With the growth in population of Virginia City, Nevada came a thirst for musical and theatrical entertainment, and variety theatres featuring minstrelsy, burlesque, and vaudeville, appealing to both more genteel audiences as well as to rough miners, proliferated. When Virginia City sprang up, Thomas Maguire recognized the opportunity resulting from the new found wealth created by the silver rush and the city’s position as a stopover between Salt Lake City and San Francisco. Enticed by the large number of successful theatres already operating in Virginia City, he opened his first opera house on July 3, 1863 with John Burns as the local manager and part owner. Although Maguire began with popular entertainment such as minstrelsy, his vision was to offer a higher class of entertainment, including fully staged opera and operetta. To serve this eventual goal, his opera house was much more elegant than previous theatres built in the city, boasting carpeted aisles, crystal chandeliers, velvet railings, and gas lighting. Off the foyer stood a billiard parlor, cigar stand, smoking rooms, and a mahogany bar inlaid with ivory. Let us look first at the more common types of entertainment in this opera house.
Minstrel shows and burlesques were extremely popular in Virginia City. Maguire’s own minstrel troupe from San Francisco often performed there, and George Christy’s Minstrels and the San Francisco Minstrels were featured at both Maguire’s and Virginia Melodeon. Walter Bray, a Virginia City minstrel performer, and Charley Rhodes, a banjoist, also performed regularly at Maguire’s, receiving favorable reviews from a number of newspapers. Rhodes had originally performed regularly one of Maguire’s competitors in Virginia City, the Niagara concert Hall, and many of the songs he composed and performed at Maguire’s were printed in local newspapers. “Sheridan’s [sic] Cleaned Out of the Valley” was typical of his songs and contained lyrics dealing with a battle of the Civil War. Other minstrel shows performed in the other venues in the city; the Champion Minstrels and Dramatic Troupe performed a “grand matinee” at Sutliffe’s complete with a performance of John Brougham’s Prize Burlesque, “Pocahontas, or, the Gentlc Savage, with music arranged by the Musical Director, a Mr. Oldfield. The Emerson Minstrels, who travelled throughout the west under the leadership of Billy Emerson, made many appearances in and around Virginia City, including several at Maguire’s house. Despite frequent changes in personnel and programming, the Emerson Minstrels remained extremely popular in the western touring circuit due, at least in part, to Billy Emerson’s regular trips to New York to recruit new members and purchase copies of newly published music.
Opening night at Maguire’s Virginia City theatre was described in detail by the Virginia City newspaper, the Daily Territorial Enterprise, including an account of the weather and the standing-room-only crowd. Julia Dean was the star of the evening, playing the lead role in the opening piece, “Money.” Mutual respect existed between Maguire and editors and critics of the Enterprise, among whom was Mark Twain, and an entire row of the best seats in the house were reserved for Enterprise representatives. In addition, the Enterprise held much of the advertising and publicity rights for the theater. The good relationship between the newspaper and the theater turned sour for a short while in 1864 after Adah Isaacs Menken performed her leading role in “Mazeppa.” Before performing in Virginia City, Menken had already become infamous for her semi-nude appearance in the drama as staged in San Francisco. Apparently what Menken lacked in talent, she made up in her charm and well built physique. To the Enterprise critics she became synonymous with her role in “Mazeppa” and was referred to as simply “The Menken.” The writers were so enchanted with her that they held contests to produce lyrical prose praising her attributes and printed the results in the newspaper. Other cast members, ignored in the reviews, countered by questioning the abilities of the reporters. The controversy created by the newspaper’s infatuation with Menken forced Maguire to close the opera house for several weeks and give a public apology to the newspaper’s reporters for remarks made by the cast of “Mazeppa.”
