High Drama: Colorado's Historic Theatres (review)

\ High Drama: Colorado’s Historic Theatres. By Daniel and Beth R. Barrett. Montrose, Colo.: Western Re®ections Publishing Company, 2005. 208 pp. $19.95 cloth. Ah, the old West. First explorers, then mountain men, miners, ministers, ranchers , and farmers. Soiled doves and schoolmarms. Silver kings and railroad magnates . A place where entertainment consisted of shivarees, sermons, and shootings . Where a man was known by his ability to hunt a grizzly with only a knife and prayer. Where blizzards stopped life in its frozen tracks for weeks. The frontier , where men were tough, women were tougher, and theatre was . . . well, it turns out, pretty darned important. Theatre had reached and breached the great Mississippi and Missouri rivers by the 1820s, when the ¤rst play of the American West, The Pedlar, was performed in a St. Louis log theatre by a troupe of soldiers, businessmen, and professional actresses. Although people went to see a play and to enjoy theatre, the art still had a rather shady reputation given that many theatres were associated with drinking gardens, bars, gambling, and other, less savory entertainments. Therefore, to avoid the taint of “theatre,”thespians sometimes chose to perform in “thespian halls,” where they either offered their own or hired out performances that included song, dance, mind reading, sketching, and lectures. If a town did not cotton to thespians, then it probably had an “opera house” of wood, brick, or stone. Opera houses followed the trails west, and by the 1850s these buildings were established in hundreds of midwestern and western towns of modest size.Like a thespian hall,the opera house was also a community gathering place where lectures, concerts, and theatre might be enjoyed by local audiences both urban and rural.The buildings ranged from simple square structures with a stage and no orchestra pit to elaborate palaces of tiered boxes, crimson velvet, and painted putti. Although many opera houses and thespian halls survive west of the Mississippi River because of determined preservationists and theatre historians, many have been lost to dynamite blasts and strip malls. But thank goodness these grandes dames of popular entertainment cast a spell strong enough to make people trek through desert and mountain to ¤nd and record their histories. Among the smitten were the late Daniel Barrett and his wife, Beth R. Barrett, authors of High Drama: Colorado’s Historic Theatres, who have compiled a charming record of Rocky Mountain theatre spaces. With this book the Barretts have contributed an important, detailed, and loving history of Colorado theatres, from their inception in 1869 with the McClelland Opera House through the heyday of the Tabor Opera House and BOOK REVIEWS { 156 } into the present, when melodramas still attract delighted audiences to restored theatre spaces. Through essays and illustrations the Barretts trace the development of theatre in the silver- and gold-mining towns and the people who made that development possible. Westerners, as the Barretts point out, were often viewed as a loud group of rough-and-ready miners. (When Oscar Wilde was lecturing about Benvenuto Cellini, a miner chided Oscar for not bringing Mr. Cellini along. “He’s dead,” explained Oscar. “Who shot him?” demanded a concerned miner.) But Colorado also attracted astute businessmen who constructed theatres as adjuncts to their hotel and dining facilities; actors like Jack Langrishe, who brought his troupe to Denver in 1860 for a short run and stayed for twenty-¤ve years, earning the appellation “The Father of Colorado Theatre”; and men like “The Silver King,” Horace Tabor, who built opera houses in Leadville and Denver. It was great personal wealth, coupled with the arrival of the railroad and the emergence of stable communities from raucous tent cities, which led to the desire for social improvements in mountain mining towns. Indeed , the “Silver Circuit” of theatres included Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico and attracted Edwin Booth, Wilde, Otis Skinner, Helena Modjeska, and later, Lillian Gish, to its stages. And what stages. The Barretts include rare and wonderful interior photographs and illustrations of Colorado’s more than a dozen theatres, showing the elaborate painted drops and wings, canopy boxes with velvet curtains, and upholstered chairs of the grand houses, as well as the lively advertising drops...