wintered in Los Angeles. Although he died in Los Angeles, Pop Lehman had asked that his ashes be returned to Kansas City for burial.The encomia that followed his death confirmed that Martin Lehman had contributed more than any other individual to elevating vaudeville to an entertainment for the most fashionable people and for making Kansas City’s Orpheum the most respected theater on the circuit. Upon receiving the news of his death on 10 February 1917,actors and managers at every theater on the Orpheum circuit paused to pay tribute to his memory. A 1922 retrospective article about the Orpheum,“The Two-a-Day Idea and Where It Led,” clearly testified to Lehman’s role in making the Orpheum the entertainment venue of choice for the fashionable people of Kansas City.4 Several paragraphs list those who kept the same seats on the same evening each week. Dr. Eugene Carbaugh occupied the second box on the right with his family every Sunday matinee and missed only three

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

Martin Lehman (1852–1917), affectionately known to theatergoers as “Pop” Lehman, was instrumental in winning a local audience for highclass vaudeville and in the development of the Orpheum chain of vaudeville theaters. The Kansas City Times, 10 August 1967.

performances in nineteen years. Elmer Kreeger, owner of Hurry Messenger Service, saw every Sunday evening performance for fifteen years from his sixth-row aisle seat.J.H.Foresman’s party of four in the second row came every Monday night for fifteen years. And the list continued. For a decade, Lawrence Lehman (1886–1956) continued his father’s successful management of the Orpheum, having got his start at age twelve, when he sold lemon drops in the lobby of the old Orpheum on Ninth Street. He left high school after his sophomore year in order to take the position of treasurer at the Orpheum. After three years of gaining experience with an Orpheum in Memphis, he returned to Kansas City in 1910 to run a stock company at the Auditorium when his father acquired it as a preventive measure against a rival vaudeville company. The younger Lehman was also closely involved with overseeing construction of the new Orpheum.The Lehmans’ faith in Kansas City was backed up by the Orpheum circuit when it put one and a half million dollars into the Mainstreet Theatre (later called the Empire),which opened in 1921—only two blocks from

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the Orpheum—as another vaudeville palace, also under Lawrence Lehman’s management. A number of locally grown performers were among those who played the Orpheum. Mabel Hite (1885 –1912) had performed in an amateur children’s production of Iolanthe at the Coates in 1895 and grew up to a succession of good comic opera roles. According to Latchaw, she found her preferred niche in comedy sketches in vaudeville, where her quick wit and pretty face made her a headliner. After she married Giants hitter Mike Donlin, they did laugh-provoking baseball sketches together and played the Orpheum in her hometown many times (EY 51). Lulu McConnell (1882– 1962) got her start with the Woodward Stock Company and showed musical comedy talent but switched to vaudeville when she married Grant Simpson; together they enjoyed many engagements at the Orpheum. Eddie Foy, who had worked at the Comique under Valentine Love so many decades earlier (see Chapter 3), often returned to Kansas City. He inaugurated the Shubert Theatre (see Chapter 7) in 1906, and it was also in Kansas City, during his engagement as headliner at the Orpheum in Mr. Hamlet of Broadway, that Eddie Foy died unexpectedly of a heart attack on 16 February 1928. Foy had been experiencing heart pains during his tour, but the audience saw only the usual zest. His biographer Armond Fields quotes the Herald Tribune’s eulogy:“He walked with a strut, like a bantam rooster looking for a fight, and his voice had that odd lisp that made every syllable drip with molasses. . . . He was funny when he sang. He was funny when he walked. He was funny when he just stood there and blinked across the footlights.”5 Foy had commented to an interviewer after his opening performance in The Falling Star on Sunday at the Orpheum:“I think it’s the besht act I’ve had in a long time. My booking agentsh call thish my farewell tour, but why should it be, eh?—why should it be? Eddie Foy’sh alwaysh good and his friendsh alwaysh shtick by him. Jusht tell me it’sh a good act, that’sh all, and I’ll keep going.”6 To fill Foy’s vacant spot on the Orpheum bill for the remainder of the week, the Four Italian Serenaders were taken off a bill in Des Moines and rushed to Kansas City. Meanwhile, members of the local Elks lodge and many other admirers held a service for Eddie Foy at Sheehan’s chapel, where the body lay in state before being taken to the depot and sent for burial in New York. A few of the other big names who played the Orpheum should be mentioned. It will be remembered that Sarah Bernhardt played two engagements there. Others included Eva Tanguay, Harry Houdini, Blossom Seeley,

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

According to a retrospective on the Orpheum in the Kansas City Star on 15 October 1927,“a child actress that everyone, from managers to stage hands, used to love in the old days—Elsie Birbauer, or ‘Little Elsie,’ as they always called her—is now Elsie Janis, who appeared at the Shubert last season with her own show.” From the Joseph Redmond Collection of Orpheum Photographs. Used by permission of the University of Missouri–Kansas City Libraries, Special Collections Department.

Jimmy Savo, Al Herman, Fanny Brice, Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Elsie Janis, Ethel Barrymore, Chic Sale, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Nora Bayes, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson. By 1927, the motorcar, the motion picture, and the radio were taking a toll on live entertainment. After two seasons of losses, the Orpheum cir-

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cuit’s management closed Kansas City’s Orpheum Theatre in the fall of 1928. It did, however, continue to book vaudeville acts into Kansas City for performance in tandem with photoplays at the larger Mainstreet Theatre, which had already attracted a broader spectrum of theatergoers by its continuous performance format, whereby a ticket buyer could enter at any time and stay until the same attractions starting coming around again.7 Years of vicissitudes followed for the Orpheum on Baltimore, which operated as a legitimate theater in 1934, presenting road shows and stock companies off and on until 1938, when it became a motion picture house. In 1956 the Trianon Hotel company—operators of the Hotel Muehlebach, which had been completed only a few months after the Orpheum, at Twelfth and Baltimore—purchased the Orpheum and dismantled the theater trappings of the interior. Demolition of the Orpheum began in December 1961 and lasted through the summer of 1962, taking longer than expected because of the building’s solid construction. As noted in a feature story on the Orpheum, the Muehlebach Hotel would never have been built if not for the Orpheum deal, and now the Orpheum was to be swallowed up by the expansion of the hotel.8 Like the new Orpheum, the little gem of a theater that opened in 1900 as Butler’s Standard—and is today known as the Folly—owed much of its image and character to out-of-town interests. St. Louis entrepreneurs Edward H. Butler (1837–1911) and James J. Butler (1861–1917), father and son, had founded the Empire Burlesque Circuit Company in 1897, and they built the theater at Twelfth and Central in Kansas City as part of a chain that soon joined the great Western Wheel comprising about fifty burlesque theaters. Edward Butler, an Irish immigrant, began as a blacksmith and, as he made money, branched into various business interests, including seven smithy shops, garbage removal, street lighting, and popular amusements. His first Butler’s Standard Theater opened in St. Louis in 1883. Although he never held elective office, “Colonel” Butler rose to considerable influence in local Democratic Party politics during the most corrupt era of St. Louis city government. His son James learned the blacksmith’s trade under his father but attended St. Louis University and was admitted to the bar in 1885. His election as state representative to Congress in 1902 involved voter fraud, but he held office until 1908. He often visited Kansas City and stayed in the hotel adjacent to the theater (opened in 1902 as the Century Hotel, and in 1911 renamed the Edward Hotel in honor of his father), where he had a special suite from which he could watch the show on stage while lying in bed. The Folly Theater—opened as Butler’s Standard and known successive-

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ly as the Century, the Lyric, the Century again, Shubert’s Missouri, and the Folly—came very close to being razed in 1974. Given the loss of Kansas City’s legendary Coates, Gilliss,Auditorium, and Willis Wood, few thought it important to save the seedy home of cheap girlie shows and adult movies that gave Twelfth Street a bad name. Fortunately, Joan Dillon of the Performing Arts Foundation took up the fight to save the theater.The battle involved getting it listed for historic preservation, raising a million dollars to buy the building, and then a whole new round of fund-raising to rehabilitate it, including removal of nine tons of pigeon droppings from the loft. Renovated at a cost of $4.4 million, the Folly reopened on 10 November 1981 and stands today as one of downtown’s finest landmarks. Saving the Folly meant not only preserving a vital link to “the enchanted years of the stage” in Kansas City but also showcasing the architectural genius of Louis Curtiss (1865 –1924). Born in Belleville, Ontario, Canada, Curtiss probably arrived in Kansas City around 1890, according to his biographer Fred T. Comee. Curtiss had studied at the University of Toronto and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was certainly aware of Kansas City’s real estate and construction boom of the late 1880s, which offered excellent prospects for a novice architect. He might also have been previously acquainted with the Corrigan brothers from Quebec, who had settled in Kansas City and whose home at Fifty-fifth Street and Ward Parkway (1914) survives as one of Curtiss’s finest designs. His only partnership with another architect, Frederick C. Gunn, dissolved early in the design process for the Standard Theater, which is credited to Curtiss alone. Another surviving architectural treasure by Louis Curtiss is the nearby Boley Building (1908) at Twelfth and Walnut, the first metal-and-glass curtain-wall construction in the United States.The somewhat eccentric Curtiss was ahead of his time in a number of architectural concepts, but a turn-of-the-century aesthetic is also evident in the way he used decorative elements without undermining the effect of airy lightness. His oeuvre includes two theaters, the ill-used Standard-Century-Folly (1900) and the Willis Wood (1902; see Chapter 7). The Standard’s facade on Twelfth Street measured seventy feet by a height of sixty-five feet.The building extended one hundred feet on Central.The relatively small site necessitated careful use of space. Yet, despite the facility’s intimacy, it could seat 2,400.The curve of the six large boxes and balconies and the elements of decor were called “Grecian.” White enameled trimmings accentuated the deep warm red of the walls throughout the auditorium and small lobby.The stage, seventy feet wide by thirty feet deep,

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The little theater (today’s Folly) at Twelfth and Central, designed by Louis Curtiss, bore the name Butler’s Standard only briefly; it was renamed the Century Theatre in 1902. From Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.

had a proscenium opening thirty-four feet wide by thirty-two feet high, its drop curtain painted with a reproduction of Edward Burne-Jones’s “The Disarmament of Cupid.” A separate wing extended from the west side of the stage to house the dressing rooms. Having undergone several remodelings since its 1900 opening—including the replacement of the original two balconies with a single balcony in 1923, the interior of the theater today cannot convey a clear impression of the original.The facade,however,although also somewhat altered over time, retains the charming interplay of simplicity and ornamentation in a symmetrical design.The red pressed brick is accented with buff-colored pressed brick for the corners, pilasters, arches, door and window jambs, and quoins. The three arched entrances at ground level are no longer used for entry but retain their original shape and proportion. Above those rounded arches, across the central section of the facade stretches a balustrade encompassing

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three sets of French doors topped by arched windows. A larger Palladian window above them is flanked by small round windows. What made this attractive facade particularly striking in 1900 was the abundance of bare electric light bulbs that lined each curve. In addition, a flagpole at the southeast corner of the roof supported not a flag but a ball of lights that would be illuminated from thirty minutes before curtain time until the end of each performance. For a population most of whose homes were still lit by gas, the blaze of electric lights on the facade signaled big-city glamour, glitter, and perhaps sin. Burlesque already had a questionable reputation at the turn of the century, although burlesque acts in the old-fashioned sense of parodies of wellknown literary or theatrical works still appeared on vaudeville bills. By 1905 burlesque and vaudeville had become well differentiated, each with its own nationwide infrastructure and characteristic clientele.Vaudeville—operated by syndicates, notably Orpheum and Keith-Albee, which merged in 1927 —appealed to middle-class audiences, including women. Burlesque lost its mainstream audience as its increasingly risqué material drew mostly workingclass males.The two major burlesque circuits—the more high-toned Eastern (Columbia) Wheel and the rougher Western (Empire) Wheel—each comprised enough theaters that a performer could work one-week stands for an entire season. The American notion of burlesque as a “leg show” can be traced back to 1869 with the first American tour of Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes, who performed parodies of classical mythology and familiar literary works sprinkled with topical references, playing both male and female roles in abbreviated costumes with flesh-colored tights. According to Robert C. Allen,“the more burlesque found a place with middle-class New York theater audiences, the more troubled critics and other commentators became by this success.” They found it “troubling in its power to entrance the spectator with displays of women in revealing costumes who were dangerously impertinent in their mocking male impersonations, streetwise language, and nonsensical humor.”9 Burlesque evolved rapidly during the heyday of its existence from the 1890s through World War II. The original impetus—parody—was forgotten as display of the female body took precedence through successive types of numbers: the hootchy-kootchy or cooch dance, the Salomé dance, the shimmy, and, finally, the striptease on the lighted runway. The fact that Butler’s Standard Theater in Kansas City was built explicitly to serve as a burlesque house made it a target of criticism even before

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it opened. At the Catholic cathedral’s eight o’clock mass on Sunday 2 September 1900,Bishop Glennon voiced the concerns of his parishioners,most of whom lived within a few blocks of Twelfth and Central, where the new theater was nearing completion. In a settled neighborhood of middle-class property owners, two schools, and a church, he objected to the type of theater for which Mr. Butler was already known in St. Louis.The bishop made it clear that he had no objection to theater in general or to using the new venue for “a good class of plays,” but “the kind of entertainment Mr. Butler intends to give this city encourages dissoluteness and immorality.”As the Star reported on 3 September, an even more serious concern was the proposed saloon adjacent to the theater; certainly it would be inappropriate to have eleven hundred children passing in front of a saloon on their way to school. A response from Leo Reichenbach, manager of the new theater, appeared in the next day’s Star: “Mr. Butler is too successful a business man to invest 1⁄ 4 million dollars in a city and then put up a class of attractions that would cause the better class of people to antagonize him.The Standard will cater to the women and children as well as to the men. . . .We will present vaudeville, burlesque, and farce comedy. There will be no smoking in the theater, nor will there be any drinking.” He explained also that the adjacent building would be run as a bachelors’ apartment hotel and that its saloon would operate like the bar in any first-class hotel. The advertisement in the Star on 15 September for the opening matinee clearly aimed at allaying the fears expressed by Bishop Glennon.The bill offered by the Jolly Grass Widows company was described as “a refined, musical spectacular extravaganza.”And the theater itself was to be “devoted to the exclusive production of   , Musical Novelties and Polite Vaudeville. Our aim will be to amuse and please the public. Every Comfort for the Ladies and the Children Has Been Provided.” It was further announced that the theater would be illuminated and open to the public for free inspection on the eve of the inaugural performance. Hundreds of people did take advantage of the open house, largely because the home show at the nearby Convention Hall was sold out, so those turned away from the hall gravitated toward the electric lights on the new Standard Theater.Workers scurried about installing seats and hanging scenery, but interest was piqued. James Butler spoke before the opening curtain of the inaugural performance on 23 September 1900. As a practiced political orator, Butler spoke persuasively about the attractions of the new theater.With lots of exits, the audience “would be as secure against fire and panic as against temptation.”

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Seeing only about twenty women in the audience, he acknowledged Missouri’s “show-me” mentality and expressed confidence that those men who had come alone to this performance would bring their wives, sisters, daughters, and sweethearts next time, according to the report in the Journal the next day. Butler promised not to insult anyone, and the Star commented that “no one was insulted.” The performance by the Jolly Grass Widows—a program of two burlesques with a vaudeville interlude of six numbers—exemplified precisely what burlesque historian Irving Zeidman would later pinpoint as “the trouble with the American burlesque show”: either it was too dirty—or else it was not dirty enough.10 According to the Star review, the main interest of the audience at the premiere was not how good the show would be, but how naughty.“No doubt there were many disappointed ones when the entertainment was done, for nothing of positive nastiness had been presented on the stage, and the actions of the entertainers merely approached the dividing line at times. . . . It is nothing new in Kansas City to see women in tights, and perhaps it is not so harrowing to be in the presence of women whose dresses have no visible means of support. . . .The girls of the chorus are some of them pretty and all change costumes many times.” The following week brought the Bon Ton Burlesquers with their own elaborate scenery, presenting two burlesques, The Homely Twins and A Jamboree, punctuated by seven vaudeville turns, the best being Viola Sheldon, who, the Star noted on 1 October, “sings remarkably well for her surroundings, but the gallery doesn’t like her selections.” The next week belonged to The High Rollers, whose program included a genuine burlesque of a well-known work, a piece titled Little Benny Hur. The fourth week brought the best yet, according to those who frequented the Standard, the Broadway Burlesquers.The 15 October review in the Star noted,“They say, too, that if the show were expurgated it might be worth while.” And so it went, with a new company each week bringing two short musical burlesques and some olio acts: Twentieth Century Maids, Miaco’s City Club Extravaganza Company, City Sports, the Royal Burlesquers, the Gay Masqueraders, Clark Brothers Royal Extravaganza Company, the Ramblers, the Utopians,Vanity Fair Extravaganza, the Americans, the Bowery Burlesquers, and the Majestics,about whom the Journal opined on 21 January 1901,“The opposition to the Standard theater can find strong argument in this week’s offering.” Even though the companies did some cleansing of their dialogue and stage business for the relatively conservative Kansas City audiences,Butler’s Standard was not doing particularly strong business.Thus it was prob-

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ably time to try a change of format anyway when Coates Opera House burned and O. D. Woodward needed a theater to host the shows he had booked for the Coates. It will be remembered that Sarah Bernhardt’s single performance in Kansas City in 1901 was scheduled for Coates Opera House, which burned down five days earlier. O. D. Woodward, manager of both the Coates and the Auditorium, moved Bernhardt to the larger Auditorium Theatre, while the Woodward Stock Company performed its scheduled Hamlet at Butler’s Standard. For that performance by the stock company, the pretty little theater at Twelfth and Central finally drew a substantial number of women. Presumably they were curious about the place and thought this might be their only chance to see the inside. However, Woodward negotiated with Butler to lease the Standard for the remainder of the season and run it as a first-class house. The Star’s announcement of the deal on 3 February quoted the elder Butler: “The Standard hasn’t paid us as well as we thought it would, but it has paid us a little. I came in here and spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars in Kansas City, and I believe I ought to have some return for it. I’m pretty sure that I will. I wonder if they’re going to get that saloon license.” Subsequent reporting in the Star two days later suggested that the public could condone a saloon as long as respectable fare held the boards of the theater. The Journal for 5 February suggested that, with the change of management,“a mantle of genteel respectability was thrown over the Standard.” At first Woodward put the attractions booked for the Coates into the Standard, but soon he routed the touring companies into the Auditorium while his stock company played the Standard.The week of 3 March 1901 is indicative of the state of flux, for the Woodward Stock Company gave the first two performances of its production of Romeo and Juliet at the Auditorium and then moved the show to the Standard to make way for a combination headed by Blanche Walsh at the Auditorium. After the regular theater season ended, the Standard continued to generate income for the Butlers during a three-week engagement of the Fulton Stock Company in June. Each week the new company presented a popular-price drama with vaudevilles at intermission. An electric fan under the stage blew air across blocks of ice into the auditorium, justifying the slogan in the newspaper ads: “The Coolest Theater But the Hottest Show.” With the beginning of the new fall season in August 1901, a change of the theater’s name helped to distance it in the public perception from its original image. After only eleven months as the Standard, the theater was

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renamed the Century, the name it retained almost continuously until 1923. For two seasons (1901–1903), the Century presented respectable fare, a mix of productions by the Woodward Stock Company, the Andrews Opera Company as well as other serious music events, and a few small road companies.The newspaper advertisements for the Century from the fall of 1901 list James J. Butler as Sole Manager, Joseph R. Donegan as Business Manager, and George Andrews as Director of the Andrews Opera Company or the Andrews-Butler Opera Company. After the 1902 shake-up of the Woodward Stock Company, the Gertrude Berkeley Players became the Century’s resident stock company, bringing their loyal following from the Auditorium. Berkeley’s players presented solid dramas with a weekly change of bill and managed nicely until a new leading man, James Durkin, blustered his way into the company’s management at the expense of Berkeley’s husband,Wilson Enos. Following Durkin’s attempt to fire players or lower their salaries, Gertrude Berkeley decided to bid farewell to her faithful audience at the Century. She stepped before the curtain and sobbingly told them:“Kind friends, I have done my best. I can say no more.” She went on with her performance, but the audience was shaken. Many spent their intermission sobbing into beers at the Edward Hotel next door.11 Fortunately for Berkeley and her colleagues,Woodward was ready to reconstitute the Auditorium’s stock company in March 1903. Since the Willis Wood had opened in 1902 as a venue for combinations, Woodward no longer needed to lease the Century for stock. Meanwhile, James Durkin and his remaining ensemble took the name Century Stock Company and managed to stage six plays during the remaining seven weeks of the season (1 March to 11 April 1903). On 29 March, the Journal assured theatergoers that this company’s work, too, would be “clean and wholesome.” In the fall of 1903, the Century abruptly reverted to bookings from the Empire Burlesque Circuit, and this remained the norm with little variation—indeed, the same companies reappearing once or twice each season—for nearly two decades.The only real deviation from the steady diet of burlesque companies occurred during the 1913–1914 season, when the theater, briefly named the Lyric, presented vaudeville and melodrama. Undoubtedly, the most colorful and beloved figure associated with the Century Theater was the ebullient Joe Donegan (1876–1930), who managed it during the heyday of burlesque and somehow turned a profit for the Butlers, though he himself died broke. Donegan had worked for the Butlers in St. Louis and was first sent to Kansas City in October 1901 to re-