Despite the Menken controversy and the resulting bitter feelings between the newspaper and Maguire, the opera house soon reopened. The frequency of reopenings of Virginia City opera houses, as evidenced by the regularity of newspaper advertisements, suggests that it sometimes was a publicity ploy. The Daily Union described one of many reopenings of Maguire’s opera house on March 28, 1865:
A report in the same newspaper talks of the great success of a benefit at the Music Hall, despite the attractions at Maguire’s opera house of the “Invisible Prince,” and a grand “pas de deux.” Although much of the entertainment was light in nature, Maguire succeeded in successfully promoting touring virtuosi from the realm of high culture. Among these travelling artists who Maguire brought to Virginia City engagement were the violinist Camillia Urso, English soprano Anna Bishop, and Anna Hunt, a soprano known for her interpretation of Auber opera. A high point in the history of Maguire’s Opera House was when Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed in Virginia City in June 5-7, 1865. The pianist appeared as part of this ill-fated California tour arranged by Emanuele Muzio, a composer, pianist, and, for a short time husband of the soprano, Lucy Simons, who also performed with Gottschalk. The Daily Union and other local Virginia City newspapers lauded Gottschalk’s performances, and the June 6 account states that,
Maguire suffered tremendous financial problems with his opera house during 1866 and 1867. John Piper, who operated a western saloon next to Maguire’s theatre, began incrementally purchasing interests in the opera house in 1867, and in March Maguire yielded complete control and ownership to him for the sum of $2,500, which according to the newspaper report satisfied “attachments and mortgages for that amount.” The name was changed to Piper’s Opera House, as it is still known today. Although Maguire remained a heavy investor in other Virginia City theaters, Piper eventually took the place of Maguire in the domination of theatrical activities in western Nevada.
In conclusion, the musical life of Virginia City during the 1860s was diverse, and the thirst for a variety of musical entertainment grew as quickly as the population. While Thomas Maguire’s venture in Virginia City lasted only a brief four years, he established an opera house that staged performances ranging from the more typical minstrelsy and light popular music to art song, Opera, and the most highly renowned of the day’s traveling virtuosi. Even though Maguire does not appear to have been financially successful in Virginia City, his vision of presenting a mix of high and popular culture enriched its early cultural life.
Piper’s Opera House once boasted of the stars who played there. Lillie Langtry, Maude Adams, Buffalo Bill Cody and Edwin Booth all gave performances at Piper’s during the great days of Virginia City.
II
Portend of Change: Tom Maguire and Regional Monopoly
Apart from New York and New Orleans. San Francisco was not only the most complex, dynamic city In the country. It was aIso the center of the nation’s fastest growing region. Its population of about thirty thousand In 1851 quintupled by 18m, and the state’s population (almost all of it in northern part and comprised largely of single males under the age of forty) multiplied by seven to over half a million. The emperor of its theatre (and that of most of the state) was a nearly illiterate New York City cab driver, saloon keeper, and initiate of Tammany Hall politics, Thomas Maguire. Like Stephen Price, he was not from the theatre, He had no experience of or interest in the art; he was devoted to the profitibility of the business. His management was premised on the principle of monopoly. He attempted to exclude competition by filling as many theatres as possible with his attractions. Consequently, he operated on a larger scale, both in terms of geography and genre, than any other manager in the period. In this way he was an indicator of the future of theatrical management.
He became proprietor of San francisco’s Parker House Hotel In 1849. When he rebuilt it after the fire of May 1850, he devoted its second floor to the Jenny Lind theatre, which was consumed by fire, rebuilt, and eventually sold as a city hall. He plunged his profits into San Francisco Hall, where Junius Brutus Booth, the younger, was his stage manager, and which he rebuilt and renamed Maguire’s Opera House In 1856.
During the same period a major new theatre, the Metropolitan, had been built, and in March 1862 Maguire leased it and turned it over to Booth. A year later he purchased a minor theatre, the Eureka, for his San Francisco Minstrels, and in May 1864 opened his Academy of Music as a home for grand opera. His ambitions were not confined to San Francisco. Though the extent of his theatrical enterprise will never be fully known, he built and managed an opera house in Virginia City, Nevada, from 1863 to 1867, and at different times either owned or leased theatres in Marysville, Sacramento, Stockton, Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Los Angeles. Nor were his activities solely theatrical. He seems always to have had interests in various San Francisco saloons and gambling halls.
His prosperity declined by 1870. He had lost as much as $120,000 on ten years of grand opera, he was being sued for both contract and copyright Violation, the California Theatre managed by Barrett and John McCullough was about to open, and Maguire’s properties were being sold or auctioned to satisfy his creditors. When his wife died in 1810, it was widely thought that his career was finished. Consequently, his renaissance at the Baldwin Theatre in the 1880s was unexpected.
