E-Mail This Article to a Friend Back in business The past — and future — of the Opera House BY IRIS FANGER
	Did you know? Some statistics about the restoration of the Opera House provided by Suffolk Construction company, project architect Gary Martinez, and Broadway in Boston/Clear Channel Entertainment: • Number of man hours for the plaster work: 30,000. • Amount of gold leaf added to the existing gold leaf (which was cleaned): four pounds. • Amount of structural steel used for the stage house addition: 720 tons. • Number of sprinkler heads added to the theater (they’re hidden under various rosettes and decorations): 900. • Amount of new electric wiring running through 13 miles of conduit within the completed project: 79 miles. • Height of the two domes that contain the painted murals: 100 feet. • Number of new light fixtures: 1600. • Number of restored light fixtures: 350. • Number of seats in the original B.F. Keith Memorial Theater: 2900. • Number of seats in the restored Opera House: 2500 (reduced for more comfortable seating). — IF

Who says vaudeville is dead? For one bright-lights evening, on June 28, the Opera House on Washington Street hosted a performance by nearly two dozen Boston-based performing-arts companies. Titled The Hard Hat Concert: A Boston Vaudeville, and produced by Broadway in Boston/Clear Channel Entertainment for the benefit of Stage Source, the local, non-profit service organization for the theatrical community, the event served as the building’s dress rehearsal before the Opera House reopens this Friday with the long-awaited touring-company production of The Lion King.

Had you walked down Washington Street before show time, you’d have found a crowd gathered in front of the Opera House begging for tickets to the sold-out affair. The lucky ones streamed through the marble-column-lined foyer into the red-carpeted lobby, where a bust of impresario B.F. Keith, after whom the original building was named, stood guard at the top of a curved marble staircase. The auditorium was lit by 10 crystal chandeliers ringing the walls, beneath the vaulted ceiling where nymphs danced among the clouds on a pair of painted murals. There were new red seats and carpeting; the aisles were framed by seat plates molded in bronze against a black and red background. The immense size of the place was startling, along with the welter of plaster decoration that ran up the walls, around the balustrades, and into a parade of niches at the ceiling, all in pale-pastel colors.

The performance itself started late and ran more than three hours. Jimmy Tingle hosted the affair, acting as a genial cheerleader for the accomplishments of both the workers who rebuilt this show palace and the entertainers who were to perform. The two-hour-long first act began, after several speeches, with the company of performers wearing white hard hats and singing "Hard Hat Life" (Annie’s "Hard Knock Life" with new lyrics by Deb Poppel). It continued with performances by Rhythm of the People from Our Place Project and the Boston Children’s Chorus and some hit numbers from this past season’s shows, ending with a stirring rendition of Kander & Ebb’s "The Day After That," from Kiss of the Spider Woman. Act two ran the gamut from ballet — Boston Ballet presenting the White Swan pas de deux — to a sing-along led by Mary Callanan and Brian Patton to Hershey Felder’s George Gershwin medley to a contingent from the Handel and Haydn Society belting out Messiah’s Hallelujah Chorus. The lights came down around 11:30 p.m.; everyone who remained — about a third of the audience had decamped after act one — cheered loudly.

The purpose of the evening was to conduct a trial run of the newly restored (at a cost of $37 million) Opera House, which has been under construction since January 2003, when Clear Channel (which also owns the Charles Playhouse and has long-term leases on the Colonial and the Wilbur Theatres) took possession of the building that first opened in 1928 as the B.F. Keith Memorial Theater, a vaudeville and movie palace. It may be a challenge to refashion plaster angels, rewire crystal chandeliers, reweave miles of fabric and carpeting, polish the acres of marble, and build a 21st-century stage house large enough and technically adept enough to handle mega-size shows while paying homage to the theater’s past glory, but the real test always comes when the audience files in and the show begins.