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place George Andrews as business manager for the house. In 1906, Donegan rose to the management of the Century. As noted in The Independent on 15 December,“this year all the reins have been put into his hands, and he is driving with superb dash.” Donegan continued the burlesque format, often booking sports figures for matches and demonstrations. As one who enjoyed cigars, he introduced smoking in the theater. Donegan soon owned and operated the Edward cabaret in the basement grill of the hotel, which he also managed.The cabaret became the center of Kansas City’s after-hours theatrical night life, drawing showgirls from the burlesque along with the prize-fighters and wrestlers that Donegan loved to get on his bill, backstage crew members, many performers from the other theaters, and even Kansas City’s mayor, James A. Reed. Celebrities who gathered at the Edward cabaret whenever they stopped in Kansas City included Eva Tanguay (the “I Don’t Care” Girl of vaudeville), Eddie Foy, Jack Dempsey, and Fannie Brice. Joe Donegan was a large man of remarkable generosity, always concerned for the well-being of his performers. When the African American boxing champion Jack Johnson performed at the Century in February 1912, Johnson and his white wife could not stay as registered guests in the hotel proper, so Donegan put them up in Butler’s old suite with the view of the stage. In 1915 Donegan hired a fifteen-year-old girl who needed to support her mother and brother. The girl, Edith Baker, had no musical training but learned some piano fundamentals from Ernie Burnett, a performer who reportedly composed “Melancholy Baby” at the piano in the Edward cabaret. Miss Baker worked hard at learning to play the piano, including regular visits to the Orpheum to observe the styles of various pianists there. She developed her own “peculiar style” and became a favorite among the cabaret regulars. After a year or so, she got a booking on a small-time circuit and eventually landed in Brooklyn. Her “eccentric” playing catapulted her to attention when she substituted for a pianist who was ill. Soon she was on the Orpheum circuit and in the Ziegfeld Follies. Edith Baker became Edythe Baker, one of the finest jazz pianists of the day. In London she taught the Prince of Wales how to dance the black bottom and, in 1928, married banker Gerald D’Erlanger. After her 1934 divorce, Edythe Baker returned to the United States and worked on Broadway. Donegan had always been protective of her and commented, as the Star reported on 6 January 1928, “She deserves all the success which has come to her.” The peak of Joe Donegan’s reign as “king of Twelfth Street” was 1911 to 1918, according to a 28 December 1947 retrospective in the Star. During

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Jack Johnson, champion heavyweight pugilist of the world, conqueror of James L. Jeffries, who went down to defeat at Reno the memorable Fourth of July, is the big attraction at the Century today and all the week.This will be Kansas City’s chance to see the big fellow in action, for he brings with him a retinue of trainers and boxers, including “Kid” Cutler.The champion will go three fast rounds at each performance, taking on one after another three good men. He also will present his inimitable monologue. Johnson for his seven dates in Kansas City receives a salary of $2,500. The other big attraction at the Century this week is “The Moulin Rouge,” the classiest of burlesque shows, with fifty people, the pick of Broadway, including a big beauty chorus. Heading the company are such well-known comedians as George X. Wilson, Ed and Mike Nibbe, Billy Mack, and Dave and Maurice Hilton. The programme consists of two burlettas,“A Night at the Moulin Rouge Café,” and “At a Railroad Station.” Each is a riot of girls, music, fun, beautiful costumes, and magnificent scenery.The vaudeville is full of features, including Lee Sisters and Mack, Nibbe Brothers and Marie Bordoux,Tortoni troupe,Wilson and Thurston, Hilton Brothers and Corine De Forest. (Kansas City Journal, 25 February 1912)

those years before prohibition, the Edward cabaret adumbrated the concept of the night club of the 1920s and 1930s. Donegan drank only White Rock soda in those days, but after the Volstead Act (passed in 1919) made the sale of liquor illegal, resulting in the decline and closure of his cabaret, he turned to alcoholic beverages. For him, every social ill could be attributed to prohibition and motion pictures. Donegan was said to have “made and lost three or four fortunes.”12 “Old Joe,” “the angel of Twelfth Street,” could cheerfully give away his last half dollar in response to a hard-luck story. Shortly before his own death, he learned of the death of an old friend, rose from his sickbed, and went on the streets downtown to pass the hat for his friend’s widow. He died at fifty-four of bronchial pneumonia and a heart attack. The Century saw a major change in management, attractions, and clientele in 1923. And again the theater’s name was changed. Electric signs on the roof and marquee proclaimed:Shubert Missouri Theatre. Again the programming was in the hands of out-of-town owners.The Shubert Theatre Corporation was the organization that by 1916 had broken the Klaw and

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Joseph R. Donegan was perhaps the best known man in Kansas City’s night life. Sportsman and showman, Joe Donegan ruled Twelfth street’s gaiety for two decades, and made and lost three or four fortunes. Joe Donegan was an institution in the night life of Kansas City.Although he had dabbled in gambling and fight promotion, he was best known as the operator of the old Edward hotel and the old Century Theater. Rare, indeed, was the show person, man or woman, who did not know Joe Donegan. It has been said he made and lost fortunes.The truth is Joe made and gave away several fortunes. In adversity, he frequently appeared a tragic figure, but Joe always smiled, and kept plugging away. (Kansas City Times, 23 July 1930)

Erlanger Theatrical Syndicate’s monopoly on theater ownership and theatrical bookings.The two surviving Shubert brothers, J. J. and Lee, proved themselves to be every bit as ruthless as their competitors had been.They had already built a first-class theater in Kansas City, the Sam S. Shubert Theater, which opened in 1906 (see Chapter 7). Leasing the Century gave them a venue for their stock organization—as well as (since the Willis Wood had burned in 1917) complete control of the local market for legitimate drama. The National Players, a Shubert stock company, opened the Missouri Theatre on 22 September 1923 with Why Men Leave Home, a comedy by Avery Hopwood.The Star reviewer the next day marveled that ladies and gentlemen not only deigned to attend this theater and wore evening clothes, but also seemed quite delighted with the show despite technical glitches: an audible prompter, an actor-resistant door in the set, a missed light cue, and two interminable intermissions. Seating was roomier in the Missouri than it had been in the Century. Apart from the replacement of two balconies with only one, much of the remodeling was not immediately visible, for it involved plumbing and extensive rewiring, but there was new gray carpeting to complement the red and gold interior. Manager Ray Whittaker (1900 –1979) worked hard for the Shuberts, though surviving correspondence (copies of which are held in the Folly Theater archives) shows that it could not have been easy.Whittaker, born in Jackson, Michigan, was the son of a newspaperman, grew up in news rooms, enlisted in the navy during World War I, worked in a freight office, became a traveling salesman, and finally decided to pursue his dream of becoming

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a lawyer.While waiting for the new term when he could begin his law studies, Whittaker took an office job with the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and found his vocation in theater. According to the Times of 31 January 1942, Whittaker got his first job with the Shuberts when he tried to throw Lee Shubert out of a theater as soon as the line of chorus girls Shubert was rehearsing went into overtime. Whittaker ordered them out, and Shubert bellowed:“Do you know who I am?”Whittaker replied:“I don’t care who you are. You are not going to get anything you don’t pay for.” That was the kind of person Shubert wanted to have in charge of his own property, so he hired the twenty-four-year-old Whittaker and sent him to Kansas City as a Shubert auditor. Whittaker’s rapid elevation to the helm of the Missouri made him the youngest manager in the Shubert organization. According to another account (in the Star on 24 April 1932), it was J. J. Shubert who originally hired Whittaker. In any case,Whittaker corresponded with both Shubert brothers during his management of the Missouri Theatre.The tone of Whittaker’s letters is officious. He often proposed ideas that were shot down by return mail from the head office. He deplored the perceived indifference or hostility of the local newspapers to his theater, but most of all he deplored the quality of shows that the Shuberts were sending him even as they expected him to draw full houses for inferior attractions. The tone of the replies from the Shuberts tends to be high-handed. J. J. Shubert commented in a letter dated 24 November 1923: “As I have already written you, Kansas City, from the best show town in America has become the worst—so much so, that I do not care to send any of our big shows there any more, as I think it is hopeless.” That same month Whittaker took over the management of Kansas City’s Sam S. Shubert Theatre along with his duties at the Missouri.The Shubert office’s opinion of Kansas City is reiterated in a letter dated 1 December 1923: You know that Kansas City is 1500 miles from the base of supplies, and it is very easy for Managers to forego the pleasure of playing Kansas City, because it is not a pleasure to lose money. It is out of the way and is a side jump. Kansas City was a 50% better show town in former days than it is today. You will probably give me the excuse that there are a great many more movies and vaudeville houses, but you must remember there is only one first class house and there is enough people in Kansas City to support one first class theatre. I can hardly understand that all of the people in Kansas City should be influenced by what appears in the Times. . . . I am very reluctant to send any of our big shows to Kansas City as I think

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it is just wasting time and money doing so.There are other places to play. There is no use in dwelling on this subject any longer.

Whittaker persevered despite such letters—and worse. On 20 December 1924, J. J. Shubert wrote to him:“You wrote me some time ago about how much money you were worth. From what I can see and what I can read— very little. Your friendship with the newspapermen does not seem to bring you very much. . . .We are not looking for friendship.We are looking for business . . . I wish to say that you are far from being appreciated at the present time.”Still Ray Whittaker lasted throughout the Missouri Theatre’s Shubert phase, and he managed Kansas City’s Sam S. Shubert Theatre until it closed in 1935. He married a Kansas City girl, Dean Reno, who was assistant treasurer at the Orpheum.When his job ended in Kansas City in 1936, Whittaker became general manager for real estate holdings on Lee Shubert’s side of the organization in New York.Whittaker continued in that position until his retirement in 1955. From 1923 to 1929, Shubert’s Missouri Theatre presented plays that can now be seen as a good cross-section of dramas and comedies of the 1920s. The 1923–1924 stock season culminated with William Anthony McGuire’s Six-Cylinder Love, a popular comedy about housewives who become obsessed with motorcars.Then the stock company was disbanded in favor of combinations.The Four Marx Brothers had a rip-roaring success with I’ll Say She Is for two and a half weeks in December and January.The 1924– 1925 season brought Pauline Frederick and Mary Boland, reprising their Broadway roles in Spring Cleaning and Meet the Wife, respectively; the latter cast included young Humphrey Bogart in a supporting role.Abie’s Irish Rose, New York’s long-run record-setting comedy by Anne Nichols, opened a run at the Missouri on 9 November and was still running three months later.Touring productions of Abie’s Irish Rose would play the theater again during its final two seasons as the Missouri (December 1927 and December– January 1928 –1929). Highlighting the 1925–1926 season was Eugene O’Neill’s provocative and searing drama Desire under the Elms. The return of a stock company for 1926 –1927 meant fewer dark weeks for the theater, but the repertoire ran to bland comedies such as Pigs and The Patsy that worked better on the road than in New York. A noteworthy exception was Sidney Howard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning and somewhat unsettling They Knew What They Wanted. Shirley Booth performed with the company in March and April 1927.The theater was dark during most of 1928. January and February of 1929 brought two successive Shakespeare companies, each

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with a repertoire of several plays. The Shakespeare productions were accounted successful, yet the Shuberts finally gave up on legitimate drama at the Missouri. They subleased the theater, which quickly reverted to burlesque. It was during those final years of the Shubert lease on the Missouri, 1929–1932, that a struggling vaudeville troupe called Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes was booked as an olio between two burlesques.Madam Rose’s sixteen-year-old daughter Louise (later known as Gypsy Rose Lee) recalled in her memoir Gypsy her mother’s dismay when they arrived at the address of the theater to find that they had been booked into a “filthy dive.” But their agent insisted that this was “one a the cream de la cream houses on the whole burlesque wheel”;13 besides, the act had no choice but to play there or be stranded.The engagement stretched to four weeks at the Missouri, largely on the strength of Louise’s discovery of her talent for burlesque.Thus it was in Kansas City that Gypsy Rose Lee began her rise to burlesque stardom. The Missouri remained dark throughout most of the 1930s when the depression left people with little discretionary income for entertainment.During World War II, Kansas City became a layover stop for soldiers traveling across the country by train.They needed entertainment, and so the theater reopened in 1941, this time as the Folly. Burlesque had evolved from skits with dancing girls to full-fledged striptease numbers interspersed by the routines of a male comedian. Five shows a day drew male audiences to the Folly for more than two decades. Kansas City had a reputation as the most conservative town on the circuit because of the constant threat of arrest of performers or closure of the operation by the police.The Folly’s management was vigilant about keeping the acts within acceptable boundaries, as exemplified by the warning that appears at the bottom of a typed list of the thirteen numbers for the week of 15 October 1948.The acts are: 1. Opening:“Western.” 2. Scene:“Chicken Talk.” 3. Strip: Betty Brooks. 4. Jazz number: Girls. 5. Scene:“Hospital.” 6. Specialty: Jimmy Defore. 7. Scene:“Border.” 8. Ballet: “China Town.” 9.Vaude act: Tommy Turner (rope act). 10. Strip: Marlane. 11. Scene:“Libshitz.” 12. Strip: Marnee. 13. Finale: entire cast (walk on at announcement).The admonition at the bottom is:“Women must wear net pants & brassieres—brassieres must have cover for nipples—no bumps or grinds direct to audience—no hanging on curtains—do not touch body—no extreem flash—wear panels: no suggestive lyrics in any vocal numbers:This is a Local Law and they are VERY STRICT.” By the late 1960s, burlesque at the Folly had given way to adult movies.

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

The Standard Theatre, designed by Louis Curtiss, opened in 1900 and underwent a number of remodelings as well as changes of name over the course of the next century.This recent photograph of the Folly Theater by the author testifies to the preservation of most of the building’s attractive facade.

By 1973 there was talk of razing the theater.Thanks to Joan Dillon and a host of others who devoted several years to the business of rescuing the building, it narrowly escaped going the way of the city’s other great historic theaters. Asked whether he had ever attended the Folly, Mayor Charles B. Wheeler replied “yes, and it’s made me a better mayor.”14 The restored Folly reopened on 7 November 1981 with a production of Room Service, starring Eddie Albert and his son Edward Albert.Today’s Folly Theater, under the direction of Douglas Tatum, presents a range of music, dance, theater, and children’s programming. The Orpheum and the Century/Folly stand in the forefront of a number of theaters that were—at least originally—devoted to vaudeville.The city’s rapid growth brought constant changes in the urban landscape, and this impacted the clientele for specific theaters. As one or another location came into or fell out of fashion, the theater managements adjusted the kind of attractions they presented, and thus burlesque gradually superseded vaudeville at many of these venues. Burlesque in turn gave way to motion

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To view the complete page image please refer to the printed version of this work.

The Mainstreet Theatre opened in 1921 as a second Orpheum house in Kansas City, testifying to the popularity earned by big-time vaudeville. It became the home of continuous-format vaudeville intertwined with motion pictures. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

pictures. And, of course, there were some bills that combined live-action chorus girls with silent-screen attractions. Meanwhile, the era of the theater manager as public personality came to an end. In the 1910s, managers began to function primarily as overseers of out-of-town interests. Still, it is remarkable that new theaters continued to be built. Among these were the first Majestic (opened in 1905 on Walnut, between Eleventh and Twelfth; name changed to Pantages in 1909); the second Majestic (opened in 1909 on the southeast corner of Twelfth and Wyandotte; name changed almost immediately to Gayety, 1909–1950); the Empress (on the northwest corner of Twelfth and McGee, 1910–1956); and the Globe (at Thirteenth and Walnut, 1913–1932). During the summer, vaudeville was presented in outdoor facilities at Fairmount Park and Electric Park. Fairyland amusement park opened in June 1923 with forty acres of concessions. When the Garden Theatre opened on 19 August 1912 on the southeast corner of Thirteenth and McGee,it was Kansas City’s largest vaudeville theater, having a capacity of nearly 2,600. Its interior decor featured artificial

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foliage and twinkling stars in the curved ceiling painted with clouds. Despite its auspicious opening, the Garden had a new owner within the year; St. Louis actor-manager Frank L.Talbot transformed it in August 1913 into the Hippodrome (not to be confused with an earlier short-lived Hippodrome indoor amusement park at Twelfth and Charlotte in 1908).Talbot’s Hippodrome lasted until the fall of 1914, then continued under new management from December 1914 until the fall of 1915, when the Dubinsky Brothers installed their stock company in the theater once again called the Garden. A major remodeling in 1919 enabled the Garden to eke out its existence until 1930. The Mainstreet Theatre, opened by the Orpheum Circuit on 30 October 1921, long remained preeminent for continuous vaudeville combined with motion pictures. Later known as the Empire, it operated as a movie house until it was closed in 1985. It stood derelict for nearly two decades, narrowly escaping being razed. As part of downtown’s renewal, restoration work on the Mainstreet/Empire began in 2005. Other motion picture houses include the Theater Royal (1022 Main, 1914 –1936); the Newman Theater (1114–1118 Main, 1919 –1967); the Pantages (Twelfth and McGee, 1921–1931; reopened in 1934 as the Tower); and one that has survived: the magnificent Thomas Lamb–designed Midland Theatre, which opened as a movie palace in 1927. Each boasts a colorful history and merits greater attention than can be given here.

Chapter 7 GLAMOUR’S LAST GASP

The Kansas City spirit is invoked in many local anecdotes of irrepressible optimism, pluck, and perseverance in the face of adversity as well as largesse toward those in need. Perhaps the most famous example of that spirit—the demonstration to the world that “Kansas City spirit” means obliteration of the word “impossible”—is the remarkable rebuilding of Convention Hall in just ninety days after it burned to the ground, so that it could reopen in time to host the Democratic National Convention beginning on 4 July 1900.1 Kansas City’s first Convention Hall had opened with great fanfare on 2 January 1899. Attendance was estimated at between fifteen and twenty thousand for the opening afternoon concert. An editorial in the Times the next day extolled the “local patriotism and civic pride which have at all times and under all circumstances made themselves felt in Kansas City.” The $165,000 cost of the hall at Thirteenth and Central (directly across the street from today’s Music Hall) had been paid by public subscription.With every citizen in some way contributing to “boom” the project, Kansas City surpassed its “once rival commercial towns,” St. Joseph,Atchison, and Leavenworth, and succeeded because of “the loyalty of Kansas City to itself.” The official dedication, on George Washington’s birthday, featured John Philip Sousa’s band in a matinee concert and as the orchestra for an evening ball. For more than a year the hall served the city well with a succession of public balls, band and orchestral concerts, trade shows, athletic events including

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bicycle races, revival meetings, a commencement, horse and dog shows, and the Grau Grand Opera. With the scheduling of the Democratic National Convention, some alterations were begun in March 1900: moving the stage, laying a double floor, adding a roof garden. But disaster struck on 4 April. Several people noticed flames and smoke rising from the building at around one o’clock in the afternoon and ran to send alarms. Although the fire department arrived promptly, the building had quickly become a “seething furnace.” The steel trusses fell inward, sending sparks into the air, which in turn caused the immolation of the Second Presbyterian Church and Lathrop School. Faulty electric wiring probably ignited the blaze. Crowds gathered quickly to witness the catastrophe, and even as the flames raged, Kansas Citians began contributing their pocket change and pledging their subscriptions to build a new hall.The Star headed the list of subscribers with $5,000, followed by the Coates Estate. Even Sir Henry Irving, who was performing at the Coates Opera House, made a donation of $50.The difficulty of obtaining new steel girders quickly posed the initial obstacle to rebuilding, but civic leaders were indefatigable in negotiating for priority delivery. In fact, the Gillette-Herzog Steel Company of Minneapolis managed to deliver some trusses ahead of schedule. The work proceeded throughout May and June as everyone made it a point of honor that Kansas City would keep its promise to the nation to host the convention in a better and safer hall.The Coates, Grand, Auditorium, and Orpheum theaters tendered benefit performances to raise funds, as did several music organizations. And so Kansas City’s new Convention Hall rose from the ashes of the old in just three months. At noon on 4 July 1900, the Democrats formally opened the facility that would stand for thirty-six years. Programming for the new Convention Hall again included balls, concerts, trade shows, animal shows, and athletics. During the Home Products Exposition of September 1900, there was a roof garden variety program with an admission of ten cents, or one could attend free band concerts with seating for 1,200 on the arena floor.The Priests of Pallas balls with their fanciful ballet entertainments were held annually in Convention Hall. On 31 December 1900, a great Century Ball attracted between eight and ten thousand people. Under a canopy of evergreens, a huge bell formed of mistletoe, and the magic of myriad electric lights, dancers swirled until four in the morning. After the doors opened at eight o’clock, the Third Regiment Band played while guests promenaded on the dance floor.The evening began with a stately grand march, followed by a Virginia reel, minuet, tallyho, varsouviana, and other dances of a century earlier performed by dancers

