David Belasco was a true man of the theater: producer, writer, and stage designer.
Belasco was the son of Portuguese Jews, the original name perhaps Velasco. The family fled persecution and eventually settled around San Francisco. During the 1860s, the young Belasco was an actor who toured small California and Nevada towns where memories of the gold rush fever were vivid and even mythologized.
After his employment at Gray’s Opera House and Gray’s in SF as an assistant stage manager and script copier, Belasco obtained an engagement with John Piper and joined the theatrical company maintained by that manager at Piper’s Opera House, Virginia City, Nevada, at that time one of the most disorderly, dissolute, and disreputable towns in the United States. This is 1864. This “Opera House” was built by Maguire, in 1863, and did not become known as “Piper’s” till several years later. It was utilized for all kinds of public meetings, social and political, as well as for theatrical performances, and judging from the history of Nevada, was, in early days, most noted as the scene of prize pugilistic combats. Piper was not only a speculative manager, but also a hotel-keeper, and a shrewd human trafficker.
By way of keeping his theatrical company well in hand he permitted its members to run into debt to him, to the amount of $1,500, and then withholding their salaries until they worked off the debt. Charges for everything in a boom-towns like Virginia City were extortionate, Thus they were prisoners. Belasco tried to run away from Piper and his debt but the sheriff in Reno took him and returned him to Piper.
Belasco took characters and incidents he found in Virginia City and combined them with stories his father had told him about the time that the elder Velasco worked in a gold-rush camp in the late 40s. Out of Virginia City, Belasco took notes on dramatic conflicts that would later appear in the Girl of the Golden West: Jake Wallace was a camp minstrel wandering from camp to camp singing songs while accompanying himself on the banjo, slipping into poker halls and putting a hat on the floor before him.
In Virginia City he saw much more of that lawlessness, recklessness, and savagery which had already colored his thoughts and served to direct his mind into the lurid realm of sensation melodrama. There he renewed acquaintance with various actors of prominence whom he had previously met back in San Francisco.
He acted as Buddiscombe, in “Our American Cousin” when Edward A. Sothern, as Lord Dundreary, was the star, and Don Caesar, in John Westland Marston’s “Donna Diana” (published 1863), a drama based on a Spanish original by Augustin Moreto. Belasco acted with Mrs. Davis P—— Bowers (1830-1895), an actress of great ability and charm, as Maffeo Orsini in “Lucretia Borgia”; Charles Oakley, in “The Jealous Wife”; Richard Hare, in “East Lynne” and a Page in “Mary Stuart,” she liked to have the young buck in her shows.
Another eminent actor whom Belasco met for the first time at Piper’s Opera House in the Winter of 1873 was Dion Boucicault who appears to have noticed him as a youth of talent and promise.
Belasco was assistant stage manager on a horrible perversion of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Richard III – Cibber’s version – with the Irish tragedian Barry Sullivan in the central character, supported by the stock company of Maguire’s. That company included, James A. Herne, Arthur D Billings, Louis James, Edward J Buckley, William Henry Crane, Michael A. Kennedy, Katie Mayhew, Emily Baker, Louise Hawthorne, Mrs. Belle Douglass. James F. Cathcart was specially engaged to play Richmond. Belasco played Sir Richard Ratcliff. After Richard III the company performed The Wonder, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Gamster, King Lear, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, A Match for a King, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and The Wife.