Maguire relied on others (Charles Tibbetts, Sheridan Corbyn) to run his theaters, he concentrated on bringing attractions for them to California. Because of his extensive control of theatres, he could offer performers 150 nights of performances. Each of the nearly one hundred stars he engaged played an initial engagement of four to six weeks in San Francisco, made an interior tour of one to three months, and then played a two-to-three week farewell engagement in the city. He was not above elevating minor talents such as Avonia Jones and Annette Ince to star status, nor was he adverse to exploiting the local appeal of Lotta Crabtree (1862) or Adah Isaacs Menken (1863), but he also engaged Mr. and Mrs. Wallack (1858-59), Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean (1864-65), Edwin Forrest (1866), Helen Western (1867), her sister, Lucille (1868), Lawrence Barrett (1868), and Mr, and Mrs. W. J. Florence (1869). To support the stars he maintained stock company of about two dozen, dividing it, augmenting it, shifting it from place to place as necessary. He also organized and promoted minstrel and opera companies, and In 1867 he went to the Eastern states and Europe with a troupe of Japanese acrobats and tumblers he had imported.
Laura Keene and the Rise of the Combination Company
By 1870 access to America’s continually increasing audience was facilitated by the rapid expansion of the railroads. The primary cause of the increase in railroad track mileage of a standard gauge was the Civil War, The Union had the industrial ability to execute the army’s demand for more efficient rail transportation. In order to supply its troops. Thus, while there had been less than ten thousand miles of track In 1850, there was over fifty thousand in 1870.
Not only did trains enable actors to move more quickly and less expensively, it enabled them to do so in a new way. They were able to return to something like the traveling company, complete with costumes and scenery that had been the norm when David Douglass had managed and that John Potter and others sustained on the frontier. Because they could move father faster, these new companies needed only a small repertory at most, and some managers found that a single play of sufficient popularity was adequate to sustain an entire season. These new companies were called combinations or single play combinations and were the basis for national theatrical monopolies that emerged in the last quarter of the century.
Laura Keene was one of the managers who pioneered the new mode of organization. Her career has been presented both as the result of an impetuous …
1863 Piper’s Opera House built in Virginia City; by 1865 there are five light-opera theaters, six variety houses there.
1865 Nov 30 Dec 20 Tom Maguire became the story in San Francisco with two very public disagreements. One with the Polish actress and opera singer Felicita Vestvali; the other with composer and pianist W.J. Macdougall, Macquire attacked Macdougall, strangling and pummeling him from behind. The day before, Macdougall had scheduled Miss emily Thorne, a popular English comedienne and vocalist, to appear with him in a benefit concert.
III
Mark Twain called his novel about America after the Civil War The Guilded Age, but the entire first half of the century had been infected with “the migratory and speculative instinct of our age” because, “To the…American… the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon”. The size and richness of the landscape was the foundation of the attitude. For those who made their living from playing, the essential condition was that the audience was increasing in number and expanding in new settlements faster than at any other time.
Cultural homogeneity was one of the casualties of the Revolutionary War. It could not survive the combination of institutional change and unprecedented demographic shifts. Thus, the second experiment that worked, the star system, succeeded in adapting theatre as a social institution to both the cultural and the geographic map of the nation. At a practical level traveling stars were an economically more efficient way to supply constant variety to new audiences spread across a vast territory. At a mythic level they also supplied the new nation with popular heroes – figures who conquered insurmountable physical and emotional obstacles to establish or sustain a cultural identity. These gains, however, were not made without cost. To the extent the star became the reason the audience attended the theatre, the star legitimately took a greater share of the revenue. On the whole, this forced managers to pay supporting players no more and sometimes less than before, so their real income stagnated or declined. The consequence was that any actor who could went on the road as a star. Not only did this dilute the quality of starring actors, it watered down their support.