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Built in ninety days, Convention Hall opened on 4 July 1900 with the Democratic National Convention. Many spectacular events were held on its premises during its thirty-six years on the block that is now Barney Allis Plaza. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

in Colonial costume with powdered wigs. At 9:30 the floor opened to general dancing as the band, in alternation with the symphony orchestra, played modern two-steps and waltzes. Refreshments provided by the Midland and other major hotels included sandwiches, salads, ices and wafers, coffee, and punch. For the countdown of the last half hour before midnight, a gigantic hourglass at the north end of the ballroom measured the minutes in electric lights like grains of sand. Minute by minute one of the thirty electric lights in the upper half was extinguished while another in the lower half was simultaneously illuminated. At three minutes to midnight the orchestra softly played “Auld Lang Syne” in the semidarkness; in the stillness of the crowd, some could be heard weeping for the end of the nineteenth century. But when the year “1901” came up in lights, the mood changed. Father Time looked down from the roof garden above the spectators and shouted, “Hurrah for the twentieth century!” Before disappearing forever, he added spontaneously, to the crowd’s happy approval:“Hurrah for prosperity!” Among other events of the hall’s early years, what was touted as the

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Convention Hall was occasionally used for large-scale theatrical productions, as when Sarah Bernhardt performed there in 1906. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

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“greatest musical event in the history of the west” took place on 15 May 1901, when 1,100 singers and a ninety-piece orchestra premiered Kansas City composer Carl Busch’s “League of the Alps.”2 The world champion trotter Croesus was shown at the seventh annual Kansas City Horse Show in October 1901.The hall also featured dog shows, poultry shows, and eventually automobile shows. On 1 May 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt spoke to 15,000 people there. Only thirty days later the hall became a shelter for 1,500 people who had lost their homes in one of the city’s worst floods; for three months their fellow citizens brought food and clothing to the destitute housed there. Kansas City’s renowned soprano Alice Nielsen performed Don Pasquale with her own company on 4 December 1905. Maurice Grau’s Grand Opera played annual engagements at Convention Hall. A number of large-scale theatrical performances were presented there, too: for example, Babes in the Wood in November 1905, Darling of the Gods in January 1906, and Sarah Bernhardt’s Camille in February 1906. In 1906, however, the muckraking Post published a series of front-page stories proclaiming disappointment in the way the hall was being used: “Long Chain of Broken Promises / Kansas City’s Great Auditorium Is Only a $500,000 Skating Rink” (10 September), “Betrayal of a Public Trust” (11 September), “How the Poor Were Deluded: Contributed Their Hard Earned Money to Convention Hall and Got No Return” (12 September), “Insist That a Change Is Needed” (13 September), “Record of the Hall: Only Two Outside Conventions Brought Here This Year” (17 September). Indeed, the complete record of events at Convention Hall from 1 January to 16 September 1906 tallied only fifty-five days of bookings other than public roller-skating.The Post moved on to other causes, while Convention Hall manager Louis Shouse appears to have made an effort to book more concerts and theatrical attractions. One of the notable blockbuster events at Convention Hall was the benefit night for Kansas City’s Red Cross Fund “to help care for the wounded in the European war” on 22 December 1914.The show, for which all performers contributed their time and talent, was billed as a Home-Coming Jubilee, for it brought together on one huge bill twenty stage stars, all Kansas Citians who had gone on to fame. Soprano Alice Nielsen remained the biggest name.When she led the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner” under Carl Busch’s baton, “it was the old Kansas City spirit that thrilled through the big hall.” The perky little vaudevillian Kathryn Durkin pronounced the event “the grandest party you ever saw,” while singer Hazel Kirke declared, “I know it was the best performance in the world. I never

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Convention Hall (1900–1935) could be set up with tables for banquets, as shown on this postcard. From the author’s collection.

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saw such a crowd and I never saw such a bill. . . . I was in the big Weber & Field Jubilee several years ago when it opened in New York and that occasion has gone down in theatrical history as the one big event. Let me say this: It didn’t come anywhere near the Kansas City Jubilee last night.We had a better program and a better crowd and better everything.”3 Undoubtedly, the single most memorable event in the history of Convention Hall was the theater production that ran for three weeks, 22 November to 11 December 1926, and drew a total paying attendance of 88,135, about half of whom came from out of town, traveling to Kansas City from all over the Midwest for Max Reinhardt’s renowned religious spectacle The Miracle. The great Austrian director Reinhardt had originally staged Das Mirakel in 1911, first in London, then in Vienna; over the years he re-created it in another fifteen European cities. Finally, after World War I,American impresario Morris Gest prevailed upon Reinhardt to mount it in New York with designer Norman Bel Geddes. After a run of 298 performances there in 1924, other American cities began booking the mammoth production. To meet the guarantee, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce had to raise a quarter of a million dollars. A committee spearheaded by Arthur Hardgrave assumed the financial risk so that Kansas City could be the eighth American city to present The Miracle. With twenty baggage cars of scenery and seventeen miles of electric cable, Convention Hall was virtually transformed into a Gothic cathedral in which the audience was seated like a congregation. A stage—with asbestos slate flooring to resemble stone—extended seventy-five feet into the arena. Thirty-two stained-glass windows, an altar ablaze with candles, the smell of incense, soaring columns, tattered banners suspended above, and the music of Englebert Humperdinck all contributed to the atmosphere. Changes of scene within the cathedral atmosphere were achieved largely through lighting effects; for example, a dappled projection onto the Gothic columns evoked foliage on slender trees for the forest scene.The coronation scene glittered entirely in shades of gold. Most of the action of the play—nearly three hours—was pantomimed to music.The story centers upon a lovely young nun, Megildis, who cannot resist dancing to the haunting melody of the Piper. She prays to the statue of the Madonna for life experience, and her prayer is answered when a Knight in silver armor folds his mantle around her, while her nun’s garb falls to the floor of the cathedral. Megildis and the Knight enjoy a happy idyll in the forest until a band of robbers captures them.The ever-present Piper, a symbol of human weakness, tries to help, but the Knight is killed. A se-

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ries of encounters takes Megildis to the height of worldly attainment, when she is crowned consort of an emperor, and to the depths, when she nearly falls victim to the executioner’s ax. On the road in winter with her infant, she witnesses a procession of the dead from her life journey. And suddenly she is back in her old cathedral. She lies prostrate to pray and places her dead child in the arms of the Virgin on the pedestal.When the nuns file in for morning mass, they pay no attention to Sister Megildis, now clothed in her nun’s habit, for they are overcome with joy at the return of the Madonna to her place near the altar.The statue had stepped down to take Megildis’s place in the convent so that the young nun would not be missed during her seven years on the outside. Among The Miracle’s cast of six hundred were two hundred well-rehearsed Kansas Citians for the mob scenes. Lady Diana Manners played the Madonna, a role that required her to hold the statue’s pose for twenty-seven minutes in the first act. At one performance she fainted, but extras were ready with their banners to conceal the problem from the audience. The demanding role of Sister Megildis was alternated by Iris Tree and Elinor Patterson. Later in the run, Manners rotated into the nun role while Elizabeth Schirmer played the Madonna. Fritz Feld earned accolades for his interpretation of the quasi-evil Piper. According to the Journal-Post of 12 December 1926, net receipts totaled $214,436. Although this fell a bit short of repaying the investment, success was measured in terms of the impressive average attendance of 3,390 for twenty-six performances, as well as over $650,000 spent by out-of-town visitors to Kansas City. Louis W. Shouse managed Convention Hall from 1900 until razing began on 6 July 1936. Shouse cited changing conditions—a need for smaller meeting spaces and separate exhibition areas—as the motive for replacing Convention Hall with the new Municipal Auditorium just across Thirteenth Street from the site of Convention Hall (on today’s Barney Allis Plaza). Municipal Auditorium achieved its own proud history, which is beyond the scope of this book. However, it is worth noting Paul Robeson’s performance there on 17 February 1942.The African American singer’s big baritone voice filled the hall with musical selections from various traditions, all garnering praise from reviewers. What made it memorable beyond the artistry, however, was Robeson’s interruption of his concert after intermission to protest racially segregated seating in the audience. According to The Call of 27 February, “his speech was a shock to the audience, but it was greeted with applause from all sections of the hall. At the end of the group

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of songs which followed the speech, however, a few groups of white persons sitting on the front rows of the first floor, left the hall. Mr. Robeson responded to their leaving by singing as an encore a little song called ‘Jim Crow,’ the words of which played significantly upon the situation in the concert hall.”An interesting sidelight is the fact that the evening’s program included a performance by Clara Rockmore on the theremin, the eeriesounding instrument played by hand movements within a magnetic field between two rods. Nearly nineteen months after the last performance at Coates Opera House, Kansas City once more boasted a genuinely first-class theater.The Willis Wood Theatre, designed by Louis Curtiss, was not only the most opulently decorated playhouse—interior and exterior—ever to grace the city, but its builder declared it to be “the handsomest theater in America” (EY 20). A prosperous dry-goods wholesaler from St. Joseph, Col.Willis Wood (ca. 1846–1914) sought to fill the cultural void that was felt by so many after Coates Opera House burned down, and thus he directed that no expense be spared in the design and construction of his eponymous theater. During construction he resided at the Baltimore Hotel, which was also designed by Curtiss (1899) and afforded a view of the work in progress.Wood’s choice of site for the new theater—the northwest corner of Eleventh and Baltimore, diagonally across from the hotel—was as unerring as his choice of Curtiss as architect. From the theater’s gleaming white-columned, ornate facade extending a hundred feet on Baltimore, one could see the beautiful face of Kansas City’s first skyscraper, the New York Life Building (McKim, Mead and White, 1890) with its Saint-Gaudens eagle sculpture above the entrance. After 1906 the street view was further enhanced by the white marble columns of the First National Bank (Wilder and Wight) at Tenth and Baltimore, which is today’s public library. The exterior of the Willis Wood looked a bit like a wedding cake with its rounded, turret-topped dome structure visible above the ornamentation that festooned the cornice.The templelike purity of the pale yellow brick and white enameled terra-cotta was punctuated by the glimpses of color on the circular walls inside the corner balconies: red, deep yellow, and green. Even the side of the structure on Eleventh Street—where the stagehouse rose one hundred feet above the street—continued a line of decorative round windows at the cornice level. At the carriage entrance to the lobby was an electric sign that would flash the number of the needed carriage when a patron was ready to depart after the show.The foot-high numbers could be seen by a carriage driver a block away from the theater.

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On the left is the corner of the Willis Wood Theatre.At the end of the Baltimore Avenue vista, on Ninth Street, stands McKim, Mead and White’s New York Life Building.The white column on the right side at Tenth Street was then the First National Bank and is today Kansas City’s Central Library. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

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The ornate facade of the Willis Wood Theatre, designed by Louis Curtiss, graced the streetscape at Eleventh and Baltimore for only fifteen years (1902–1917).After it burned down, old-timers long reminisced about the tunnel (known as “highball alley”) beneath the intersection that offered a warm and dry passageway from the theater lobby to the elegant Hotel Baltimore. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

Behind the front columns, mahogany doors opened into the marblefloored lobby, thirty by sixty feet, with an elliptical domed ceiling. Electric lights were incorporated into the French Renaissance ceiling in yellow and gold leaf.The box office and manager’s office were located at the end of the lobby to the left, while at the right end was a ladies’ lounge and cloakroom. At each end, a graceful staircase led up to a comfortable smoking area furnished with divans and potted palms and affording a pleasant view of the lobby. Through mahogany swinging doors off the lobby one entered the foyer, a wide promenade that surrounded three sides of the auditorium.This space gave access to all of the orchestra seating as well as to the first-floor boxes. Softer colors prevailed in the auditorium, but the decorative features were far more assertive.The most memorable element that truly characterized the Willis Wood for anyone who ever attended a play there was the series of life-size caryatids between the ten boxes on the side walls of the auditorium.These female figures with outstretched arms held up the boxes’

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pink-silk-lined green velvet curtains. A Kansas City woman had posed for the sculptures on which a “flimsy” drapery scarcely concealed the beauty of the female form. In the 24 August 1902 view of the Journal reporter,“they are the finest real works of art this town has turned out.” The red-carpeted auditorium floor was steeply raked in order to allow a good view from any seat. Some especially wide seats on the aisle would serve “men of more than ordinary weight.” The seating capacity totaled 1,527. From the foyer two staircases and a ramp gave access to the first balcony, here called the salon floor.The row of boxes across the front as well as the rows of seats rising steeply behind them were deemed the best of all in this theater. At the back of the salon seating, a gorgeous salon or parlor served as a place for socializing between the acts.This room, eighty by thirty-five feet along the front of the building, had windows opening onto Baltimore Avenue. One could also step out onto the corner balconies.Window seats, comfortable settees, electric lighting, cupids and nymphs cavorting on the ceiling—all provided “an ideal place for little parades that may prove more interesting than some of the plays,” according to the Star of 24 August 1902. A famous alternative to the salon for intermission imbibing and socializing was what was familiarly termed “Highball Alley.” This was an enameltiled tunnel with marble wainscotting that led from inside the theater and under the street to the Hotel Baltimore’s elegant lobby, which was dubbed “Peacock Alley,” as people loved to be seen there in all their finery. With electric lights and a mosaic floor, the underground passageway proved popular, especially in winter when theatergoers could go out during intermission or for supper after the show without having to bundle up again. Yet another use of the tunnel during inclement weather is exemplified by a notice in the Journal for 22 January 1904, reporting on the heavy advance ticket sale for the engagement of Mrs. Leslie Carter:“The purchasers stood in a line that reached through the tunnel to the grill room of the Hotel Baltimore.” Latchaw recalled that “the congestion in this passage between acts sometimes explained after-curtain arrivals and disturbances in the progress of the plays.This tunnel later was used, I believe, for the storage of certain pre-prohibition liquors legitimately possessed in the early years of the technical drought” (EY 20). Above the salon level in the auditorium was a balcony, also richly decorated, with all seats to be reserved.There was no gallery or “heavens” to segregate holders of lower-priced tickets, for the Willis Wood was to be strictly elegant. A dome in the center of the auditorium ceiling mingled a riot of color and relief-work patterns with an abundance of gold leaf to pick up

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A lot of us remember the semi-circle of plaster-of-Paris figures around the last row of ground-floor seats at the Willis Wood theater. Coming out one night to make a curtain speech in this theater, Francis Wilson began:“Ladies and gentlemen and statuary.” Louis James once told me that this “gallery” was the most disconcerting that ever confronted him in any playhouse. (EY 57)

the light from the “starry heaven” of lamps in the ceiling. A turret or chimney above the dome allowed fresh air to be sucked into the building.The air would then pass over steam coils in winter—coils that could be filled with refrigerating fluid in summer—and then be forced through ducts into the auditorium. The stage was equipped with both an asbestos curtain and a water curtain.The stage area measured forty feet deep by one hundred feet wide behind a proscenium opening forty-two feet wide by forty feet high. All of the electrical power for lighting and heating the theater came from the Baltimore Hotel’s power plant. The absence of any boiler room at all in the Willis Wood Theatre surely gratified those who remembered how several of the Kansas City theater fires had begun at the furnace under the stage. Each of the five principal dressing rooms boasted a window looking onto Eleventh Street, a stationary washstand, hot and cold water, both gas and electric lights, and carpeting. A spiral staircase led up another level to the chorus dressing rooms. The Star reported on 25 August 1902 that Amelia Bingham, the actress who inaugurated the Willis Wood, was pleased at the provisions for the comfort of actors and praised the theater as the most beautiful she had ever seen. The Willis Wood’s opening night, 25 August, was rather warm, yet many wore evening dress for the occasion: swallow-tail coats with white waistcoats on the gentlemen, and women with bare shoulders. Others considered the sultriness of the evening and chose demi-evening dress: gray suits on the men, bare necks on the women whose shoulders were covered in filmy white fabric.When the green velvet curtain opened, the audience saw the scenic curtain painted with the temple of Juno—designed to complement the decor of the auditorium. John Behr led his small but excellent orchestra, and from his box Mayor James A. Reed addressed the audience, extolling the role of theater in uplifting a city.Then the curtain rose on the

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Amelia Bingham (1869–1927), the actress/manager whose company inaugurated the Willis Wood Theatre in 1902, had a somewhat uneven career, long specializing in emotional roles. From The Illustrated American Stage (1901).

squalid setting for act 1 of A Modern Magdalen. The inaugural speechmaking occurred in earnest after the third act. Amelia Bingham was called to speak, and she charmingly thanked and congratulated the citizens of Kansas City.Then O. D.Woodward stepped from his box over the footlights onto the stage. As lessee of the new theater,Woodward extolled its magnificence while deflecting concerns about his checkered management of the

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Auditorium. Several sources, including Latchaw, reported Woodward’s clever quip about the new theater’s higher ticket prices. Referring to himself and his partner,William Burgess of Omaha,Woodward said, according to the story in the Journal for 25 August: “Five years ago we came to this city. At that time we had a play house, and we offered plays so cheap that you could save money by going. All you had to do was turn down the gas at home, and when you got back you found that you were ahead of the game. . . .We now give you an opportunity of spending the surplus that you have saved during the past five years.”Woodward praised Colonel Wood for risking so much money on a playhouse of such quality and praised the genius of architect Louis Curtiss.Wood and Curtiss bowed from their boxes but would not make speeches. Walter D. Sanford, a drama critic who had gained business experience as assistant manager of the Orpheum, was hired to manage the Willis Wood under O. D.Woodward. Some criticized the choice of such a dark play for the festive occasion. A Modern Magdalen was a new adaptation by Haddon Chambers of a Danish play about the ill treatment of a fallen woman with a heart of gold. Bingham had just added the drama to her repertoire, and it was on the bill for her entire weeklong engagement. As an emotional actress, Bingham inclined toward roles like that of the unfortunate Katrinka, whom she portrayed appealingly enough to make the moral platitudes palatable. The strong supporting cast included such luminaries as Wilton Lackaye (long associated with the role of Svengali in Trilby) and the matinee idol comedian Henry E. Dixey. In March 1903 Mrs. Patrick Campbell played a memorable engagement at the Willis Wood.The three roles in her repertoire were all women of “unconventional social positions,” as Latchaw politely expressed it, yet each a distinct portrayal: the title roles in Magda and The Second Mrs.Tanqueray, and Beata in The Joy of Living. Latchaw was always one to enjoy female beauty and to appreciate a woman’s intelligence.When he interviewed Mrs. Campbell, he reveled in both, recalling that the interview was “one of the most interesting of my experience,” for she was “earnest, even zestful” in her analysis of the characters she portrayed (EY 54).The Star’s 17 March review of her opening as Beata noted that the role presented Mrs. Campbell “rather advantageously. Beata is a woman of aristocratic birth and tastes, and her life has never been coarsened by her unconventional departures. . . . Mrs. Campbell’s refinement of manner, grace of movement, taste in dress and distinction of personality all have fitting scope in this drama.” Kansas City audiences always appreciated religious spectacle. As a Syndi-

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cate house, the Willis Wood scored the famous Klaw and Erlanger production of Ben-Hur, based upon the 1880 novel by Gen. Lew Wallace. It played a half-week engagement with added matinees in January and returned for a full week in October 1903.The Kansas City World reported on 4 October that the tour required eight sixty-foot baggage cars of scenery and props plus two cars for the livestock, including sixteen horses and three camels. The scenery comprised 140,000 square feet of canvas, much of that devoted to the famous chariot race, which was staged with a painted panorama that scrolled across the stage behind the twelve horses running in the opposite direction on treadmills. An all-star revival of that old warhorse about sisters caught up in the French Revolution, The Two Orphans, came to the Willis Wood Theatre in 1904, the last of the twenty or so incarnations of it that played Kansas City beginning in 1875. It had remained an American stage favorite and as late as 1922 was made into a silent film, Orphans of the Storm, starring Lillian and Dorothy Gish.The Star reviewer on 29 November called it “certainly one of the greatest melodramas ever written.” It must have been a remarkable experience to see those legendary actors all in the same production. Notably, the great emotional actress Clara Morris appeared in the small role of Sister Genevieve, and James O’Neill (famed as the Count of Monte Cristo) was “picturesque and romantic as the Chevalier.” Louis James played “a strong, brutal, reckless Jacques Frochard.” Jameson Lee Finney made a hit with the comic role of Picard. Grace George played the blind sister Louise, ably supported by Mrs. Le Moyne, Sarah Truax, Elita Proctor Otis, and Bijou Fernandez. The succession of stars who played the Willis Wood in 1904 and 1905 is particularly impressive.Viola Allen played Viola in Twelfth Night (11–13 January 1904), followed over the next few weeks by engagements of John Drew, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Blanche Walsh, Lillie Langtry, and the Four Cohans. May 1904 brought five blockbusters in a row: the eminent tragedian Richard Mansfield, the delightful Maude Adams, operetta star Fritzi Scheff, Ziegfeld’s musical comedy star Anna Held, and the matinee idol E. H. Sothern.The fall season of 1905 brought Robert Mantell’s famous Richard III, Louis James in a classic repertoire, and the beloved comedian William H. Crane. One of the most powerful performances at the Willis Wood was that of the Polish-born actress Bertha Kalich in The Kreutzer Sonata in 1909. Although she opened to small houses, she was drawing overflow crowds by the end of her engagement, and Latchaw called it “one of the greatest sen-

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By 1904 the hold of the melodrama of former years had slipped.The public to which it had appealed had become less susceptible.“The Two Orphans” was more than a melodrama, but it was melodramatic.When he put it out, the author was convinced that he had given the world a real drama, exaggerating nothing. His own estimate was sustained, at least by success, for a long time. But he lived to see that the stage was susceptible to a more natural exposition of real life. But “The Two Orphans” served its purpose and its time. It was great “theater.” For one, I am glad I saw it in its prime; glad, too, that I saw it exalted, and in a measure rationalized, by great players who themselves were undergoing the natural evolution that attended the progress of the stage before the crash. (EY 13)

sations the Kansas City stage has witnessed.” He further recalled this tragedy of a Jewish woman married to a Russian nobleman as “repellent in some of its realism, graphic and shocking in some of its developments”; yet “this actress compelled such admiration for her art that she quite swept away the normal conservativism of Kansas City audiences. Memories of this play and the great actress often are recalled when older playgoers reminisce, sometimes wistfully” (EY 37). Kalich played subsequent engagements in Kansas City, thrilling audiences with now-forgotten plays such as Marta of the Lowlands, Cora, A Woman of Today, and The Riddle Woman. Such attractions—big-name artists in impressively staged plays—represented the finest shows on the road, and their bookings into the Willis Wood maintained the theater’s prestige during its first few seasons. A picture postcard of the Willis Wood in my collection (postmarked 28 November 1908) bears the sender’s notation: “This is the place it takes money to go.” Certainly the Willis Wood fulfilled Colonel Wood’s intention of giving Kansas City a first-class theater for a fashionable clientele. However, as the Shuberts’ challenge to Klaw and Erlanger’s Theatrical Syndicate played out on a national scale, the repercussions were felt locally. In the first years of the twentieth century, those two New York–based booking agencies competed for control of the first-class theaters in cities across the nation as well as for the attractions to book into those theaters. The escalating rivalry led the Shuberts to construct their own first-class theater in Kansas City, only a block from the Syndicate’s Willis Wood.The Shubert’s opening in 1906 at first stimulated a healthy competition. For a few

Glamour’s Last Gasp

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The shapely Viennese-born singer Fritzi Scheff (1879–1954) was one of many musical stars who performed at the classy Willis Wood Theatre during the fifteen years of its existence (1902–1917). From a postcard in the author’s collection.

