Local Glories: Opera Houses on Main Streets, where Art and Community Meet by Ann Satterthwaite (review)

In 1891, Kearney, Nebraska, a town of a little under 10,000 people, celebrated the opening of its brand new opera house. Seating 1,200 people—over 10 per cent of the local population—the opera house was hailed by the local newspaper as 'Kearney's wealth and Kearney's work; Kearney's beauty and Kearney's manhood' (p. 13): the ultimate testament to the town's modernity and prosperity. As Ann Satterthwaite's book reveals, Kearney, Nebraska was just one of thousands of American towns that built and sustained an opera house in the late nineteenth century. It joined the ranks of other such unlikely locations as Red Cloud, Nebraska (population in 1888: 796) and Vergennes, Vermont (1890 population: 1,773), not to mention the aspirationally named Paris, Kentucky (population: 4,218 in 1890). Satterthwaite's book therefore serves as a fascinating survey of the hitherto underexplored history of these small-town theatrical institutions and their relationship to wider developments in America—social, cultural, and economic—in the final years of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth.

The first of the book's four interlocking sections, 'A Heady Time: Thousands of Opera Houses', sets up the context for this proliferation of opera houses in the decades after the Civil War. Satterthwaite outlines early American theatrical history in terms of the division between the Puritan north and the less theatrically resistant south, and also draws vital connections between the growth of rail networks and the building of new opera houses, revealing the role that technological and infrastructural developments played in the cultural growth of small-town America. Established rail connections would draw performers and patrons, but equally she suggests that businessmen and civicminded individuals would fund an opera house with the specific aim of attracting the railway companies to build a branch line to their town. In addition, these new houses became the focus for multifarious civic functions, providing a key location for municipal meetings and positioning them at the centre of social life.

'On Stage: Performances, Performers, and Patrons', the next section, then offers a miscellany of material relating to the historical struggles of opera houses, their repertories, and the people who performed in and frequented them. Satterthwaite outlines some of the challenges that were posed to opera houses even in their heyday, by such rival institutions as the Chautauqua movement (which was originally set up to train Sunday school teachers, but grew to provide educational lectures and musical performances in rural communities), and the popular showboats that visited river towns. Thus she contextualizes the opera house's glory days within a developing industry of entertainment and education in small-town America. The response to such challenges, which in part involved diversifying the opera houses' repertory and further adapting their flexibility as public spaces, is particularly striking: these were multi-purpose buildings, playing host to theatre of all sorts, as well as public lectures, dances, wrestling matches, and roller-skating, among other activities. Opera houses, in other words, were never just opera houses, nor even simply places to watch entertainments, but instead places of active participation.

This subject is developed in Satterthwaite's next section, 'In Town: Public Halls and Public Roles'. Here we are introduced to everything from the intricate links between the opera house and local business to the relationship between opera-house architecture and town planning around the turn of the twentieth century. Satterthwaite also teases out the roles immigrant groups large and small—from the Czechs to the Welsh and the Cornish—played in the cultural life of the towns in which they settled. She explores the ways in which opera houses physically became part of the fabric of a town, showing that they often included the town's government offices and could even on occasion be located within the commercial hub of a company store. Their placement...