The third change, the long run in urban theaters, functioned in a similar way. Practically, it took advantage of increasing population to reduce the unit cost of the performance, thus increasing profit, while mythically each long-running play provided a narrative that supplied acceptable symbolic coherence for otherwise intractable social situations. As in all things, there was a price for the long run. The traditional repertory grounded in the plays of Shakespeare gradually gave way to sensation melodrama and extravaganza because each had greater audience appeal. There came a time when not enough people shared cultural assumptions to which Shakespeare’s plays or those that imitated them were relevant. The economic efficiency of the long run made it imperative to focus the repertory on those types of scripts that did articulate cultural assumptions that were more widely shared.
Two other changes, regional monopoly and the combination company, were introduced but were not widely adapted before 1870. Subsequently, each was to provide an effective new means of managing a profitable relationship between theaters and audiences. The aim of monopoly is to eliminate competition. Once that is accomplished, the monopoly can then do one or both of two things: it can lower cost by lowering quality and it can raise prices. Tom Maguire’s monopoly was fragile and brief, but he experimented successfully with both strategies in a manner that anticipated later managerial practice. In the same way, Laura Keene’s experiment with the combination company came at the end of her career, when her resources were diminished, but she demonstrated that a combination company without a star of the first magnitude could profit in both cities and small town in different regions.
Perhaps the greatest change in structure and and management during the entire period, however, is one that was almost unnoticed: the gradual shift in control of the theatre from those who ere artists or who were motivated by a love of the art, to those who were not artists and who were motivated solely by profit. Any type of expansion requires capital. With only rare exceptions, David Douglass managed to find capital without surrendering control. So did the Wallacks. However, neither William Dunlap nor John Potter could; consequently, each lost control of his theatre. A similar fate befell John Ellsler and Laura Keene. So long as they managed within a capital structure they could pay for, they retained control of their theaters, but every time they couldn’t pay for their own operations, every time they had to turn to commercial capital, they lost control, ceased to manage, and became salaried employees. Thus, the final irony was that Maguire’s and Keene’s management experiments, which in both cases were intended to allow them to retain control, later resulted in control of the theatre being concentrated in a small number of persons whose primary concern with theatre was to profit to the greatest degree possible from it.
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In Nevada’s nineteenth-century towns and mining camps, the demand for entertainment was almost entirely filled by traveling theatrical troupes. Thinly settled and distant from major population centers, the state took well over a century to develop the sort of sophisticated stage culture necessary to incubate its own professional playwrights and theater companies. During this period, few theatrical backers would risk a production by any American playwright, let alone an unknown local one, when audiences were likely to prefer a more fashionable foreign play. Furthermore, until Congress passed the 1891 Chace Act to enforce international copyright law, plays by non-American authors could be performed free of royalty charges.
Most early Nevada towns of any size had theaters, music halls, and “opera houses” to accommodate visiting acting companies from the East Coast, Europe, and occasionally San Francisco, offering matinees and evening performances as often as seven days a week. The mining camp circuit was extremely lucrative, the miners’ thirst for theater was strong, and they were willing to pay well to have it satisfied.
By 1861, Nevada Territory boasted seven theaters seating between 200 and 1000 customers each. The earliest known Nevada imprint (1862) is a pink silk poster for Topliffe’s Theatre in Virginia City. In 1863, San Francisco theater impresario Thomas Maguire opened a grand opera house in Virginia City, operating it for four years. In 1867, John Piper, a local merchant, purchased it and operated the institution for three decades, rebuilding his opera house twice and elevating it into the largest legitimate theater east of San Francisco and west of Chicago. Destroyed by fires in 1875 and 1883, the surviving Piper’s Opera House dates to 1885 and is now a museum hosting performances.
The plays that were shown in Virginia City and on other Nevada stages at the time tended to be either classics by Shakespeare and other European dramatists, or popular farces and social comedies fresh from the New York or London stages such as Timothy Toodles, The Swiss Swain, and the dramatization of Ellen Wood’s 1858 novel East Lynne, a performance of which Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) reviewed in 1863 as “that sickest of all sentimental dramas.” Traveling blackface minstrel shows also drew enthusiastic crowds and often took up residence in Virginia City for extended periods.
Nineteenth-century directors freely adapted texts, including Shakespeare’s, to match the tastes of their audiences, and contemporary accounts remark on the rowdiness and frequent inebriation of actors and spectators alike. This was the market for the sort of theatrical humbug that Twain mocked with the performances of the Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn (1884), as testified by Virginia City Territorial Enterprise editor Joseph Thompson Goodman’s satirical play, Hamlet’s Brother (1883).