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Bertha Kalich (1874–1929) acted in Yiddish when she began her American career on New York’s Lower East Side. She initially performed her great role in The Kreutzer Sonata in Yiddish, but then learned it in English and played it on Broadway in 1906. From The American Stage of Today (1910).

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seasons, the two theaters coexisted and theatergoers enjoyed excellent bookings at both. However, the Shubert attractions gradually surpassed those at the Willis Wood. The Willis Wood underwent several changes of management and programming, beginning with the installation of a stock company. Under Roy Crawford in 1913 –1914, it presented burlesque. Colonel Willis Wood died on 27 August 1914, and his theater was remodeled for motion pictures with a $20,000 pipe organ installed. The Willis Wood’s final lessees, E. E. Russell and Nugent T. Flynn of New York, returned it to stock, under the management of Joseph H. Gilday. After a fire ravaged its stage in 1917, the Willis Wood was never rebuilt. The fire shortly after midnight on 8 January 1917 was thought to have started in a fifth-floor dressing room, perhaps from an unextinguished cigar or cigarette. By the time the night watchman saw the blaze, it had burned all the scenery in the stage area.When the supporting rods for the asbestos curtain failed, flames shot into the auditorium and burned seats as far back as the fifteenth row. Firemen inundated the interior with water in time to save the shell of the theater, but the Willis Wood was deemed beyond restoration.The stock company was disbanded, and the theater was razed in March 1918 to be replaced by the twenty-story Mark Twain Building. When J. J. Shubert came to Kansas City in September 1905 to sign the contracts for construction of the new theater bearing the name of his recently deceased brother Sam S. Shubert, the Shubert firm was still positioning itself in the media as a public-spirited independent organization standing up to the goliath Syndicate. However, J. J. and Lee Shubert had already assumed the mantle of their brother’s business acumen and proceeded to astonish the business world with the speed and extent of their acquisitions. Foster Hirsch suggests in his study of the building of the Shuberts’ theatrical empire that Lee Shubert cannily exploited the memory of the middle brother, raising him to mythic status as the one who laid the foundation of the business while maintaining an untarnished personal image.4 It is evident that Kansas Citians were eager to buy into the myth.The local press long perpetrated the false legend that Sam Shubert had been en route to Kansas City on 11 May 1905 when he was killed. It was said that he had hoped to negotiate some bookings with Abraham Judah. On 29 September 1906, just before Kansas City’s Shubert Theatre opened, the Kansas City World was claiming, “Sam Shubert was on his way to Kansas City to close the deal with Leo N. Leslie for the site and the construction of the new playhouse when he was killed in the wreck on the Lake Shore line.” The truth is that Sam Shubert had taken the night train to Pittsburgh to nego-

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tiate a theater lease that would challenge the Syndicate in that city. A baggage car full of ammunition on an army transport train swerved into the Pullman car in which Sam Shubert slept, and the explosion ripped it open. A broken steam pipe scalded much of Shubert’s body. He died a day later in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. An oft-repeated bit of theatrical lore is that, in their grief over Sam’s death, Lee and J. J. Shubert went to the Syndicate head,Abraham Erlanger. They had in hand Sam’s contract to book some Syndicate theaters but secretly harbored thoughts of possibly getting out of the business, abandoning the field to the enemy.When Erlanger insensitively told them that he was not bound by contracts with dead men, the fate of the Syndicate was sealed.The Shubert brothers left, vowing to give no quarter. Over the years, the Shuberts’ ruthlessness surpassed that of the Syndicate. After the encounter with Erlanger, the Shuberts announced that they were working with independent producers David Belasco and Harrison Gray Fiske.Within six months after Sam Shubert’s death, according to Jerry Stagg, Lee “quadrupled the chain, planned five memorial theatres to honor Sam,” and scrambled to get enough attractions to book into all those theaters.5 In the same week as the signing of the contract to build Kansas City’s Shubert Theatre, it was announced that the Shuberts were adding two additional circuits to their chain, Stair and Havelin, and Kernan and Rife, both controlling first-class theaters.6 When the Kansas City Shubert opened in 1906, it was the fifty-second theater in the Shubert empire.The very playbill in the hands of audience members drove home the competitive message: “The Sam S. Shubert Theatre was erected and named in memory of the late Sam S. Shubert, founder of the firm which now controls 52 theatres and 45 high class attractions independent of the Theatrical Trust.” The Sam S. Shubert Theatre, located at Tenth and Baltimore, was dubbed “The House Cozy” by manager Walter Sanford (who had four years earlier been the inaugural manager of the Willis Wood). Designed to create a feeling of intimacy between those on stage and those who filled the 1,625 seats, the Shubert featured a first balcony so low that the front of it would be level with the brow of a medium-height actor on stage. Inclined planes gave easy access to the balcony and galleries; thus theatergoers had no stairs to climb. For the ground floor, a steep slope was excavated below the level of the street entrance. Steel girders supported the roof and balconies so that no posts obstructed the view. Advertised as “absolutely fireproof,” the Shubert had wide aisles, twenty exits all lighted by gas as well as by electricity in case one or the other system should fail, heating and lighting plants lo-

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The Shubert, the last of Kansas City’s important theater buildings, opened in 1906 and stood until 1936. The site is today a parking ramp for the Central Library. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

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The interior of the Shubert Theatre,“The House Cozy,” is shown with a fashionable audience filling the auditorium. Courtesy of the Shubert Archive, a project of the Shubert Foundation.

cated outside the building, and even a cement floor beneath the wooden flooring of the stage. Nor would any piece of scenery be stored in the theater other than what was brought in by the touring company of the week. Walls, curtain, and carpets in red set off the ivory and gold forty-footwide proscenium arch that framed a forty-foot-deep stage with ample wing space. Mirror panels reflected the incandescent lights from frosted globes on the ceiling and walls of the auditorium. In the lobby, the mosaic floor pattern featured the name of Sam S. Shubert. To the left from the main entrance on Tenth Street was a ladies’ retiring room with a maid in attendance. There, too, were a checkroom and a gentlemen’s smoking room. The fashionable people of the city came out for the Shubert opening on 1 October 1906. On the bill was the great Eddie Foy in The Earl and the Girl, engaged for six nights and three matinees. No speech-making was planned for the inauguration, but the audience called for Foy after the first

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act. He obliged, smiling his renowned V-shaped smile, thanking the city for the opportunity to open such a beautiful theater.Walter Sanford “asked the audience to look pleasant while a flash light picture was being taken,” according to the Post’s report of the next day. Speaking to reporters, J. J. Shubert praised “one of the finest audiences I have ever seen.” He said that he was proud to have built a theater in Kansas City and that this was “the prettiest” of the twenty theaters that the Shuberts themselves had built. Also in the audience were A. Judah of the Grand Opera House and O. D.Woodward of the Willis Wood, both wishing Sanford every success.The Post further praised the show, with special appreciation for Eddie Foy:“Foy has the happy faculty of standing on top of the footlights and making everyone imagine he is about to invite the house out to have a couple of drinks. His odd methods are decidedly mirth provoking.” For the big hit number— “How Would You Like to Spoon with Me?”—illuminated swings suddenly dropped into view to be promptly filled by pretty chorus girls flying out over the heads of those in the front rows. Many illustrious stars besides Eddie Foy graced the Shubert stage during its thirty-year existence, but only a few can be mentioned here. Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865 –1932), who ranks in the top tier of American actresses, achieved naturalness both in light comedy and in serious social dramas by Ibsen and others. As Minnie Maddern, she had played five Kansas City engagements in the 1880s. Returning to the stage a few years after her marriage to Harrison Grey Fiske, she regularly took her New York productions on the road, playing the Shubert on several occasions before World War I and again in the 1920s. For example, Mrs. Fiske split the week of 18 November 1907 between the powerful title roles in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Leah Kleschna.When she brought Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (week of 9 March 1908), critic Frank A. Marshall wrote in the Journal on 10 March:“the annual visits of this very interesting, and possibly the most intellectual of American actresses, are always occasions of welcome, but it is doubtful if Kansas City theater-goers will catch the full meaning” of “Ibsen’s gruesome symbolic tragedy.”An impressive cast surrounded her in The Merry Wives of Windsor, opening 23 January 1928, with Mrs. Fiske as Mistress Page, Henrietta Crosman as Mistress Ford, and Otis Skinner as Falstaff.Will Geer, still an unknown, played Pistol. Because Minnie Maddern Fiske came so often to Kansas City, it is impossible to pin down the date of Latchaw’s reminiscence about her visit to his home, yet it is a charming anecdote that merits recording here. He devoted a chapter of his “Enchanted Years” entirely to Mrs. Fiske, whom he

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Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932) played Kansas City many times. She was not only a superb actress but also used her celebrity to speak out for various causes. From The American Stage of Today (1910).

regarded as having “contributed more to the American stage than any other of our actresses” (EY 31). She normally wore veils on the street to disguise her celebrity but lifted the veils and interacted warmly with the other guests when Mrs. Latchaw gave a tea for her.The actress asked if she could pour the tea and thus chatted with everyone. The sound of a late arrival caught her attention and she asked Latchaw,“Who is that?” It was Latchaw’s

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employer, William Rockhill Nelson, owner and editor of the Kansas City Star. “What a personality!” she exclaimed.“I must talk with him.” The famous actress and the publisher seem to have been greatly impressed with each other and found much to talk about. Latchaw became apprehensive only when he saw the two of them sitting side by side on the porch swing, the tiny Mrs. Fiske next to the weighty Mr. Nelson, for it could have been disastrous if Nelson’s great bulk had been too much for the ceiling bolts. It is gratifying to be able to stand on the front porch of the house at 4701 Rockhill Road and see those bolts firmly in place yet today. Al Jolson (1886 –1950) played eleven boffo engagements at the Shubert between 1909 and 1932. His earlier tours with Dockstader’s Minstrels or in vaudeville had been at the Grand Opera House and at the old Orpheum, but he was the headliner in the Shubert musicals: Whirl of Society (1912), Honeymoon Express (1914),Dancing Around (1915),Robinson Crusoe, Jr. (1917), Sinbad (1920 and 1921), Bombo (1923 and 1924), Big Boy (1927), and Wonder Bar (1932). Jolson was truly “the world’s greatest entertainer,” and his thrilling voice surely filled every corner of The House Cozy. David Warfield (1866 –1951) held a special place in the hearts of theatergoers for his heartrending portrayal of the title character in The Music Master by Charles Klein. Produced by David Belasco, the play had opened in New York in 1904 and sustained a phenomenal run of 540 performances there. Warfield continued to perform it on the road for many years. He played a struggling piano teacher who had left his fine career in Vienna to search in New York for the wife who had run off with an American, taking his infant daughter. He learns that one of his piano students is his own daughter, but to reveal himself to her would jeopardize her happiness, so he masks his feelings even as he descends into poverty. For Warfield’s April 1907 engagement at the Shubert, people waited in line all night to buy tickets as soon as the box office opened. By nine o’clock in the morning, there were a thousand people in line, and the line continued throughout the day despite the rain. Forty years later Warfield told the Star that he still treasured a photograph that had been taken of those waiting in the rain to buy tickets.7 For his November 1908 engagement at the Shubert, the role of the daughter was played by Antoinette Perry, the actress (and later director) after whom today’s Tony Awards are named. Warfield also earned acclaim in the role of the Civil War veteran in A Grand Army Man by David Belasco, Pauline Phelps, and Marion Short. He introduced it into his touring repertoire alongside The Music Master in 1908. In fact, it was on the opening night of A Grand Army Man, 6 November

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Al Jolson’s vibrant personality and immortal voice had an electrifying effect on audiences everywhere. He starred in eleven musicals at the Shubert between 1912 and 1932, and all that mattered was his presence in front of the audience, who lapped up every instant. Photograph courtesy of James Fisher.

1908, at the Shubert Theatre that Austin Latchaw experienced the repercussions of the bad feelings that had developed between his employer, William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star, and the enterprising theater manager O. D.Woodward. It will be remembered that Woodward had made his mark in Kansas City by his management of the Auditorium Theatre, home of the Woodward Stock Company. It was Woodward and his Omaha partner William Burgess who had acquired the lease on Coates Opera House when Mel Hudson retired. As soon as Colonel Willis Wood had announced plans to build a first-class theater to fill the void left

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The phenomenally popular sentimental drama The Music Master proved to be a great vehicle for David Warfield in the title role as Anton Von Barwig.The play by Charles Klein, produced by David Belasco, opened in New York in 1904 and ran for 540 performances.A novelization was published in 1909. Courtesy of the Shubert Archive, a project of the Shubert Foundation.

by Coates Opera House, Woodward had presented himself as the one to lease that theater, the Willis Wood, and to oversee its management. Meanwhile Woodward had also become a presence at the Standard (Century) Theater.Woodward further owned outright the Kansas and Missouri Circuit Booking Agency and the Hoyt State Bank in Hoyt, Kansas, in addition to other significant banking interests. In 1907 he obtained a controlling interest in the Kansas City Post, which positioned itself in opposition to many issues championed by William Rockhill Nelson in the Star. The Post’s attacks on Nelson peaked in 1908. At some point between March and September 1908,Woodward also became general manager of the Shubert Theatre.The Shubert programs for that fall indicate that the theater was “under the Management of Woodward & Burgess Amusement Co. and Lee and J. J. Shubert.”

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Anton Von Barwig in “The Music Master” [was David Warfield’s] most enduring and most profitable role. He acted Von Barwig more than 1,000 times, to gross receipts of nearly 1 million dollars. . . . “The Music Master” was designed by Belasco to get his star out of the broad character in which he had become popular and to give him a legitimate role, but with some of the old qualities retained.This objective was achieved happily.The story of Von Barwig had a powerful appeal, so powerful that the audiences wept over it, as they did many years before over “Hearts of Oak” and “East Lynne.” If the play was surcharged with sentiment, some of it mawkish, at least there was nothing in it to harrow our feelings. Furthermore, a play that has had the success that attended this one scarcely needs a defender. Kansas City waited for it. Goodly numbers used to stay in line most of the night for the opening of the seat sales. (EY 37)

Latchaw devoted much of chapter 36 of “The Enchanted Years of the Stage” to recounting the circumstances of the hostilities between O. D. Woodward and William Rockhill Nelson. According to Latchaw, Nelson long had a policy of ignoring attacks on him by other newspapers. Latchaw doubted that Nelson ever even saw any of the “rather brutal” cartoons of him on the front pages of the Post. When informed of what was going on, Nelson simply cut back his support for the Woodward theaters, which had been considerable (see Chapter 4). As Latchaw recalled the sequence of events: Mr. Nelson first ordered that advance notices of Woodward attractions be cut down to bare announcements.When the personal attacks continued, he refused to take Woodward’s advertisements. His instructions to me, as dramatic critic, were that I should pay for my seats, and when I reviewed a performance I should forget all about the controversy and handle the attraction, as always, solely on its merits.This I did, and this policy held for some weeks. In spite of continued abuse, it might have continued indefinitely but for a personal incident that occurred at the Shubert theater the night that David Warfield opened his engagement in A Grand Army Man. The Shubert treasurer had been holding my seats for me. But on this night he said with regret that inadvertently they had been sold. As that

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So successful was he in The Music Master that David Warfield played no other role from the time of the play’s Broadway opening until 1907. In 1908 he introduced another sentimental melodrama with strong appeal to those who remembered the Civil War and played A Grand Army Man in rotating repertory with the ever-popular Music Master, but Latchaw unfortunately did not get to see the performance. From The American Stage of Today (1910).

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easily might have happened, I thought nothing of it, and asked for the best seats remaining. I was told the house was sold out except for two seats in Mr.Woodward’s box. Naturally, in the circumstances, I did not choose to sit in the Woodward box. So I bought two admissions (my daughter accompanied me) which entitled us to standing room. An innocent and obliging usher rounded up two chairs, which he placed back of the regular seats and which I gratefully accepted. About the middle of the first act an usher was sent to me to say the management was very sorry, but the fire regulations would not permit the use of extra chairs. I was well aware that it was against the regulations to use a lot of extra chairs, but many times I had seen a few in use. So, I knew very well that I was being “frozen out,” with the alternative of standing through the performance. This alternative I might have been willing to accept in the first instance, but not as a matter of vicarious punishment. We left the theater and went to The Star offices. I called Mr. Nelson on the telephone for instruction.“Ignore the performance,” he said.“We will talk about it in the morning.” The next day he was about as mad as I ever had seen him.“I am not going to hand this man any more money through the medium of The Star,” he said.“Until further direction, do not mention the Woodward attractions, either by announcement or review.” (EY 36)

Nelson was a man of principle; when he made a decision, he stuck to it. Surmising that Woodward needed the Star to reach the theatergoing public more than the Star needed Woodward’s advertising revenue, Nelson blacklisted Woodward’s theatrical interests. Latchaw and others on the Star staff tried to persuade Nelson that this policy was unfair to newspaper subscribers as well as to the touring theater companies.“But he was adamant, and the policy stood as long as Woodward had local theaters.” Woodward’s side of the story can only be intuited from various news stories, particularly those in the Post. It is impossible to know precisely what might have motivated him to turn so vehemently against the publisher who had made a policy of supporting the Woodward Stock Company at the Auditorium. However, we can see that 1907–1908 was an oddly eventful period in the life of the self-styled “Napoleon of local theatredom.”8 For one thing,Woodward was shot and wounded by a disgruntled former employee of the Post. On 23 November 1907 Gen. Richard C. Horne, a Post stockholder and editorial writer who had been dismissed along with ten or twelve other employees in a general retrenchment, waited in the city editor’s office while Woodward and his managing editor,H.J.Groves,conferred

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in the latter’s office.When Woodward came out of Groves’s office, Horne shot him in the side.Woodward fell, and Horne shot him twice in the right arm.Then Horne went after Groves, shooting him in the hip. Horne handed his revolver to a Post employee, stated “I have been robbed,” left the building, and turned himself in to a policeman on the street.Woodward recovered from his wounds, but Groves died. At his trial for murder in March 1908, Horne was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a state mental asylum. The saga of Woodward’s involvement with the Shubert Theatre is more complicated. The Shubert itself experienced managerial vicissitudes, becoming a vaudeville house only a year after its opening. It appears that the Shuberts were running short of first-class attractions in the fall of 1907. At any rate, control of Kansas City’s Shubert Theatre passed to the Oppenheimers of St. Louis, who held a contract for bookings of vaudeville attractions through Klaw and Erlanger, but they also honored existing contracts for legitimate drama presented by independents Belasco and Fiske. Rumors in December 1907 that the Orpheum circuit would gain control of the Shubert proved unfounded. On 25 January 1908, the Star reported that, as a result of “the mutations of an aggressive war between theatrical interests,” the Shubert was leased to C. J. Flaven and Reginald C. Barker, who installed the Barker Stock Company but also presented Minnie Maddern Fiske’s annual combination. The Barker Stock Company lasted out the season, enjoying particular success with some religious dramas, but another change of management was then announced.Woodward would be running the Shubert along with the Auditorium and the Willis Wood. Strangely, that summer of 1908—when Woodward must have been extremely busy with bookings for three theaters in the season ahead—also marked the peak of the Post’s vicious attacks on William Rockhill Nelson. Kansas Citians looked forward to the reopening of the Shubert as a first-class house charging only $1.00 for the same shows offered in other cities for $1.50. However, even before the opening of the first play in September,Woodward fell afoul of the Shuberts. The Post’s 3 September 1908 version of the melodramatic standoff at the theater between the Woodward and the Shubert interests reviewed the theater’s past travails: “Considering the short time that the Shubert theater in Kansas City has been in existence, it probably stands first among the playhouses of the country in point of management juggling and entanglement. . . . Leased and subleased, reverted and leased again, its history has been a stormy one. Powerfully influencing the failure of the Klaw and Er-