The Hard Hat Concert saluted the tradition of inviting a building’s craftsmen back to enjoy the fruits of their labors. The workers and their families were admitted free; the general public bought the remaining tickets for $10, a nod to the 10-cent admission charge for Keith’s first theatrical hit in Boston, back in the 1880s, when he leased the Bijou Theater and ran five performances a day of Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado. Nothing could be more appropriate than this re-creation of a vaudeville show for the first public offering at the Opera House, because Keith went on from The Mikado to head a chain of vaudeville theaters and book the acts to fill them. Modeled after the Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier as a vaudeville and film palace by the famous theatrical architect Thomas White Lamb, the B.F. Keith Memorial Theater was erected even as vaudeville was being threatened by the advent of talking films. Keith had died in 1914, and Edward Franklin Albee (grandfather of playwright Edward Albee) built the theater in memory of his partner, who’s considered the "father of vaudeville" because he was the first producer to run continuous shows all day long and clean up the acts so everyone could attend.

But Keith and Albee were two of a kind. Keith, the youngest of eight children, left the farm in Western Massachusetts to join the circus at 17; Albee, the son of a Maine shipwright, did the same when he was 19. Both worked many years for P.T. Barnum. By 1883, Keith had struck out on his own to open the Gaiety Museum in Boston, just south of the present Opera House. Among the exotica on exhibit were "Baby Alice the Midget Wonder," who weighed only a pound and a half, and "Mrs. Tom Thumb," but success eluded him until the run of The Mikado.

Keith and Albee became partners in 1885. By 1893, the pair had built Keith’s New Theatre as a 3000-seat vaudeville house and linked the Bijou to it, and Keith had talked Thomas Edison into helping string the carbon-filament bulbs in that theater, which was the first in America to have electric light. In 1909, Keith added the Boston Theater to his real-estate holdings, forming a vaudeville complex of 7000 seats, the largest in the world. Less than 20 years later, the Boston Museum would be torn down to make way for the B.F. Keith Memorial Theater.

Managed by Albee, the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit grew to more than 500 theaters, and it offered performers who complied with the owners’ standards of morality improved salaries and working conditions. Among the attractions on the circuit were the Foy and Cohan family acts (which spawned Eddie Foy Jr. and George M. Cohan), Buster Keaton, and Lillian Russell. In 1902, an "eccentric comedian" named W.C. Fields appeared. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was one of six black acts booked regularly by Keith-Albee from the turn of the 20th century, in an era when theater offerings were still segregated. Ethel Barrymore and Isadora Duncan played the bills as "class acts," to elevate the proceedings beyond the trained-animal acts and adorable children.

When he died, Keith left an only son who succumbed to the 1918 flu epidemic. Most of the Keith holdings fell to Albee, who continued to run the theaters and the vaudeville circuit until 1928, when Joseph P. Kennedy, father of President John Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy, bought Albee’s stock, which would form part of RKO, a corporation that also included Pathé pictures, the RCA Photophone sound system, Victor Records, and the National Broadcasting Company.

That same year, on October 29, the $5 million B.F. Keith Memorial Theater opened to huge fanfare. The opening-night master of ceremonies was James Michael Curley, then between jobs, as they say in the theater; he was joined by Kennedy, Governor Alvan T. Fuller, Boston mayor Malcolm E. Nichols, and George T. Cohan and Al Jolson, whose 1927 talkie The Jazz Singer signaled the end of vaudeville. The bill was a sampler of the weeks to come. Among the offerings were Jack Pearl, an ethnic German comedian, a juggler, the Foy Family, a slapstick act, 12 girls in an ensemble dance, and Colleen Moore’s feature film Oh, Kay! Boston newspapers of the period describe some of the other early programs. George Jessel appeared in April 1929. Miss Ewing Eaton played the violin and saxophone and performed tap and grotesque dancing, not to mention acrobatics. "What’s more she can play ‘Turkey in the Straw’ on the violin with the bow in her mouth while turning a handspring," an anonymous journalist gushed. Gilda Gray brought her shimmy, and one Herb Williams played the piano while standing on his head. A pool beneath the stage served as a green room for the trained seals; an animal holding room was also built beneath the stage for the dog and horse acts.