Almost no serious American plays were to be seen, in part because few were being written. Insecure in their national culture and eager to follow European literary fashions, American theatergoers tended to prefer the latest hits from London, and Nevadans were no different. They might pay to see “period pieces,” undistinguished works of melodrama with sensational special effects and a heavy dependence on coincidence. Plays of American origin were often dramatizations of popular novels, such as Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819), James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In 1875, Mark Twain sued to stop the staging of an unauthorized adaptation of The Gilded Age (1873), while the authorized version—based on the novel he co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner—was his first great financial success and made his name known in New York City.
Many of the luminaries of the American and British stages had substantial connections to the then-thriving and prosperous Comstock. The Irish actor and playwright Dion Boucicault (1820-1890) practiced his stage Irish shaughraun character there, and the San Francisco-born director David Belasco (1853-1931) worked at Piper’s Opera House on his way to Broadway. The town was repeatedly visited for extended periods by such other eminent actors as Edwin Booth, Frank Mayo, Ada Cavendish, Madame Modjeska, Lawrence Barrett, Willie Gill, and John McCullough.
More popular in nineteenth-century Nevada than the legitimate playhouses were so-called “bawdy theaters,” featuring sexually charged musical productions such as The Last Chance in Virginia City (1861), with risque lyrics, skimpy costumes, and skimpier plots. The offstage lives of actresses such as Adah Isaacs Mencken, Sue Robinson Getzler, and the occasional out-of-town celebrity such as Lola Montez, were at least as notorious as the ones they portrayed onstage in these establishments. In the 1870s, the largest and most ornate of the bawdy theaters was the Alhambra Melodeon on C Street in Virginia City. The Alhambra was known to function as a way station where visiting actresses, if they lived up to their Victorian-era reputation, could be enticed into the more lucrative trade of prostitution.
While most locally-written plays pandered to such popular tastes, there were some exceptions, especially from Virginia City’s “Sagebrush School.” The Psychoscope: A Sensational Drama (1871), by Joe Goodman and his fellow Territorial Enterprise editor, Rollin Mallory Daggett, was set in New York City, not Nevada, and contained elements of melodrama typical to period pieces. On the other hand, it also utilized innovative detective and science-fiction motifs, and several scenes were daringly set in a brothel. This level of realism was far ahead of its time.
When The Psychoscope ran for five performances in four days at the end of the theatrical season in 1872, it stirred up a spirited controversy among Virginia City’s newspapers, some of whom considered it indecent. Even the actors sabotaged their performances lest they be tagged as disreputable. Daggett and Goodman, however, turned the full force of the Enterprise on the company, which belatedly improved its performances. The play was never seen again on the commercial stage, though in 1949 it was put on by the Department of Theatre at the University of Nevada, Reno.
If The Psychoscope bookmarks the beginning of Sagebrush School drama, Sam Davis’s The Prince of Timbuctoo (1905) does the same for the end of the era. This play, with similarities to both John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, survives only in several manuscripts and it is not clear that it was ever performed. A musical satire on Rooseveltian imperialism, it is set in Africa during the Boer War and depicts several Americans descending on the native king of Timbuctoo with different agendas: steel company representatives who want to build bridges for the British army; an adventuress from San Francisco; and a group of hypocritical “Puritan maidens” from Boston. Editions of both this play and The Psychoscope were published in 2006.
Suggested Reading:
David Belasco. Gala Days of Piper’s Opera House and the California Theater. Sparks, NV: Falcon Hill Press, 1991.
Rollin M. Daggett and Joseph T. Goodman; Lawrence I. Berkove, ed.. The Psychoscope: A Sensational Drama in Five Acts. Charleston, SC: Mark Twain Journal Press, 2006.
Sam Davis; Lawrence I. Berkove and Gary Scharnhorst, eds.. The Prince of Timbuctoo. In The Old West in the New Work: Lost Plays by Bret Harte and Sam Davis. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt, eds.. When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Margaret G. Watson. Silver Theatre: Amusements of the Mining Frontier in Early Nevada, 1850-1864. Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1964.