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langer vaudeville venture, the control of the house has been juggled back and forth between Kansas City, St. Louis and New York for two seasons.” The Post concluded that O. D.Woodward had finally been bringing stability to the enterprise before the volatile situation was initiated by the arrival from New York that morning of C. A. Bird, general manager of the Shubert interests. According to the Journal the next day, the contract between Woodward and the Shuberts was intended “to pool the costs of maintenance and profits of the two theatres.” Bird claimed that Woodward had violated his contract with the Shuberts by assuming total control of the theater rather than managing it subject to directives from the Shubert Amusement Company. Specific violations cited by Bird included Woodward’s removal of office furniture from the Shubert for use at the Willis Wood, Woodward’s attempt to deposit Shubert revenue in his own name rather than in the name of the Shuberts, and Woodward’s initiative in contracting an attraction rather than allowing the Shuberts to book all attractions. Although Bird declared that Woodward had been relieved of his management of the Shubert,Woodward took possession of the box office, locking himself inside, along with employees Frank Woodward and Ted Allen, and declaring that he intended to hold onto his lease and go to court to maintain his rights.With Woodward hunkered down in the box office, Bird occupied the stage and also prevented delivery of a lunch to Woodward. Meanwhile, the lobby filled with nonplussed policemen and attorneys for both sides, according to the Star’s 3 September account. By three o’clock that afternoon,Woodward’s legal representatives had secured a circuit-court restraining order to prevent the Shuberts from discharging him. However, the order also provided that all finances would be handled by George H. Miller, whom the Shuberts had appointed as treasurer of the theater. On Friday 4 September,Woodward had emerged from the box office to supervise preparations on stage for the season opening on Sunday,while Miller was ensconced in the box office cage under police protection.Woodward exchanged some heated words with detective Ed Kirk, who had been hired to prevent Woodward’s access to the box office, but there was no serious confrontation.Thus, on the second day, the opponents had exactly reversed the theater territory under control of each side. On 5 September it was announced that the litigation between Woodward and the Shuberts would be taken out of the circuit court and removed to federal court, thus delaying any decision. Woodward told the Journal that there was no basis to the charge that he had deposited Shubert funds under

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The Shubert Theatre was the scene of a bizarre standoff between its manager, O. D. Woodward, and the Shubert representative, C.A. Bird. Despite setbacks caused by rival business interests, it was the Shubert that gave Kansas City one last decade of legitimate theater after the Willis Wood burned down in 1917. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

his own name:“The Shubert had not taken in one cent this year.The box office was opened only a few hours when the trouble began. On the other hand, I have advanced over $1,200 to the Shubert theater from my own resources in order to put the thing on its feet and in working order.” That same day, the Post ran a statement by William J. Burgess of Omaha, vouch-

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ing for O. D.Woodward’s character.The Times story that day reported that the siege was still on, for the Shubert employees were ordered not to open the box office door if any Woodward people were near; lunches were delivered to the box office cage, after which the Shubert men nonchalantly smoked postprandial cigars. The Shubert’s season opened as scheduled on 6 September 1908 with the romantic melodrama The Wolf by Eugene Walter, in the original production from New York and Chicago. In the absence of any new incident to report, the Times on 7 September quoted the young woman who sold chocolates in the lobby and the one-legged man who had the chewinggum concession on the sidewalk, and both expressed concern about becoming caught up in the ongoing battle for the theater.“I ain’t working for either of ’em,” said the chewing gum man.“I’m playing a lone hand. Honest, I ain’t identified with no theatrical trust.” In United States court on 10 September and again on 2 October, Judge Pollack expressed impatience with businessmen who could not clarify the terms of their own contracts. The latter hearing focused on Woodward’s complaint that the Shuberts had refused to pay his contracted salary and other bills incurred in running the theater. As reported in the Star on 2 October, the Shubert side contended that Woodward had put men on the Shubert payroll who were actually working for other Woodward enterprises and that Woodward himself could not give any attention to the Shubert because he was busy running his other concerns,“a bill posting company, an automobile agency and a newspaper, of which he controls the policy.” Further, they claimed, the Shubert was losing patrons because of indifference and discourtesy on the part of the demoralized staff. Judge Pollack called upon both sides to stop their wrangling or else the court would step in and run the theater for them. However, he did declare that until a final adjudication could be made,Woodward should be recognized as manager and his salary paid. On that basis, the Post’s story on 2 October was headlined: “O. D. Woodward Again Victorious in Shubert Case.” Still, the quarrels continued and the case went to the circuit court of appeals in St. Louis. It was at this juncture, during David Warfield’s two-play engagement at the Shubert (2–7 November 1908), that Latchaw experienced the unprofessional treatment noted earlier. An interview with Warfield in the Star on 2 November unleashed a journalistic exchange of hostilities with the Post. Warfield was one of few stars who managed to tour nationally as an “independent,” not booking through Klaw and Erlanger’s Theatrical Syndicate. Because of a prior contract, he was now playing the Shubert Theatre,which,

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he told the Star, “Kansas City lost as an independent house when the Shuberts made terms with the trust.”Warfield also told the Star that Klaw and Erlanger wanted him to play at popular prices, but that he was protected by his contract from doing that. He feared that the situation might soon force independents to look to Europe for bookings, because “that would be better than submitting to the conditions and extortions practiced by the syndicate.” He deplored the Shuberts’ concessions to the trust, as many artists had looked to the Shuberts to put a crimp in the Syndicate’s power. Little did he know what lay ahead along those very lines. On 5 November, a Post headline responded: “Klaw & Erlanger Say Somebody Lied—As to Star Advertising”and “The Theatrical Firm Declares That Nelson’s Paper Is Unworthy of Patronage.” The Post story stated that Klaw and Erlanger had sent a telegram to the Star refuting Warfield’s claims, but that the Star had refused to give space to that side of the story. Since the Star was an evening paper, it was able to respond that same day by publishing the text of the telegram, followed by Warfield’s reiteration of the truth of what he had claimed. It was the very next evening, 6 November, that Latchaw and his daughter were denied seats at the Shubert. The United States circuit court of appeals made its decision in the Woodward-Shubert case on 4 February 1909. Woodward was ordered to relinquish control of the Shubert Theatre to the Shuberts. Despite the setbacks of 1907–1909,Woodward persevered. Although he never became a beloved figure in the vein of Abraham Judah and Martin Lehman, he managed to get considerable press coverage for himself. A feature story on Woodward in the World on 6 December 1903 quoted several of his maxims, among which we find: “The man who looks after every detail of his own business is the man who wins.”“A business cannot be run successfully on sentiment.”“If your employees do not satisfy the requirements, replace them with others.” The Journal published a retrospective of his career progress on 11 June 1911, noting that he had produced more than five hundred plays in fifteen years. As “one of the biggest producing stock managers of the country,”Woodward had gained a nationwide managerial reputation. After the transfer of the Auditorium lease to the Orpheum in 1910,Woodward worked for a time in St. Louis, Omaha, Denver, and Spokane. Yet he continued to assemble productions that played Kansas City theaters in the 1920s and 1930s. He moved to Los Angeles in 1932 and died there in 1946. Legitimate theater died a slow death in Kansas City, a gradual demise from the time of World War I and throughout the 1920s. Old-timers often wrote in to the newspapers and waxed nostalgic about the glory days of live

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theater, but the next generation grew up on radio, motion pictures, and the occasional blockbuster charity event and could not realize what they were missing. The Journal-Post’s entertainment editor noted on 29 September 1929 that it had been “seven months since a live, breathing performer wandered into our legitimate theater.” Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, community theater groups made valiant efforts to fill the void.The story of the Resident Theatre, the Kansas City Children’s Theatre, the Circle Theatre, and others remains to be fully told. Starlight Theatre is the subject of a book by Kathleen Hegarty Thorne. Not until 1964, when Dr. Patricia A. McIlrath started a professional summer theater at the University of Kansas City, would a new theatrical renaissance be seeded. McIlrath’s initiative became Missouri Repertory Theatre, the flagship regional repertory theater that until 2001 attracted a new critical mass of artists to make their homes and careers in Kansas City. From that new beginning came the Unicorn Theatre, the Coterie, Theatre for Young America, American Heartland Theatre, Martin City Melodrama, Quality Hill Playhouse, Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, Gorilla Theatre, Just Off Broadway productions, Kansas City Actors Theatre, and others. Without the great touring stars of yore, we will never again see “enchanted years of the stage.” But there can be a city made livable by the vibrancy of its performing arts culture. All we have to do is support our local artists.

APPENDIX

THE BIG HAT

From the front page of the Kansas City Star, Tuesday, 5 March 1895

THE BIG HAT CAPITULATES WOMEN AT THE COATES FORSAKE HUGE HEADGEAR

Only Three Big Hats in the First Floor Audience When the Curtain Rose Last Night—Eighty-Four Feminine Heads Wholly Hatless

Her Ladyship, with gracious suavity, has taken off her hat! When the comic paragraphers jeered, when the Man Behind grumbled, when the witch-burning legislators threatened, Her Ladyship’s hugest hats and broadest bows and proudest plumes held their begrudged place in calm defiance. But when Melville Hendrick Hudson, manager and diplomate, gave courteous wording to the plea of Those Who Came Yet Saw Not, and, with irresistible politeness, requested forbearance, the obstructive top-gear vanished as if by magic. The scene of this most memorable and generous capitulation was the Coates Opera house; the time, last night. The programme of the evening’s performance contained—as the newspapers had foretold—this card: 291

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“Detested by all men” says the doggerel on this 1908 postcard mocking the huge hats named after Léhar’s 1905 operetta.Yet Latchaw had waged his campaign against picture hats in the theater more than ten years earlier. From a postcard in the author’s collection.

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TO OUR PATRONS In deference to the expressed wishes of many of the regular patrons of the Coates Opera house, including both men and women, the management respectfully asks that ladies remove their hats during performances in this theater.This request is not made in the spirit of a ruling, but as a favor, which, if granted, will bring equal benefits to all. M. H. HUDSON

When the people began pouring into the theater, shortly before 8 o’clock, it looked bad for the hat proposition.The way hats floated in, defiance seeming to breathe from each feather and flower and ribband, was appalling.There were moments of hope, moments when the mirror in the lobby became a kaleidoscopic reflection of yellow hair. Why it was that blonde women, particularly, made that mirror a sacrificial altar of headgear is past finding out, but they did. Then big, defiant black hats would come in a bunch and hope was thrust back, until a concourse of sweet little hats, followed by a bevy of absolutely hatless heads and radiant smiles, gave reassurance.Then a big black hat, again, like an unrelenting conspirator in the court—and so the tide of hats and heads flowed in. Five minutes before the curtain rose, there were hats all over the house like ominous specters. Manager Hudson flung up his arms.“All is lost!” he exclaimed. The subservience of man was pitiful.The man who has said many bitter things about big hats—who has railed at big hats—was there and the bitterer the anti-hat man the bigger the hat of his companion. The big hats marched in front and the man followed after, like a captive dragged at the chariot wheels of female supremacy. The hatless women and the almost hatless ones bowed and smiled to friends; they were happy.The big-hatted contingent looked neither to the right nor to the left, but seemed resolute.They were only misunderstood: they knew their own plans and were content to await, in patience, their exculpation. But it looked like open war. Suddenly came the stampede! Stories have been told of the stampedes of wild-eyed cattle; of mad stampedes of scared soldiers who wanted to quit the war quick; of conventions stampeded to a “dark horse,” but a stampede of hats had yet to occur and it happened at 8:07 o’clock last evening at the Coates. Just where it began observers differ. Some say a large yellow hat just be-

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hind the rail on the right started it. It is asserted that this hat riveted the glance of every feminine eye and it became thus the leader, and when it sank from sight the rush was on. At any rate, an uneasy flutter ran through the house, like the sound of leaves shaking in the presage of a tempest, and here and there white hands went up and tugged at hat pins and other mysteries. Hats disappeared on all sides.Two hundred hands fluttered about hats that had seemed defiant. One, two, three, four, and ten! and presto! the curtain rolled up and only three big hats remained in all the orchestra seats and orchestra circle. Two of them were together, far back.The other held its own alone. There were hats which stayed on, to be sure, but they were not the “theater hats” of fame.The parquette contained 201 women.They wore, to begin with, five distinct sorts of headgear, namely: Big, big hats, 19; big hats, 22; unobstructive hats, 37; sweet little hats, 39; no hats, 84.When the stampede was over three big hats remained, together with fourteen of the unobstructive kind, and twenty-seven sweet little hats. The eighty-four who came hatless and charming were the phalanx of victory against the big hat in the parquette and they were radiant with triumph. In the balcony it was different. An atmosphere of perversity as subtle as the perfume that floated about, surrounded exactly two-thirds of the fair ones there.The other one-third sat hatless, targets for the disapproving eyes of their twenty-five unyielding sisters, but inwardly upheld by their own conscious graciousness. Of these those who came without hats were about equal in number to those who removed their hats after entering. Manager Clark of the Ninth Street theater will agitate a like movement with possibly a few variations.“I have been thinking of trying the scheme for some time,” he said this morning. “It’s a good thing, doubtless. It certainly ruffles a man a bit to pay a dollar or a dollar and a half for a seat at the theater for the privilege of contemplating a rear elevation of an elaborate design in headgear. I shall inaugurate the plan in a few days and I believe it will be successful. If the ladies object to holding their hats in their laps, I will arrange a dressing room where they may check them on going in.” Manager Judah at the Grand takes a different view of the matter.“I don’t feel that I have any right to dictate as to what ladies shall wear in the theater,” he said.“There is no doubt that it would prove a great benefit to the men if they would not wear hats, but if there is any change here at the Grand it will be entirely voluntary.The plan worked very nicely at the Coates last

The Big Hat

295

night and believe it won’t be long until the ladies will either all remove their hats or else wear small ones, but if they haven’t enough consideration for the men to remove them without a request from me, why, they’ll continue to be worn. I’m not going to ask them to take them off.”

ToPIcS CoVERED IN AUSTIN LATcHAW’S

“The Enchanted Years of the Stage”

“The Enchanted Years of the Stage” by Austin Latchaw was published in sixty installments in the Kansas City Star from 31 March to 23 June 1935. The following is a breakdown of subject matter by installment (or, as he called it, by chapter). Chapters 1 to 60 are referenced as EY 1 to EY 60. EY 1 (31 March 1935):“Early Days in Kansas City.” Coates Opera House. Mel Hudson. Audiences of the 1880s. Gillis Opera House. Ninth Street Theatre. Grand Opera House. EY 2 (2 April 1935):“Noted Actors in Philadelphia.”Lawrence Barrett.John McCullough.Warder Grand Theatre. EY 3 (3 April 1935):“Memorable Nights at the Warder Grand.”The 1887 Booth-Barrett inauguration.The 1888 Booth-Barrett engagement.Colonel Warder.Adelina Patti. Drama critic as subject to the publisher’s suggestion. EY 4 (4 April 1935): “Recalling Mather, Anderson, Janauschek, and Morris.” EY 5 (5 April 1935):“Notable Roles of Booth and Barrett.” Booth’s Hamlet, Iago, and Richelieu. Barrett’s Ganelon. Booth and Barrett in downtown Kansas City. EY 6 (7 April 1935): “When Comic Opera Flourished.” The Bostonians. Alice Nielsen. Whitney Opera Company. Lillian Russell. Thomas Q. Seabrook. Robert E. Graham. Barry Sullivan. Francis Wilson. Ladies remove their hats. DeWolf Hopper. Della Fox. EY 7 (9 April 1935):“Emma Abbott and Others.” Grand opera. Lotta Crabtree.Maggie Mitchell.RosinaVokes.The Exposition Building (1887–1901).

296

Topics Covered in Austin Latchaw’s “Enchanted Years of the Stage”

297

EY 8 (10 April 1935): “Kansas City in the ’80s.” Some early hotels.Transportation.The real estate boom. Newspapers. Restaurants. Saloons.Variety houses. EY 9 (11 April 1935):“The Drew Family.”Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia. John Drew. Maurice Barrymore. Mrs. John Drew. A narrow-minded minister in Kansas City. EY 10 (12 April 1935):“Jefferson and Other Comedians.” Joseph Jefferson. Rip Van Winkle. The All-Star Cast of The Rivals. Sol Smith Russell. The Minstrel Show. Billy Kersands at the Gillis. EY 11 (14 April 1935): “Grand Opera in Kansas City.” Walter Damrosch. Caruso, Melba, Calve, and others at Convention Hall. Henry W. Savage presenting light opera and grand opera. EY 12 (16 April 1935): “Langtry and the Coghlans.” Lillie Langtry. Rose Coghlan. Charles Coghlan. Gertrude Coghlan. Extravaganza. Eddie Foy. EY 13 (17 April 1935): “The Salvinis, Kate Claxton and Mrs. Carter.” Interpretations of Othello. The Two Orphans. Decline of melodrama. E. S. Willard. David Belasco and Mrs. Leslie Carter. EY 14 (18 April 1935): “James O’Neill and Monte Cristo.” May Irwin and Pete Dailey at Grand Opera House. EY 15 (19 April 1935): “Fanny Davenport; Lillian Olcott; Charles Hoyt’s Plays.” Sardou’s melodrama.The dog performing with Miss Olcott. Paired comedians at the Grand. EY 16 (21 April 1935):“The Career of Richard Mansfield.” His great roles. Margaret Anglin. Personal anecdotes. EY 17 (23 April 1935):“The Great Bernhardt.”At the Gillis, the Auditorium, Convention Hall, and the Orpheum. EY 18 (24 April 1935):“Louis James and Marie Wainwright.”The split between James and Barrett. EY 19 (25 April 1935): “James A. Herne and Denman Thompson.” Psychology like that in Ibsen’s plays. The Old Homestead. Decency onstage. The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief. EY 20 (26 April 1935):“The Willis Wood Theatre.” The 1902 opening. Rivalry between the two booking agencies.Viola Allen. Interpretations of The Winter’s Tale. EY 21 (28 April 1935):“Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.” Sardou’s Robespierre. EY 22 (30 April 1935):W. J. Florence and John T. Raymond. Irish singing comedians: Joe Murphy, William J. Scanlan, Andrew Mack, J. K. Emmett (and his “Fritz” comedies), Chauncey Olcott.

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EY 23 (1 May 1935): Helena Modjeska. EY 24 (2 May 1935):Walker Whiteside. EY 25 (3 May 1935): Sir Johnstone Forbes-Robertson. Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Henry Miller. The Great Divide. EY 26 (5 May 1935): “Robert Mantell, Thomas Keene and Frederick Warde.” EY 27 (7 May 1935): Grand Opera House. Mr. Judah. In Old Kentucky. EY 28 (8 May 1935): Mme Hortense Rhéa.W. S. Hart. J. M. Francour. John A. Lane. EY 29 (9 May 1935): Mrs. Potter and Kyrle Bellew. James K. Hackett. EY 30 (10 May 1935): New York stock organizations: Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre Company, A. M. Palmer’s Madison Square Theatre Company, Charles Frohman’s Empire Theatre Company.Augustus Thomas. Herbert Kelcey. Georgia Cayvan. EY 31 (12 May 1935): “Minnie Maddern Fiske.” When she met William Rockhill Nelson. EY 32 (14 May 1935): Stuart Robson and William H. Crane. Nat C. Goodwin. Early variety. EY 33 (15 May 1935): Lesser tragedians. George C. Miln in The Merchant of Venice. EY 34 (16 May 1935): Character actors:Theodore Roberts,Wilton Lackaye, Frank Mayo. EY 35 (17 May 1935): Musical artists who came to Kansas City: Paderewski, Madame Carreno. Composer Carl Busch. Conductor John Behr and Kansas City Symphony Orchestra. Local singers. EY 36 (19 May 1935):“Stock Company Days.”The 1890s stock company revival.Wagenhals and Kemper. Fairmount Park.The Blande Stock Company.O.D.Woodward at the Auditorium.Eva Lang.Gertrude Berkeley.Nelson’s feud with Woodward. EY 37 (21 May 1935): David Warfield in The Music Master. Bertha Kalich. EY 38 (22 May 1935):Alice Nielsen. Felice Lyne. EY 39 (23 May 1935): Parkina (Elizabeth Parkinson). Mme Nordica. Louise Rieger. EY 40 (24 May 1935): Kansas City musical artists. EY 41 (26 May 1935): “Vaudeville in Its Heyday.” From early variety to vaudeville. Martin Lehman and the Orpheum circuit. Action against Sunday performances. Lawrence Lehman.Vaudeville headliners. EY 42 (28 May 1935): Otis Skinner. Lawrence Barrett.Ada Rehan.

