Review by Ed Quillen
Dramatic History – December 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
High Drama: Colorado’s Historic Theaters
by Daniel and Beth R. Barrett
Published in 2005 by Western Reflections
ISBN 1932738185
WHEN IT COMES to entertainment, our forebears can seem much more cultured than we are. Coloradans a century ago did not have radio or television, and they did not indulge themselves with Jerry Springer and NFL games. They had opera houses, and stepped out on Saturday night to catch a Shakespeare play.
But as this readable and well-researched book explains, the idea of a higher culture then is pretty much a myth. Shakespeare, after all, wrote for a popular audience, and his plays are full of raunchy puns and innuendos. And the local opera house seldom hosted a real opera. In fact, according to High Drama:
“The word ‘theatre’ often had an unwholesome ring to the ears of our pioneer ancestors…. Their circumspection is hardly surprising, considering that everything from a dance hall to a saloon was referred to as a theatre. Commonly found on the upper floors of drinking and gambling halls, theatres were routinely inveighed against by religious leaders as havens of vice. Few women who valued their reputations attended them. A question of semantics arose: how to distinguish between bawdy, low-class entertainment houses and the socially acceptable, legitimate theatre? Many towns settled the issue by designating their foremost playhouse as the ‘opera house,’ fully realizing that opera might be an infrequent visitor.”
This book is partly a history of structures, ranging from survivors like the Central City Opera House and the Tabor Opera House in Leadville to long-gone halls in Colorado Springs and Pueblo. But it is also much more. It’s a history of the buildings — and of changing times.
Since these facilities generally hosted traveling troupes, transportation is a big part of the story. Before the railroads arrived in the mining towns, a troupe might stay a week. Once it was easier to get around, entertainers generally performed for a couple of nights before moving on. There was a “Gold Circuit” which involved Denver and Central City, and a longer “Silver Circuit” through Pueblo, Salida, and Leadville.
National and international stars like Sarah Bernhardt often performed in Colorado because their companies could pick up bookings here while traveling from Chicago to the West Coast.
So there were big-name stars and high-class productions. But the same hall would also host vaudeville and burlesque, and as the 20th century progressed, the opera house became a movie house, with live productions growing rarer by the year until they vanished in most towns.
THE CENTRAL CITY AND Wheeler (Aspen) opera houses were resurrected for live performance, the Tabor in Leadville (featured in the August edition of this magazine) is being restored, and most others, from Pueblo to Grand Junction, have been demolished.
This book features the bigger opera houses, as well as the summer stock theatre at Elitch Gardens in Denver and the melodramas that have anchored Cripple Creek summers since 1947.
It also recounts several other opera houses in a catch-all chapter of “Representative Theaters of Colorado” — a few pages apiece for the McClellan Opera House in Georgetown, the Jaffa in Trinidad, the Wright in Ouray, the Park in Grand Junction. The authors note that in the big cities like Denver and Colorado Springs, the opera houses were razed as progress meant more profitable uses for the building sites. The survivors were in mountain towns where fading economies from the 1930s onward meant there was no investment capital to erect a new building after tearing down an old one.
In this chapter is the best account I’ve ever read of Salida’s Unique Theater, which began life as the Salida Opera House, opening on Jan. 16, 1889 with the Park Dramatic Company performing the drama Alone in London.
It was a handsome brick building before the stucco was applied (one reason Salida has so many stucco exteriors is that the local brick was of poor quality), and its history was representative of many other small- town opera houses.
It didn’t host many operas, but it did offer “musical comedies, spectacles, and minstrel shows,” along with attractions on their way from Denver to the Tabor Grand in Leadville and then Salt Lake City and the West Coast. In 1909 it was remodeled to accommodate motion pictures and became the Osos Grand Theater. There were a few live productions before 1936, when it was fully converted to a movie house, which it remains today.
This is a fine specialized history book, focused on theater but providing ample context so that we can see how it fit into the lives of people a century ago. It covers not just the buildings, but the impresarios like Jack Langrishe and Peter McCourt (Baby Doe Tabor’s brother) who arranged the productions and scheduled the troupes. It adds a cultural dimension to our history, and it made me feel better about us moderns — since our great-grandparents often enjoyed tasteless and mindless entertainment, too.