But the real attraction was the building, which no doubt was erected with the competition in mind. The $8 million Metropolitan Theater, now the Wang Theatre, had been built in 1925 to be Boston’s largest and grandest picture palace, with films, live entertainment, an orchestra, and a huge Wurlitzer organ among its amenities. Governor Fuller and then-mayor Curley were also in attendance at the October 16 opening-night festivities. Albee shared the management of the theater with Jesse Laskey.

By 1929, the vaudeville programs were gone from the Keith, replaced by films, under the aegis of RKO. In 1965, the theater was sold to North Shore impresario Ben Sack, who changed its name to the Savoy and maintained it as a movie theater. In 1972, Sack had the proscenium arch bricked in so he could have two separate screens. Then in 1978, Sarah Caldwell bought the building and changed its name to the Opera House. Caldwell, who had formed the Opera Company of Boston in 1957, began to stage larger, even more innovative productions: Puccini’s Tosca and Turandot, Bizet’s Carmen, Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, Verdi’s Aida. And she brought in such international stars as Régine Crespin, Shirley Verrett, and Beverly Sills.

Helen Pond and her late partner, Herbert Senn, designed many of the productions when the Opera Company first moved there. "The Opera House was not in bad shape," Pond recalls. "The silk on the walls was peeling, but the worst part was the oval arch in front of the stage. Its plaster was falling. Sarah tried to fix up the theater at the beginning. She did the best she could."

But by 1991, financial problems had forced the Opera Company of Boston to disband. By then, the Opera House was run down, and Caldwell was in arrears on both taxes and utility bills. There followed a period of decline. Al Petrucelli, former production manager of Boston Ballet, brought Elma Lewis’s signature holiday production, Black Nativity, to the Opera House for several seasons at the end of the Caldwell era. "I remember how cold it was in the theater because nobody had money to pay for heat. I had to rent space heaters to keep the dancers in the show warm."

For more than a decade, the theater lay in ruins. Water flowed in from a clogged drain, raining down plaster on the seats. Rodents scampered in the hallways. Liquor bottles littered the aisles, left by a Satanic-cult group that had camped out in the building after the performing groups were gone. Petrucelli remembers touring the building after it had closed. "The cult spray-painted black symbols on the walls and probably stole the brass ticket cage to sell for liquor."

In 1995, Mayor Tom Menino got the building declared one of the 11 most endangered historic theaters in the United States, along with the Paramount and the Modern Theaters, and that made Lower Washington Street a priority for reclamation. A year later, the Opera House was sold to Theater Management Group, which was then purchased by Clear Channel Entertainment with the intention of restoring the house for use by Broadway shows like The Lion King. That meant also extending the stage house to accommodate the high-tech scenery and lighting equipment that were now de rigueur for Broadway attractions. The Opera House’s neighbors objected to the closing of Mason Street at the rear of the theater in order to build a larger backstage area, but eventually, the project was allowed to move forward.

Clear Channel Entertainment took possession of the Opera House on Christmas Day 2002. As Broadway in Boston/Clear Entertainment president Tony McLean explains, "Even when nothing was official, Clear Channel spent money just to keep the building in order. To stop the building from deteriorating, they fixed the roofs and other parts, just to make sure there were no further leakages or problems. The company had been preparing everything in advance with the hope and understanding that all of these things would happen."

McLean is confident that he’ll be able to put people in the seats and product on the stage. "Our challenge is to make sure we meet the needs of the audiences, to provide a big variety. It’s not all Broadway. The Colonial is a beautiful theater. Lots of things can go into the Colonial, not just Broadway. It will be exciting to see [Boston Ballet’s] The Nutcracker in the Colonial this year, and then when it goes to the Opera House [in 2005], it will be the bells and whistles Nutcracker. We’ll have concerts in there, recitals, why not?"

"The expenses in the ‘non-union’ houses are not that much under regular theaters. I have the ability to be more flexible and work with just about everybody, with other presenters, the arts groups. We’re just not there yet. This is my plan. We’re an alternative to any place in town. We’re more inclusive, not competitive, but inclusive because Boston is a small town." The opening salvo in his campaign was The Hard Hat Concert, which brought the theatrical community and the public into the game plan from pre-opening night.