Topics Covered in Austin Latchaw’s “Enchanted Years of the Stage”

299

EY 43 (29 May 1935): Amateur theater groups. Stanislaus Stange. Personal anecdotes. EY 44 (30 May 1935):William Faversham and Julie Opp. Interpretations of Hamlet by women and children. Soprano Ellen Beach Yaw. EY 45 (31 May 1935):William Gillette.Virginia Harned.Trilby-mania. EY 46 (2 June 1935): “The Individuality of Maude Adams.” Peter Pan. L’Aiglon. EY 47 (4 June 1935): How Margaret Anglin rose in the ranks at the Coates. Nance O’Neil. McKee Rankin. EY 48 (5 June 1935): Cyril Maude. Charles Hawtry. Marie Tempest. EY 49 (6 June 1935):Alla Nazimova. EY 50 (7 June 1935):Weber and Fields. Lillian Russell. Other entertainers who performed with Weber and Fields. EY 51 (9 June 1935): “Players from Kansas City.” Mrs. Louis James. Mary Hall. Robert Conness. Mabel Hite. Robert T. Haines. EY 52 (11 June 1935): Genevieve and Marguerite Liggett (Gauntier). Janet Dunbar. EY 53 (12 June 1935): Marie Doro. Jeanne Eagels. Lulu McConnell. Grace Hopkins. Ray Maskell. EY 54 (14 June 1935): Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Margaret Illington (wife of Major Edward J. Bowes of radio). EY 55 (16 June 1935): “Recalling the Famous Dancers.” Carmencita. La Belle Otero. Anna Pavlowa. Adeline Genee. Gertrude Hoffman. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Gaby Deslys and Henriette the hen. Maud Allan. Isadora Duncan. EY 56 (18 June 1935): Maxine Elliott.Walter Hampden. Joseph Haworth. EY 57 (19 June 1935): Miscellaneous anecdotes. EY 58 (20 June 1935): Olga Nethersole. Mary Shaw. Cecelia Loftus. Henry E. Dixey. EY 59 (21 June 1935): Blanche Bates. Eleanor Robson. Mary Mannering. EY 60 (23 June 1935):“Sothern and Marlowe.”

NoTES

Abbreviations Journal

Western Journal of Commerce, Daily Journal of Commerce, Kansas City Journal of Commerce

Star

Evening Star, Kansas City Star Introduction

1. Star, 24 January 1948. 2. Arthur Bloom, Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theatre, 170–71. Prologue: Frontier Town Amusements 1. Charles E. Hoffhaus, Chez les Canses: Three Centuries at Kawsmouth: The French Foundations of Metropolitan Kansas City, 119. 2. Roy Ellis, A Civic History of Kansas City, Missouri, 7. 3. Hoffhaus, Chez les Canses, 157. 4. The evolution of the town’s boundaries and of its name is detailed in many histories of Kansas City,including those by Ellis,Garwood,Haskell and Fowler,and Montgomery and Kasper.With the death of the early settler Gabriel Prudhomme in 1836, a sizable tract of prime land on the south bank of the Missouri became available, and this included the rock ledge that served as a natural landing for boats.This ledge, informally called Westport Landing, where goods and people ended their river journey needing to travel only four miles overland to Westport, became the starting point for the new town on land purchased from the Prudhomme estate in 1838 and partitioned during the 1840s. In 1846 the fourteen owners, led by John Calvin McCoy, chose Town of Kansas as the name of the future city, never suspecting the confusion that would arise when the Indian Territory to the west eventually became a state named Kansas.Town 301

302

Notes

of Kansas was incorporated under that name by the Jackson County court in 1850. With its formal chartering by the Missouri State Legislature in 1853, it became City of Kansas. It was not until the late 1850s that City of Kansas began to surpass Westport in the number of commercial establishments and inhabitants. The name Kansas City had been used by its inhabitants long before that name became official in 1889. Kansas City and Westport merged in 1899. 5. Carrie Westlake Whitney, Kansas City, Missouri: Its History and Its People, 1808– 1908, 1:658. 6. Journal, 12 January 1859. 7. Whitney, Kansas City, 1:657, 222. 8. Although many sources follow Rietz in claiming that Mabie and Stone’s company was the first to perform publicly in Kansas City, Bowen discovered the earlier reference to the Badger Circus. See Elbert R. Bowen, “The Circus in Early Rural Missouri,” 15, and Theatrical Entertainments in Rural Missouri before the Civil War, 34. 9. A reproduction of the advertisement may be seen in Bowen,“The Circus,” 7. 10. Journal, 16 July 1859. 11. Journal, 25 March 1866. 12. Journal, 14 June 1866. 13. Journal, 26 January 1867. 14. Journal, 9 February 1867. 15. For more information on the careers, separate and entwined, of George Chaplin and Mary Gladstane, see John S. Kendall’s Golden Age of the New Orleans Theater. James C. Malin’s close analysis of the records of Chaplin’s seasons in Kansas is invaluable (“Theatre in Kansas, 1858–1869”). 16. Journal, 3 November 1867. 17. Journal, 2 November 1867. 18. Journal, 9 November 1867. 19. Frank H. Brooks,“The Drama before Colonel Coates Built His Opera House.” Chapter 1 Colonel and Mrs. Coates Bring Culture to Cow Town 1. Laura Coates Reed, In Memoriam: Sarah Walter Chandler Coates, 40. 2. Journal, 9 October 1870. 3. Star, 24 July 1885. 4. Times, 30 August 1881. 5. Star, 20 September 1900. Chapter 2 When the Stars Shone on Kansas City 1. Times, 10 May 1887. 2. Anecdotes about Louis James appear also in DeWolf Hopper, with Wesley Winans Stout, Once a Clown, Always a Clown, 131–34; Otis Skinner, Footlights and Spotlights: Recollections of My Life on the Stage, 115–16; and Margaret, Theatrical Sketches: Here and There with Prominent Actors, 48–53.

Notes

303

3. Times, 22 March 1872. 4. Journal, 25 October 1887. Chapter 3 Expositions, Priests of Pallas, Variety Saloons, and Tarnished Legitimacy 1. Times, 15 September 1875. 2. Journal, 1 October 1906. 3. Star, 6 August, 1922. 4. Star, 31 October 1932. 5. Journal, 8 October 1908). 6. Times, 1 November 1872. 7. Journal, 28 September 1877. 8. Star, 2 December 1900. 9. Mail, 14 September 1893. 10. Star, 7 February 1909. 11. Star, 13 March 1896). 12. Journal, 10 August 1902). Chapter 4 The Idealist Who Refought the Civil War and the Stock Company Revival 1. George W.Warder, Poetic Fragments; or, College Poems, 23–24. 2. Star, 7 October 1887. 3. Star, 17 October 1887. 4. Augustus Thomas, The Print of My Remembrance, 231. 5. For the full text of the poem, see Felicia Hardison Londré,“Makers of Kansas City Theatre:Talents on Their Own Turf,” 27–28. 6. Thomas, Print, 232–33. 7. Journal, 8 September 1888. 8. Burris Jenkins, Where My Caravan Has Rested, 47–49. 9. For example, Kansas City Star, 28 October 1890, and Kansas City Journal, 29 October 1890. 10. Journal, 27 October 1901. 11. Times, 25 June 1901. Chapter 5 Our Mr. Judah, Beloved Coast to Coast 1. Robert Grau, The Business Man in the Theatrical World, 155. 2. Post, 27 October 1915. 3. Star, 21 January 1912. 4. Journal, 7 January 1908. 5. Star, 12 January 1912.

304

Notes

6. Grau, Business Man in the Theatrical World, 156. 7. Star, 3 October 1926. 8. Star, 1 September 1926. 9. Star, 3 October 1926. 10. Star, 16 August 2005. 11. Used by permission of the Kansas City Star, owner of E. B. Garnett’s unpublished papers, notebooks, photographs, and programs. Chapter 6 Big-time Vaudeville and Burlesque 1. Journal 10 February 1917. 2. Times, 10 February 1917. 3. The program is in the Union Station/Kansas City Museum archives. 4. Star, 15 October 1922. 5. Armond Fields, Eddie Foy: A Biography of the Early Popular Stage Comedian, 235. 6. Star, 16 February 1928. 7. Star, 10 September 1928. 8. Star, 19 November 1961. See also Star, 4 February 1962. 9. Robert C.Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, 28. 10. Irving Zeidman, The American Burlesque Show, 11. 11. Journal-Post, 7 August 1938. 12. Times, 23 July 1930. 13. Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy:A Memoir, 179. 14. Times, 9 March 1974. Chapter 7 Glamour’s Last Gasp 1. The “Kansas City spirit” was much invoked in the press when the entire city rallied to get Convention Hall rebuilt in ninety days for the Democratic National Convention to begin on 4 July 1900, although outsiders had deemed the task impossible. Thus, when a better, safer Convention Hall opened right on schedule, the notion of anything being “impossible” for Kansas City was beneath consideration. The Kansas City spirit was tested and triumphed again with the floods of 1903 and 1951. It was in response to the latter disaster that Norman Rockwell painted “The Kansas City Spirit,” which shows, in front of the Kansas City skyline, a man resolutely rolling up his sleeve to build anew. 2. Times, 14 May 1901. 3. Star, 23 December 1914. 4. Foster Hirsch, The Boys from Syracuse:The Shuberts’Theatrical Empire, 51. 5. Jerry Stagg, The Brothers Shubert, 75. 6. Star, 15 September 1905. 7. Star, 27 April 1947. 8. Independent, 23 August 1902.

BIBLIoGRAPHY

General Works The American Stage of Today: Biographies and Photographs of One Hundred Leading Actors and Actresses. Introduction by William Winter. New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910. Bernheim, Alfred L. The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932. 1932. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1962. Bordman, Gerald. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Bronner, Edwin J. The Encyclopedia of the American Theatre, 1900–1975. San Diego:A. S. Barnes and Co., 1980. Brown,T.Allston. History of the American Stage, Containing Biographical Sketches of Nearly Every Member of the Profession That Has Appeared on the American Stage, from 1733 to 1870. 1870. Reprint. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969. Burge, James C. Lines of Business: Casting Practice and Policy in the American Theatre, 1752–1899. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Bryan, George B. Stage Deaths:A Biographical Guide to International Theatrical Obituaries, 1850 to 1990, 2 vols.Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Csida, Joseph, and June Bundy Csida. American Entertainment:A Unique History of Popular Show Business. New York:Watson-Guptill, 1978. Ellis,Roy.A Civic History of Kansas City,Missouri. Springfield:Elkins-Swyers Co., 1930. 305

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Garwood, Darrell. Crossroads of America:The Story of Kansas City. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1948. Green, George Fuller. A Condensed History of the Kansas City Area. Kansas City: Lowell Press, 1968. Haskell, Henry C., Jr., and Richard B. Fowler. City of the Future:A Narrative History of Kansas City, 1850–1950. Kansas City: Frank Glenn Publishing Co., 1950. Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hixon, Don L., and Don A. Hennessee. Nineteenth-Century American Drama: A Finding Guide. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. The Illustrated American Stage:A Pictorial Review of the Most Notable Recent Theatrical Successes,Together with Many Drawings and Portraits of Celebrated Players. New York: R. H. Russell, 1901. Latchaw, David A. “The Enchanted Years of the Stage—Recollections of the Stage in Kansas City in Its Early Days and of Its Most Distinctive Actors.” A series of 60 articles. Kansas City Star, 23 March–23 June 1935. Leavitt, M. B. FiftyYears in Theatrical Management. New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1912. Lewis, Robert M. From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Londré, Felicia Hardison.“Makers of Kansas City Theatre:Talents on Their Own Turf.” Kawsmouth: A Journal of Regional History 3:1 (Winter– Spring 2001): 10 – 30 (Special Issue: History of the Arts in Kansas City). Montgomery, Rick, and Shirl Kasper. Kansas City:An American Story. Kansas City: Kansas City Star Books, 1999. Moses, Montrose J. Famous Actor Families in America. New York:Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1906. Paul, Howard, and George Gebbie, eds. The Stage and Its Stars Past and Present. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Gebbie and Co., Publishers, [1898?]. Peck, Phoebe. “The Theater in Kansas City.” M.A. thesis, University of Kansas City, 1940. Rietz, Louise Jean. “History of the Theatre of Kansas City, Missouri, from the Beginnings until 1900.” 3 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1939.

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Sherman, Robert L. Actors and Authors, with Composers and Managers Who Helped Make Them Famous:A Chronological Record and Brief Biography of Theatrical Celebrities from 1750 to 1950. Chicago: Robert L. Sherman, 1951. Slide,Anthony. The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Stars of the American Stage. A bound volume of articles from assorted publications, with handwritten inscription dated 1917. Strang,Lewis C.Famous Actors of the Day in America. Boston:L.C.Page,1900. ———. Famous Actresses of the Day in America. Boston: L. C. Page, 1899. ———. Players and Plays of the Last Quarter Century. 2 vols. Boston: L. C. Page, 1903. Taylor, Ellard W. “A Survey of Selected Professional Theatre Buildings, Kansas City, Missouri. 1870 –1902.” M.A. thesis, Central Missouri State University, 1968. Whitney, Carrie Westlake. Kansas City, Missouri: Its History and Its People, 1808 –1908. 3 vols. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1908. Wilmeth, Don B., with Tice L. Miller. Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Introduction Bloom,Arthur. Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theatre. Savannah: Frederic C. Beil, 2000. Kansas City Star. 1935: 2 April. 1940: 31 December. 1941: 16 November. 1948: 24, 25 January. Prologue: Frontier Town Amusements Bowen, Elbert R. “Amusements and Entertainments in Early Missouri.” Missouri Historical Review 47:4 ( July 1953): 307- 17. ———. “The Circus in Early Rural Missouri.” Missouri Historical Review 47:1 (October 1952): 1–17. ———. “The German Theatre of Early Rural Missouri.” Missouri Historical Review 46:2 ( January 1952): 157– 61. ———.“Negro Minstrels in Early Rural Missouri.” Missouri Historical Review 47:2 ( January 1953): 103 – 9.

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———. Theatrical Entertainments in Rural Missouri before the Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1959. Briggs, Harold E., and Ernestine A. Briggs. “The Theatre in Early Kansas City.” Mid-America 32 (1950): 89 –103. Brooks, Frank H. “The Drama before Colonel Coates Built His Opera House.” Chapter 11 of “The Kansas City I Knew.” Kansas City Star, 15 October 1922, p. 30. Carson, William G. B. The Theatre on the Frontier: The Early Years of the St. Louis Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932. ———. Managers in Distress:The St. Louis Stage, 1840–1844. St. Louis: St. Louis Historical Documents Foundation, 1949. Christian, Shirley. Before Lewis and Clark:The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Hicks, John Edward. “Shakespeare Came West before Kansas City Was.” Kansas City Star, 5 May 1964. Hoffhaus, Charles E. Chez les Canses: Three Centuries at Kawsmouth: The French Foundations of Metropolitan Kansas City. Kansas City: Lowell Press, 1984. Jennings, Harlan. “The Early Days of Grand Opera in Kansas City, 1860– 1879.” Missouri Historical Review 95:4 ( July 2001): 349–71. Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce (including variants Journal of Commerce, Daily Journal of Commerce, etc.). 1858: 19, 24, 31 December. 1859: 12, 23, 28 January; 29 April; 7, 21, 24, 28 May; 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 30, 31 July; 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 August; 4, 24 September; 2 October; 1, 2 November. 1860: 17 June; 4, 6, 18 July; 26, 29 August; 2, 6, 7 September. 1865: 8, 11, 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 29 June; 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 18, 19, 25, 29 July; 3, 20, 22 August; 7, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30 September; 1, 3, 10, 11 October; 29, 31 December. 1866: 3, 7, 9, 10, 14, 19, 20, 21, 23, 31 January; 11, 13, 21, 23, 28 February; 1, 2, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27 March; 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29 April; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 30 May; 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 June; 1, 11, 12 July; 22 December. 1867: 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26 January; 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 17, 19, 20, 21 February; 7, 12 March; 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31 October; 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12 November. Kansas City Enterprise. 1856: 26 April. 1857: 2 May; 3 July. Kansas City Weekly Journal of Commerce. 1868: 18 January; 15, 22 February. Kansas City Star. 1907: 29 December. 1909: 7 February.

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Kansas City Times. 1938: 24 June. 1939: 13 July. Kaslaitis-Townley, Suzanne E. “The Development of Kansas City Theatre from 1856 to 1871.” M.A. thesis,Arizona State University, 1995. Kendall, John S. The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theater. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Malin, James C.“Theatre in Kansas, 1858 –1868.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 23 (Spring 1957): 10 – 53; (Summer 1957): 113–203. Marra, Dorothy Brandt. Cher Oncle, Cher Papa: The Letters of François and Bérénice Chouteau.Trans.Marie-Laure Dionne Pal.Ed.David Boutros. Kansas City:Western Historical Manuscript Collection, 2001. Schoberlin, Melvin. From Candles to Footlights:A Biography of the Pike’s Peak Theatre, 1859–1876. Denver: Old West Publishing Co., 1941.

Chapter 1 Colonel and Mrs. Coates Bring Culture to Cow Town Bloom,Arthur. Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theatre. Savannah: Frederic C. Beil, 2000. Jaswall, Alice Mackey.“Coates House Background.” Jackson County Historical Society 7, no. 19 (Spring 1966): 6 –7, 12–14. Kansas City Bulletin. 1871: 30 December. Kansas City Journal of Commerce. 1870: 11 September; 6, 9 October; 22, 23, 24, 27 November. 1873: 9, 18 February; 22 March; 25 April; 5 June. 1880: 11 November. 1881: 21 January; 28 August. 1888: 12 April; 2 September. 1893: 2 January. Kansas City Mail. 1881: 27, 30 August. Kansas City Evening Star. 1880: 16 October; 9, 12 November; 8 December. 1881:17 January;25 July;14 November.1885:24 July.1888:12 April; 7 September. 1900: 20 September. 1901: 1 February. 1933: 8 January. 1942: 26 August. 1950: 13 January. 1962: 4 September. Kansas City Times. 1871: 24 September. 1872: 3 January. 1881: 28, 30 August. 1888: 7 September. 1901: 1, 5 February. 1941: 6 February. 1950: 21 January. 1966: 15 September. 1970: 7 October. Loring, Janet.“Coates’Tales.”Missouri Historical Review 56,no.4 ( July 1962): 319–27. Mackey,Alice.“A History of the Coates Opera House,Kansas City,Missouri, 1870–1901.” M.A. thesis, Central Missouri State University, 1963.

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May, Leland C. “Opening and Closing Nights for a Grand Hotel.” City 1, no. 12 ( January 1979): 34 – 37. Reed, Laura Coates. In Memoriam: Sarah Walter Chandler Coates. Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly Publishing Co., 1899.

Chapter 2 When the Stars Shone on Kansas City Cagle, Charles Harmon.“Oscar Wilde in Kansas,” Kansas History 4 (Winter 1981): 227– 45. Crane, William H. Footprints and Echoes. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1927. David, John R.“Joseph K. Emmet as Fritz, Our Cousin German: The Stage Immigrant and the American Dream.” Missouri Historical Review 73 (January 1979): 198 –217. Dempsey, David, and Raymond P. Baldwin. The Triumphs and Trials of Lotta Crabtree. New York:William Morrow and Co., 1968. Hart,William S. My Life East and West. 1929. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968. Hill, Errol.“The Hyers Sisters: Pioneers in Black Musical Comedy.” In The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present, 115 – 30. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hill, Errol, and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hopper, DeWolf, with Wesley Winans Stout. Once a Clown,Always a Clown. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1927. Kansas City Daily Mail. 1877: 15, 24 December. 1878: 7 December. Kansas City Journal of Commerce. 1873: 14 June. 1880: 23 October. 1881: 1 March. 1882: 17, 18 April. 1885: 26 October. 1887: 11 May. 1900: 17 April; 25 October. 1901: 1, 5 February. Kansas City Star. 1881: 14 January; 3 February; 3, 5 March. 1882: 17 April. 1883: 12 October. 1887: 10 May. 1900: 17 April. 1901: 30, 31 January; 1, 4 February. Kansas City Times. 1872: 22 March. 1880: 21 September. 1881: 16 January; 19,21,28 February;1,2,5 March.1882:28 February;16,17,18 April. 1887: 10 May. 1889: 24 September. 1901: 27 January; 1, 2, 5 February. 1918: 2 September. Kendall, John S. The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theater. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.

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Margaret. Theatrical Sketches: Here and There with Prominent Actors. New York: Merriam Co., 1894. Robbins, Phyllis. Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956. Skinner, Otis. Footlights and Spotlights: Recollections of My Life on the Stage. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1924. St. Louis Republic. 3 February 1901. Watermeier, Daniel J.“Edwin Booth’s Richelieu.” Theatre History Studies 1 (1981): 1–19.

Chapter 3 Expositions, Priests of Palace,Variety Saloons, and Tarnished Legitimacy Andrews, J. H.“Career of Eddie Foy Prompts Memories of Comique Theater.” Kansas City Post, 16 February 1928. Brady,William A. Showman. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1937. Bredehoft, Michael R.“The Contested Will of William Gillis: Insights into Life in the Early Kansas City Region.” Kawsmouth: A Journal of Regional History 2 (Autumn 1999): 18 – 35. Foy, Eddie, and Alvin F. Harlow. Clowning through Life. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928. Fields, Armond. Eddie Foy:A Biography of the Early Popular Stage Comedian. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999. Kansas City Daily Mail. 1875: 31 March; 29 April. 1877: 1, 3 October. 1878: 23 October. 1893: 14 September. Kansas City Journal. 1877: 2, 6, 11, 12, 16, 27, 28 September. 1878: 22 October. 1883: 9 June; 3 August; 2 September; 11, 27, 28 December. 1884: 16, 17 January. 1891: 25, 29 March. 1893: 3, 4, 5 January; 24, 26 December. 1899: 15 January. 1900: 18 November. 1902: 10 August. 1906: 1 October. 1908: 1 January; 7 September; 8 October. 1926: 26 September. 1927: 8 March. Kansas City Post. 1907: 31 December. 1908: 1 January. 1928: 16 February. Kansas City Rising Son. 1903: 6 February. Kansas City Star. 1881: 14 February; 16 April; 20 August; 3, 20 November. 1882: 21 November. 1883: 9, 11, 14, 15, 19, 23 June; 31 July; 1, 3 August; 8 September; 23 October; 29 November; 24 December. 1887: 5 March. 1889: 18, 20 May. 1891: 4 May; 15 September. 1892: 31 December. 1893: 3 January. 1895: 9 October. 1896: 26 January; 13

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March. 1899: 18 February; 4 March. 1900: 2 December. 1901: 18 February; 5 August. 1908: 18, 29 September; 4, 6, 7, 8 October. 1909: 7 February; 9 October. 1918: 6 June. 1922: 6 August; 8 September. 1925: 6 July. 1926: 7 March. 1932: 31 October. 1961: 6 November. Kansas City Times. 1871: 28 November. 1872: 27, 28 September; 1, 27, 28 November. 1875: 26 January; 15 September. 1877: 2 October. 1878: 26 February; 2, 6, 7, 18 June; 2, 17 July. 1879: 12, 16, 17 August; 2 September; 5 November. 1883: 9 June; 16 September. 1884: 16 August. 1895: 9 October. 1899: 15 January; 4 December. 1901: 6 August. 1905: 12 November. 1906: 16 February. 1907: 10 February. 1909: 7 October. 1925: 27 June. 1926: 7 March. 1938: 34 June. 1940: 22 August. 1965: 26 June. 1970: 29 January. Kansas City World. 1895: 9 October. McCorkle,William L. “Nelson’s Star and Kansas City, 1880 –1898.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1968. McNamara, Brooks. The New York Concert Saloon:The Devil’s Own Nights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. New York Dramatic Mirror. 1895: 10 August. 1898: 9 July. Odell, George C. D. Annals of the NewYork Stage. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1949.Vol. 8 (1865 –1870): 536–37.Vol. 9 (1870– 1875): 227–29.Vol. 10 (1875 –1879): 96.Vol. 11 (1879–1882): 621– 22.Vol. 12 (1882–1885): 109, 114, 315, 517.Vol. 13 (1885–1888): 273. An Old Super. “Stage Super Recalls Players and Incidents of Long Ago.” Kansas City Journal, 8 March 1927. Settle,William A., Jr. Jesse James Was His Name. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966. Spencer,Thomas M.“Priests of Pallas: Kansas City’s Forgotten Fall Festival.” Jackson County Historical Society Journal 44:2 (Autumn 2003): 11–16. Zellers, Parker. Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage. Ypsilanti: Eastern University Press, 1971.

Chapter 4 The Idealist Who Refought the Civil War and the Stock Company Revival Barry, John Daniel. Julia Marlowe. Boston: R. C. Badger, 1899. Hayes, Laurice Messing.“A History of the Auditorium Stock Company at

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the Auditorium Theatre, Kansas City, Missouri.” M.A. thesis, University of Kansas,1961. Jenkins, Burris. Where My Caravan Has Rested. Chicago:Willett, Clark and Co., 1939. Lewis, Philip C. Trouping: How the Show Came to Town. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Kansas City Journal. 1887: 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 October. 1888: 8, 11 September. 1890: 29 October. 1891: 14 March; 27 September. 1897: 21, 22, 26 December. 1899: 15, 22 January; 3 September. 1900: 27 August; 2 September; 20 November. 1901: 3 August; 27 October. 1902: 24 August; 25 September. 1903: 27 March. 1907: 8, 9 February. 1908: 31 May; 23 August. 1909: 15 February; 31 October. Kansas City Journal-Post. 1932: 1 February. Kansas City Mail. 1897: 21 December. Kansas City News. 1887: 24, 25, 26, 28, 29 October. Kansas City Post. 1907: 8 February. 1908: 22, 30 August. Kansas City Star. 1887: 14 March; 10, 28 April; 7, 17, 20; 24, 29 October. 1888: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 September. 1890: 28 October. 1897: 19, 20, 29 December. 1899: 15, 22 January. 1900: 2 September. 1902: 9 November. 1907: 8 February; 1 May. 1916: 10 February. 1930: 13, 14 April. 1933: 6 April. 1935: 19 May. 1942: 22 February. 1945: 15 July. Kansas City Times. 1887: 27, 28, 29, 30 October. 1897: 20, 21 December. 1899: 22 January. 1901: 5 February. 13 August. 1902: 25 September. 1903: 27 March. 1906: 12, 14 April. 1913: 4 October. 1916: 22 January; 23 February. 1927: 22 April. 1930: 3 February. 1960: 4 August. Kansas City World. 1899: 22 January. Russell, Charles Edward. Julia Marlowe: Her Life and Art. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1926. Soliday, John Chase.“The ‘Joint Star’Tours of Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett.” 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1974. Thomas,Augustus. The Print of My Remembrance. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. Warder, George W. After Which All Things; or, Footprints and Shadows. New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1895. ———. The Cities of the Sun. New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1901. ———. Eden Dell, or, Love’s Wanderings, and Other Poems. Kansas City: Press of Ramsey, Millett and Hudson, 1878. ———. The New Cosmogony, or,The Electric Theory of Creation. New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1898.

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———.Poetic Fragments;or,College Poems. St.Louis:Southwestern Book and Publishing Co., 1873. ———. The Stairway to the Stars, or, Enola Reverof: a Novel of Psychic and Electric Study and Biography. New York: [n.p.], 1903. ———. Utopian Dreams and Lotus Leaves. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1885.

Chapter 5 Our Mr. Judah, Beloved Coast to Coast Brandt, Nat. Chicago Death Trap:The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Coiner, Myles W., Jr.“The Grand Opera House and the Golden Age of the Legitimate Theatre in Kansas City.” Missouri Historical Review 67 (April 1973): 407–23. Grau, Robert. The Business Man in the Amusement World. New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1910. Gubar, Susan. Racechanges:White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hopper, DeWolf, with Wesley Winans Stout. Once a Clown,Always a Clown. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1927. Kansas City Journal. 1883: 23 September. 1887: 6, 13, 25 March. 1891: 4 October. 1900: 29 August. 1902: 24, 25 August. 1903: 4 January. 1904: 23 January. 1907: 30 December. 1908: 7 January; 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23 February; 4, 5, 6 March; 4 July; 20, 30 August; 5, 6, September; 11, 12 December. 1913: 2 March. 1915: 27, 28 October. 1921: 27 December. Kansas City Journal-Post. 1926: 26 September. Kansas City Post. 1907: 24, 30 November; 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 16, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29 December. 1908: 1, 3, 4 September. 1915: 9 May; 25, 27 October. Kansas City Star. 1883: 6, 7, 8, 11 September. 1886: 6, 7, 11 September. 1889: 30, 31 August; 2 September. 1891: 3 October. 1893: 18 January. 1902: 23 November. 1904: 23 January. 1907: 13, 29, 30 November; 1, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30 December. 1908: 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 30 January; 30 August; 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 30 September. 1912: 12, 21 January. 1915: 8, 9 May; 27 October. 1920: 4 August. 1926: 1 September; 3 October. 1927: 1 May. 1928:

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14 December. 1928: 14 December. 1937: 15 April. 1962: 30 October. 2005: 16 August. Kansas City Times. 1883: 2, 19 September; 18 November. 1887: 13 March. 1891: 4 October. 1904: 23 January. 1908: 11, 12 September. 1915: 27, 28 October; 1 November. 1933: 15 May. 1981: 20 November. Kansas City World. 1900: 12 September. 1903: 9 October. 1907: 25, 27, 29, 30 November. 1908: 13, 23, 30, 31 January. Leonard,William Torbert. Masquerade in Black. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986. Lhamon, W. T., Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pitts, Leonard, Jr. “Ebony: Magazine Gave a Voice to Black Americans.” Kansas City Star, 16 August 2005, p. B5. Pollock,Channing.Harvest of MyYears. Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill Co.,1943. Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. White, Shane, and Graham White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Chapter 6 Big-time Vaudeville and Burlesque Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Comee, Fred T.“Louis Curtiss of Kansas City.” Progressive Architecture 44, no. 8 (August 1963): 128 – 34. Erdman, Andrew L. Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Folly Theater 100th Anniversary 1900–2000. Kansas City:Supplement to The Independent, 2000. Kansas City Journal. 1887: 6, 13 March. 1893: 24 September. 1898: 17, 23 January. 1900: 21, 24 September. 1901: 21 January; 3, 5 February; 2 June; 27 October. 1903: 29 March. 1908: 6, 9, 19 February. 1912: 25, 27 February. 1913: 30, 31 August. 1914: 27, 28, 29 December. 1917: 10 February.

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Kansas City Journal-Post. 1926: 5 December. 1930: 23 July. 1938: 7 August. Kansas City Post. 1908: 8 March; 20 August. 1913: 30 August. 1914: 26, 27 December. Kansas City Star. 1887: 9, 14, 15 March. 1893: 18 January; 24 September. 1895: 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31 October. 1898: 17 January. 1899: 15 November. 1900: 3, 4, 15, 16, 23, 24 September; 1, 15 October. 1901: 3, 4, 5 February; 25, 26 October. 1906: 6 February. 1908: 19 February. 1914: 27, 28 December. 1922: 15 October. 1923: 22, 23 September. 1927: 26, 30 October; 18 December. 1928: 6 January; 10 September. 1932: 24 April. 1947: 28 December. 1951: 13 April. 1956: 15 January.1961:19 November.1962:4 February.1965:26 December.1969: 28, 29 December. 1981: 18 October. 1990: 11, 16 September. 1999: 23 September. 2000: 4 May. Kansas City Times. 1887: 13, 15 March. 1893: 19 January; 24 September. 1895: 25, 27 October. 1898: 6 February. 1901: 3, 5 February. 1917: 10 February. 1919: 24 October. 1920: 3 May. 1923: 6, 8 June. 1928: 13 January. 1930: 23 July. 1934: 15 October. 1942: 31 January. 1956: 7 August. 1967: 10 August. 1970: 1 January. 1974: 9 March; 13 June; 26 December. Kansas City World. 1895: 24 October. 1900: 6, 11, 20, 24 September. Lee, Gypsy Rose. Gypsy:A Memoir. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957. Luce, Michael G.“A History of the Standard Theater, Kansas City, Missouri, 1900–1929.” M. A. thesis, Central Missouri State University, 1981. McDonnell, Patricia. On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Frederick R.Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 2002. Sandy,Wilda, and Larry K. Hacks. Stalking Louis Curtiss. Kansas City:Ward Parkway Press, 1991. Shteir, Rachel. Striptease:The Untold History of the Girlie Show. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Zeidman,Irving.The American Burlesque Show. NewYork:Hawthorn Books, 1967.

Chapter 7 Glamour’s Last Gasp American Institute of Architects Guide to Kansas City Architecture and Public Art. Kansas City: Highwater Editions, 2000.

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The Call (Kansas City). 1942: 13, 27 February. Fields, Armond. Eddie Foy: A Biography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999. Hirsch, Foster. The Boys from Syracuse:The Shuberts’Theatrical Empire. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. The Independent (Kansas City). 1900: 23 August. 1902: 23 August. Kansas City Journal. 1902: 24, 25 August. 1904: 22 January. 1906: 30 September; 2 October. 1908: 10, 11, 26, 27, 28 March; 21 August; 4, 5 September. 1909: 31 January; 5 February. 1911: 11 June. 1913: 30 August. 1917: 8 January. Kansas City Journal-Post. 1923: 5, 6 November. 1926: 21 November; 12 December. 1929: 29 September. Kansas City Post. 1906: 11, 12, 13, 17 September; 2 October. 1908: 6, 7 March; 11, 21 August; 3, 4, 5 September; 2, 3, 6 October; 5 November. 1909: 4 February. Kansas City Star. 1902: 24, 25, 26 August. 1903: 17 March. 1904: 20 August; 29 November. 1905: 15 September. 1906: 2 March; 30 September. 1907: 18, 28 April; 8, 23 November; 20 December. 1908: 9, 25 January; 3, 4, 10 September; 2 October; 2, 3, 5 November. 1909: 4 February. 1914: 27 August; 23 December. 1917: 8 January. 1923: 5 November. 1935: 30 October. 1946: 9 January. 1989: 19 April. 1990: 16 December. Kansas City Times. 1899: 3 January. 1901: 14 May. 1902: 24, 26 August; 23 September. 1906: 2 October. 1908: 5, 7 September; 2, 3 November. 1909: 5 February. 1917: 8, 9 January. 1923: 5 November. 1942: 25 August. Kansas City World. 1903: 4 October; 6 December. 1906: 29 September; 2 October. Klein, Charles. The Music Master. Novelized from the play as produced by David Belasco. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1909. Stagg, Jerry. The Brothers Shubert. New York: Random House, 1968. Thorne, Kathleen Hegarty. The Story of Starlight Theatre. Eugene, Ore.: Generation Organization, 1993. Truax, Sarah. A Woman of Parts: Memories of a Life on Stage. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949. “Willis Wood Theatre—Louis Curtis,Architect.” Architectural Record 15 ( January–June 1904): 150.

INDEX

Abbey, Henry E., 64 – 66, 69, 70 Abbott, Emma, 51, 100 Actors: life as troupers, 19, 21, 38, 60, 64, 71, 160; characteristics, 19, 64, 73, 76, 85, 87, 88, 91, 169, 171; reviewed, 23, 24, 29, 46, 67, 76, 78, 79, 268; stars, 40, 63, 73, 74, 76, 94– 95, 163, 172, 211, 235– 36, 269 Adams, Maude, 5, 87– 89, 103, 211, 269; portrait, 89 Adelphi company, 124, 125, 126 Advance agents, 65, 94, 169 Adventures of Lady Ursula,The, 90 African Americans, 18, 43, 97–100, 141, 150 –51, 205 –10, 220, 225, 230, 245, 246, 261– 62 Allen,Viola, 103, 169, 269 Amateur drama clubs, 8– 9, 43, 47, 48, 99–100, 103–6, 120 Anderson, Mary, 103 Anglin, Margaret, 5, 89– 90 Animals on stage, 45– 46, 97, 99, 131, 147, 150, 192 Atchison, Kansas, 85, 254 Audiences, 31, 35, 55, 67, 71, 75, 79, 97, 150, 179, 190, 204, 266, 282; ladies, 3, 24, 30, 62, 161, 226, 241, 291–95; gallery, 3, 91, 148, 149, 199; behavior of, 30, 68, 84– 85, 161– 62,

178, 181, 184; elite at Coates, 38, 39, 54– 55; racially segregated seating, 43, 225, 230, 261–62; line parties, 55 Auditorium Theater, 61, 62, 63, 72, 73, 113, 140, 151, 169 –89, 190, 205, 215, 234, 238, 243, 244, 255, 285, 289; photographs, 175, 189; burned, 176–77; rebuilt, 178 –79; gala reopening, 179 –81. See also Warder Grand Opera House Baker, Edythe (Edith), 86, 245 Balls, 16, 21, 33, 113 –18 passim, 120, 255– 56 Bantie, Daniel W., 16; Bantie’s (Banta’s) Band, 17, 21, 33 Barnum, P.T., 30. See also Thumb, “General” Tom Barrett, Lawrence, 40 –41, 48, 63, 76 – 78, 92, 156; portrait, 41 Barrymore, Ethel, 103 Baum, L. Frank, 114 Beck, Martin, 74, 223, 224, 226, 229 Belasco, David, 6, 180, 274, 279, 281, 282, 285 Benefit performances, 25, 47, 127, 132, 133, 199, 214 –15, 258 Beresford, Harry, 180, 188

319

320

Index

Berkeley, Gertrude, 180, 181, 183, 244 Bernhardt, Sarah, 49, 61, 62, 63–76, 109, 144, 146, 147, 198, 233, 235, 243, 257, 258; caricature, 67 Billikens, 114 Bingham,Amelia, 266– 68; portrait, 267 Bishop,Anna, 21 Black Crook,The, 127, 128 Black Patti (Sissieretta Jones) and Troubadours, 150 –51, 183 Booth, Edwin, 6, 47, 55, 63, 65, 92, 103, 109, 156 –64, 198; portrait, 156 Booth, John Wilkes, 38 Booth-Barrett joint-star tours, 156– 66 Bostonians,The, 100, 102 Bowers, Mrs. D. P., 46– 47, 48 Brady,William A., 91 Breese, Edmund, 146 Breslaw, Melissa (Breslaw troupe), 24, 25, 27 Brice, Fanny, 236, 245 Brown, Georgia, 113, 114, 116–18, 184, 186 –88; portrait, 187 Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward. See Lady of Lyons,The; Money; Richelieu Burgess,William J., 56, 61, 62, 72, 174, 177, 178, 268, 280, 287 Burlesque, 120, 125, 129, 152, 240– 42, 244, 250, 251 Busch, Carl, 217, 258 Butler, Edward, 237, 241, 243 Butler, James J., 61– 62, 237, 241– 42, 244 Butler’s Standard Theater. See Standard Theater Camille, 25, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 145, 171, 258 Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 268 Carmen, 171, 172 Carter, Mrs. Leslie, 6, 103, 265, 269 Cawthorne, Joseph, 202 Century Theater, 183, 215, 244, 246, 247. See also Folly Theater; Shubert Missouri Theater; Standard Theater

Chanfrau, Frank, 42, 103 Chaplin, George (troupe), 28 –30 Chase,Arthur B., 157–62 passim Chicago, Illinois, 18, 68, 90, 103, 114, 125, 127, 131, 135, 157, 160, 178, 222, 224, 288 Chillicothe, Missouri, 153 –54 Chouteau family, 14 –15 Circus, 17–18, 82, 110 Civil War, 9, 21–22, 33, 34, 43, 48, 97, 99, 108, 127, 135, 153 –55, 158, 193, 194, 195, 200, 205, 206; Order Number 11, 21–22, 153 –54 Clark, Henry D. (Hank), 133 –36, 140, 152, 193, 199, 200, 223, 294 Claxton, Kate, 103, 170 Cleveland, Grover, President, 82, 109, 110, 157 Clog dancing, 79, 124, 129 –30 Coates, Col. Kersey, 32–34, 38, 42, 49, 51, 54, 62, 65 –66, 107–8, 140; portrait, 39 Coates, Sarah Chandler (wife), 32–33 Coates, Laura (daughter). See Reed, Laura Coates Coates House (hotel), 34, 54, 60, 93, 155, 163 Coates Opera House, xiii, 3, 5, 31, 32– 62, 63 –106 passim, 120, 126, 140 – 48 passim, 155 –58 passim, 165, 167, 172, 173, 186, 187, 190, 194, 198 – 209 passim, 212, 235, 238, 243, 255, 262, 280; architectural features, 35 – 38; photographs, 36, 37, 52, 61; inaugural evening, 38 –39; stock company, 38 –42, 48; remodeling, 50–54; fire, 55 –62, 63, 119 Coghlan, Charles, 93 –94 Cole, Bob: and Billy Johnson, 206 –7 Coliseum Theatre, 133 –36, 194; drawing, 133 Combination (touring company), 2, 80, 85, 172–73, 183, 243 Concert saloons, 119 –40 Connelly, Ed J., 128, 129 Conness, Robert, 186

Index

Convention Hall, 73, 75, 113, 114, 116 –18, 241, 254 – 62; photographs, 75, 256, 257, 259; burned, 255; rebuilt, 255; Century Ball, 255– 56; The Miracle, 260– 61 Cooley, Hollis, 198 Coquelin, Constant, 61, 73 Count of Monte Cristo,The, 85, 87, 146 Crabtree, Lotta, 42, 48, 63, 65, 66, 79– 80, 97, 99, 155, 201; portrait, 80 Craig, Corydon F., 144, 157, 159, 161, 166 Crane,William H., 95, 104, 269; portrait, 96 Crawford, Lester M., 157, 166 Critics: drama, 3, 5–6, 9, 11, 94; backstage, 5, 6; and actors, 6. See also Latchaw, David Austin;Winter, William Crittenden,Thomas, Governor, 66, 68 Crystal Palace, 109 –11, 119, 157; illustration, 109; burned, 110 Curtiss, Louis, 238, 239, 262, 268 Cushman, Charlotte, 63 Cyclorama, 140, 193, 195 Dance, 15, 16, 19, 23, 113–18 passim, 129–31 Daniels, Frank, 53 D’Arville, Camille, 172 Davenport, Fanny, 91, 103, 147, 169 Davy Crockett, 103, 198 Davis, Jefferson, Confederate President, 108 DeBar, Benedict, 31, 38, 39, 48 Denin, Susan, 29 Denver, Colorado, 19, 184, 289 Des Moines, Iowa, 105, 157, 235 Dickinson,Walter S.“Rube,” 230, 232 Dillon, Joan, 238, 251 Dime museums, 140, 192– 93, 200 Dodge City, Kansas, 121, 131 Donegan, Joseph R., 215, 244– 47 Doro, Marie, 85, 186; portrait, 86 Drew, John, 5, 88, 103, 269 Drew, Mrs. John, 5, 170

321

Dubinsky brothers, 220, 253 Dunn, Emma, 180, 181 Eagels, Jeanne, 186 East Lynne, 25, 175, 282 Emmet, Joe ( J. K.), 42, 97, 209 Empire Theater. See Mainstreet Theater Enos,Wilson, 180, 181, 183, 244 Equestrian performance, 45 –46, 127 Excursion trains, 43, 110 Expositions, 17, 107–11, 118 Eyetinge, Rose, 103, 173 Field, Eugene, 8, 54 Field, Roswell M., 8, 54 Fires: danger of, 50 –51, 212–13; theaters burned, 56, 59 –62, 139, 151– 52, 176 –77, 199, 255, 266, 273 Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 5, 9, 23, 146, 163, 166, 277–79, 285; photograph, 278 Florence,William J., 95 Folly Theater, 237–39, 250, 251; photograph, 251. See also Century Theater; Shubert Missouri Theater; Standard Theater Forrest, Edwin, 42–44, 63; portrait, 44 Four Cohans,The (with George M. Cohan), 211, 269 Foy, Eddie, 103, 122, 131, 211, 233, 235, 245, 276 –77 Frank’s Hall, 25, 26, 27–31, 32, 119, 120, 124; photograph, 29 Fredericks, George, 137–38 Free-and-easy. See Concert saloons French influence, 13 –15, 66, 147 Frohman, Charles, 85, 88, 211 Ganelon, 76 Garden Theater, 252–53 Garnett, E. B., 74, 211 German influence, 27–28 Gilbert and Sullivan, 98, 101, 118, 187; H.M.S. Pinafore, 98, 118, 192; The Mikado, 101; Iolanthe, 187

322

Index

Gilded Age,The, 95 Gillette,William, 63, 85 Gilliss Opera House, xv, 3, 54, 70–72, 82, 94, 111, 140– 52, 155, 158, 165, 167, 173, 175 –78, 190, 194, 198, 205, 208, 212, 238; photographs, 141, 143; fire, 151– 52 Gilmore’s Band, 110 Gladstane, Mary, xiii, 29 Goodwin, Nat C., 103 Graff family (troupe), 28 Grand Army Man,A, 279, 282– 84 Grand Opera House, 88, 104, 120, 140, 184, 190, 198, 200–21, 255, 277, 279, 294; construction, 200; architectural features, 200–201; photograph, 202; remodeled, 212 Grant, Ulysses S., President, 47 Grau, Maurice, 64, 70, 258 Gray,Alice, 38, 40 Grover, Leonard, 129 Hagen, Claude, 158, 160 Haines, Robert T., 186 Hale, Billy, 122, 124, 129– 30; drawing, 130 Hall, Mary, 186, 189 Hamilton, Frank C., 157– 62 passim Hanlon Brothers, 97, 103, 122, 211 Harned,Virginia, 90 Hart,William S., 76, 145– 46, 166 Hats worn in theater, 3– 5, 291– 95; illustrations, 4, 292 Hayle, Billy. See Hale, Billy Henderson, David, 103, 173 Hendricks,Alphia. See James,Aphie Henrietta,The, 95 Herbert,Victor, 101, 102 Hite, Mabel, 86, 186, 207, 235 Holland, George, 46, 186 Hopper, DeWolf, 101, 204 Howard, Frank (Howard company), 23, 24 Hudson, Melville (Mel), 3, 48– 50, 55– 56, 64 –65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 96– 97,

100, 101, 146, 148, 155, 156, 169, 181, 191. 194, 198, 203, 280, 291, 293; early experience, 48; portrait, 49; theaterette drawing, 57 Hudson, Miss Leo, 45 –46 Hudson and Judah (Kansas City Amusement Association), 56, 194, 198, 199, 200, 202–3, 223 Hyers Sisters, 97– 99 Independence, Missouri, 56, 57 Ingomar, 25, 198 In Old Kentucky, 205 –7, 219 Irish themes, 95 –97, 127, 131, 198 Irving, Sir Henry, 76, 91–93, 103, 104, 255 Irwin, May, 208, 229 James,Aphie, 77, 78 –79 James, Louis, 76 –79, 173, 209, 266, 269; portrait, 77 James Boys in Missouri,The, 149 James Gang, 21, 108, 129, 149; Bill Ryan, 21; Frank James, 84, 138, 149; Jesse James, 108, 149; Cole Younger, 149 Janauschek, Fanny, 40, 42, 76, 166 Janis, Elsie, 236; portrait, 236 Jefferson, Joseph III, 6, 63, 81–82, 97, 103, 146, 169; portrait, 81 Jenkins, Burris, 164 Johnson, Billy: and Bob Cole, 206 –7 Johnson, Jack, 245 –46 Jolson,Al, 236, 279; portrait, 280 Judah,Abraham, 140, 148, 152, 190 – 95, 200, 203 –5, 211, 213 –19, 273, 277; portrait, 191; philanthropy, 214 –15, 219, 289, 294 Kalich, Bertha, 269 –70; portrait, 272 Kansas City: as a theater town, xvii, 1–2, 103 –4, 248 –49; frontier town conditions and mentality, xvii, 15 – 16, 26, 32–33, 35, 121–23, 134, 138 –39; geographical location, 1,

Index

13; cultural growth, 2, 47, 54, 108, 111, 147–48, 155; arts as stimulus to commerce, 13, 20, 30, 34– 35, 42, 68, 111, 266; chartered, 17; early photographs, 26, 34; civic pride, 29, 30, 64, 65, 66, 68, 106, 168, 212, 254, 259 –60; Southern sympathies, 42, 155; conservative tastes, 100, 121, 171–72, 241– 42, 250 Kansas City Post, 281– 82, 284– 86, 288 Kansas City Star, ix, x, 9, 137– 38, 284, 288–89 Kansas City Times, ix, 8, 64–71 passim Keene,Thomas W., 90– 91, 186 Keiller, David T., 193, 200 Keith (or Keith-Albee) circuit, 224, 240 Kemper, Collin, 78, 173 Kersands, Billy, 98, 99, 151 Kershaw,Willette, 59 – 60 Klaw and Erlanger. See Syndicate Lady of Lyons,The, 19, 24 Lady of the Camelias,The. See Camille Lang, Eva, 184 –86; portrait, 185 Langrishe, Jack S., 19, 20 Langtry, Lillie, 76, 269 Latchaw, David Austin, 11, 63, 77, 85, 87, 90 –97 passim, 119, 147; The Enchanted Years of the Stage, ix, x, 2–3, 8, 63, 87, 88, 97, 167– 68, 282, 296– 99; career, ix, 2, 8; portrait, x; Pennsylvania background, 2, 3, 7– 8; hat removal campaign, 3– 5; as drama critic, 5–6, 9, 10–11, 87, 91, 93, 280, 282, 284; socializing with actors, 5 –6, 170; personality, 6, 10–11, 268; homes, 8, 9, 10; amateur acting, 8–9, 104–5 Latchaw, Hortense, 7, 9–10, 11, 144 Latchaw, Mary Aloise Filler, 9, 11, 278–79 Lawrence, Kansas, 21, 32, 85, 187 Leadville, Colorado, 121, 132, 137, 138

323

Leavenworth, Kansas, 16, 28 –33 passim, 65 –69 passim, 85, 254 Lee, Gypsy Rose, 250 Lehman, Lawrence, 233 Lehman, Martin, 200, 215, 223 –34, 289 Lighting, 20, 36 –38, 53, 54, 93, 111, 113, 142, 144, 165, 201, 240 Lincoln, Nebraska, 105, 157 Locke, Charles, 48 Lockridge Hall, 20 –21, 26, 33 Lonergan, Lester, 181, 183, 188 Long’s Hall, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27; drawing, 22 Los Angeles, California, 223, 224, 233 Lotta. See Crabtree, Lotta Love,Valentine, 122, 125 – 39, 235 Lucas, Sam, 97–99 Lyne, Felice, 86, 101 Maddern, Minnie. See Fiske, Minnie Maddern Mainstreet Theater, 234 –35, 237, 252, 253; photograph, 252 Mansfield, Richard, 5, 63, 170, 173, 192 Mantell, Robert, 5, 91, 269; portrait, 92 Marble Heart,The, 40, 91 Marlowe, Julia, 5, 63, 94 –95, 167–69; portrait, 168 Marx Brothers,The, 249 Maskell, Nellie (Mrs. Valentine Love), 125, 126, 132–33, 134, 136 Mazeppa, 45 – 46 McCaull’s Opera Company, 100 McCullough, John, 63, 103 McGee’s Addition, 17, 20 Melodrama, xvii, 19, 25, 91, 92, 94, 126, 128, 129, 140, 147–51, 175, 176, 244, 269, 270 Menken,Adah Isaacs, 45, 127 Meyer, Marcus, 65, 69 –70 Meyerfeld, Morris, 223, 224 Miller, Meta, 188

324

Index

Miln, George C., 5, 6, 104 Milwaukee,Wisconsin, 159, 160 Minstrels, 18, 20, 25, 42, 129, 139, 279; African American companies, 97, 99–100 Miracle,The, 260– 61 Modjeska, Helena, 76, 163, 166 Money, 39–40 Morris, Clara, 63, 71, 103, 269 Mountain Meadow Massacre, 124, 125– 27, 132, 136 Murdoch, Frank, 38 Murphy, Joe, 42, 48, 96– 97 Music, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 33, 161, 217, 229, 230, 245 Music Hall, 50, 53, 198 Music Master,The, 279, 281, 282, 283 Native Americans, 13–14; in circus, 17, 126, 141 Nazimova,Alla, 186 Nelson,William Rockhill, x, 9, 23, 50, 82, 174, 279, 280, 282, 284– 85. See also Kansas City Star Nethersole, Olga, 171–72; portrait, 171 Nevins, Charles, 104 New Orleans, 31, 38 Newspapers: records, xiv–xv; headlines, 50, 66, 67, 72, 84, 108, 289; slanted or unreliable reporting, 50– 51, 65 –66, 71–72, 78, 82– 85, 93, 94 New York City, 2, 3, 5, 38, 50, 64, 113, 128, 129, 136, 172, 173, 211, 222, 229, 235, 286, 288 Nielsen,Alice, 86, 100–101, 258; portrait, 102 Ninth Street Theater, 55, 110, 120, 135, 140, 152, 193–200, 205, 223, 224, 294; architectural features, 195 –96; photographs, 196, 197; inaugural evening, 196– 97; burned, 199; reopened, 199; renamed Orpheum, 200

Olcott, Chauncey, 97, 209 Olcott, Lillian, 147 Old Homestead,The, 100 Omaha, Nebraska, 72, 174, 176, 178, 184, 268, 280, 287, 289 O’Neill, James, 63, 85 –87, 146, 209, 224, 269 Operetta and light opera, 100 –103, 271 Orpheum circuit, 188, 200, 223, 224, 226, 228, 233, 234, 236 –37, 240, 245, 285 Orpheum Theater (former Ninth Street), 74, 215, 224 –29, 255, 279; photographs, 225, 227 Orpheum Theater (opened 1914 on Baltimore), 74, 184, 186, 229 –37, 249, 251; opening, 229 –32; illustrations, 231, 233 Panorama, 193, 194, 200; as Midland Theatre, 200 Pastor,Tony, 119, 129 –30 Patti,Adelina, 71, 150, 170 Paulding, Frederick, 105, 167 Peter Pan, 88, 211 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2, 3, 8, 10, 32, 38 Pitou,Augustus, 46 Plays: repertory, 19, 21, 24 –25, 39, 40, 43, 46, 73, 74, 78, 79, 91, 128, 129, 132, 136, 145, 147, 148, 171–72, 175, 178, 184, 198, 247, 249, 258, 268, 269, 270, 277; locally written, 20, 28, 101, 104, 120, 127. See also Melodrama; Shakespeare,William Pope, Charles, 38, 39, 40, 158 Pope,William Coleman, 24, 25 Popular entertainments, 3, 17–18, 21, 23, 25, 27, 107–52 passim, 192–93. See also Balls; Burlesque; Dime museum; Expositions; Minstrels; Tightrope walking; Vaudeville Pretz, Florence, 114

Index

Priests of Pallas, 110 –19, 157, 158, 187, 188, 255; illustrations, 112, 115, 117 Queen of the Highway, 150 Queen’s Lace Handkerchief, The, 100 Railroads, 2, 33, 69, 71, 73, 90– 91, 158, 160, 273 –74 Raymond, John T., 95 Reed, James A., Mayor, 245, 266 Reed, Laura Coates, 33, 42 Reinhardt, Max. See Miracle,The Rhéa, Hortense, 103, 144– 46, 163, 186; portrait, 145 Rice, Seymour, 193, 204, 219, 220 Richelieu, 40, 43, 78, 90, 91 Ring, Blanche, 114 Rip Van Winkle, 48, 81– 82 River traffic, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 33, 140 Road, the. See Touring Robeson, Paul, 261– 62 Robson, Stuart, 42, 95, 104; portrait, 96 Rosa, Patti, 200 –201 Russell, Dan, 24, 25, 29 Russell, Lillian, 101 Salsbury, Nate, 53, 101; Troubadours, 53, 101 Salvini,Alexander, 76 Salvini,Tommaso, 47, 76 Sanford,Walter, 220, 268, 274, 277 San Francisco, California, 101, 223, 224 Scheff, Fritzi, 269; portrait, 271 Scheller, Methua, 29, 40 Shakespeare,William, 15, 91, 94– 95, 140, 173, 250; Merchant of Venice, 5, 6, 58, 92, 164, 173; Othello, 19, 23, 24, 28, 40, 43, 47, 58, 91, 160– 62, 164; Macbeth, 25, 46, 160, 163; Romeo and Juliet, 29, 94, 105, 167, 243; Hamlet, 40, 43, 47, 58, 59, 91, 160, 162, 173, 181, 243; Richard III,

325

40, 57, 59, 91, 104, 105, 173; Julius Caesar, 41, 76 –78, 104 –5, 159, 160, 162– 63; King Lear, 43, 58; Henry VIII, 79; Twelfth Night, 94, 269; The Comedy of Errors, 95; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 95, 277; Much Ado About Nothing, 144, 145; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 188; As You Like It, 188 Shouse, Louis (critic), 62, 94 Shouse, Louis W. (Convention Hall manager), 258, 261 Shubert Missouri Theater (Missouri Theater), 238, 246 –50. See also Century Theater; Folly Theater; Standard Theater Shubert Theater (Kansas City), 95, 111, 220, 235, 236, 247, 248, 249, 273– 89; architectural features, 274, 276; photographs, 275, 276, 287; inaugural performance, 276 –77 Shubert theaters (organization), 246, 248, 249, 250, 273; involvement in syndicate wars, 3, 73, 218, 247, 270, 273 Silver King,The, 176, 178 Skinner, Otis, 5, 63, 103, 277 Sothern, E. H., 5, 89, 94 –95, 103, 269 Standard Theatre, 61, 62, 237, 238, 240, 241, 242, 243, 281; architectural features, 238 –40; photograph, 239. See also Century Theater; Folly Theater; Shubert Missouri Theater Stange, Stanislaus, 8, 104, 105 Stein, Orth, 137–38 Stevens, John A., 42–43, 45, 47–48 St. Joseph, Missouri, 15, 19, 30, 47, 65, 66– 69, 98, 124, 137, 144, 157, 254, 262 St. Louis, Missouri, 13, 14, 15, 31, 37, 40, 46–47, 54, 60, 65, 68, 125, 127, 131, 138, 157, 158, 166, 167, 191, 213–14, 237, 244, 253, 285, 286, 288, 289

326

Index

Stock companies, 3, 38– 39, 62, 169– 70, 173, 175, 178, 183, 184, 188– 89, 192, 243, 244, 247, 253. See also Woodward Stock Company Stoker, Bram, 93 Sunday theater closings, 215–17 Syndicate, 3, 73, 174, 217–18, 220, 246 –47, 268 –69, 270, 273, 285, 288–89

Topeka, Kansas, 53, 85 Touring, 1, 2, 18 –20, 21, 22–25, 28 – 30, 56, 60, 64, 69 –71, 73, 74, 80, 160, 172, 191 Two Orphans,The, 132, 175, 193; allstar revival, 269

Tanguay, Eva, 211, 235, 245 Tempest, Marie, 101 Templeton, Fay, 103 Templeton, John, 22 Terry, Ellen, 92 Theater as performance venue: Courthouse, 19; upper-story hall, 19–21, 23, 27, 119, 122; clienteles compared, 140, 147, 190, 203 Theater management, 38, 40– 50 passim, 55, 64 –66, 68, 70, 107, 132, 156, 166, 173, 177–78, 203, 204, 214, 218, 226, 248, 249, 251, 252 Theatre Comique (Kansas City), 121– 34, 136 –38, 235; burned, 138– 39 Theatrical production, 93; machinery and effects, 45, 52, 87, 103, 111, 147, 148, 149, 150,158, 189, 197, 269; wardrobe, 45, 58, 60, 54, 71, 73, 90– 91, 105, 128, 145, 161; scenery, 45– 46, 52, 58, 60, 62, 71, 73, 128, 144, 148, 158, 161, 166, 196, 197, 201, 269 Theatrical Trust. See Syndicate Thomas,Augustus, 158, 160– 61 Thomas, Charles, 72, 146 Thomas,William H., 193, 196, 198 Thumb, “General” Tom, 30– 31 Tickets: prices, 23, 55, 64, 65, 140, 161, 174, 179, 194, 195, 203– 4, 228, 285; speculation, 55, 61, 156; box office demand, 72, 73, 92, 157 Tightrope walking, 25–26, 133, 134, 192 Tootle Opera House (St. Joseph), 47, 65, 66, 144

Vaudeville, 74, 119, 120, 222–37, 240, 241, 242, 251, 252, 253 Vokes, Rosina, 101

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 42, 48, 73, 99, 124, 125, 186, 205

Wagenhals, Lincoln A., 78, 173 Wainwright, Marie, 77–78, 173 Walker,Aida Overton: portrait, 210 Walker, George, 206 –9, 210; portrait, 209 Walnut Street Theatre (Kansas City), 25, 119 –21 Walnut Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 38, 47 Walsh, Blanche, 103, 243, 269 Walter, Gustav, 200, 223, 224 Warde, Frederick, 78, 103, 166, 203 Warder, Col. George W., 84, 153 –62, 166, 169, 170, 180 –81, 189; portrait, 182 Warder Grand Opera House, 54, 76, 95, 113, 146, 155 –69; opening, xiii–xiv, 159, 161–63; construction, 157–59; architectural features, 165 – 66; photograph, 167. See also Auditorium Theater Warfield, David, 279, 281–84, 288 – 89; photographs, 281, 283 Warner, Maj.William, Mayor, 43, 144, 193, 195 Western, Lucille, 40, 42 Westport, Missouri, 13, 15, 16, 17, 56, 108 White, Mrs.William Allen, 9 Whiteside,Walker, 56 –60, 173, 186; portrait, 58 Whittaker, Ray, 247– 49

Index

Wilde, Oscar, 76, 82– 85; caricature, 83 Williams, Bert, 206 – 8; portrait, 208 Willis Wood Theater, xiii, 82, 85, 95, 111, 188, 215 –16, 217, 238, 244, 262–73, 277, 281, 285; architectural features, 262, 264 – 66; photographs, 263, 264; burned, 273 Wills, Nat M., 211, 212–13 Wilson, Francis, 3, 266

327

Winter,William, 6, 11 Woodward, O. D., 56, 61, 72, 174, 177, 181– 84, 188, 243, 267–68, 277, 280– 82, 284 –89; career before Kansas City, 174 Woodward Stock Company, 62, 174 – 78, 180 –86, 235, 243, 244, 280, 284 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 151, 269