Go back to reading about Harry branching out from musical management.
The first Thearle / Buckley production was an extravaganza that went well beyond the vaudeville format, and perhaps can even be seen as a forerunner of the modern Broadway musical. It certainly featured generous helpings of Thearle showmanship.
The Barn Dance is a rural comedy sketch, with songs, electrical effects, a great Radium Ghost Dance, and the most realistic old barn dance ever presented on any stage… The act contains a distinct plot, dealing with the rival attempt to win the hand of a village maiden by a young country lad and a youth from the city. Comedy situations, interspersed with pleasing songs and spectacles, go to make up an act that holds the undivided interest and appreciation of the audience from the rising of the curtain to the beautiful spectacular closing …The finale of the act is a big radium dance that is in itself a big feature card. Eight ghosts, with radiumized costumes and hollow pumpkins for heads, execute a beautiful dance and chorus. There is an excellent quartet, which is an important feature of the act. Dave Nowlin introduces his celebrated barnyard imitations during the course of the act, and other novel specialties add atmosphere. We carry all special scenery and electrical effects.
The performers glowing in the dark must have been used to great effect. Still, one has to worry a bit about the health of actors wearing costumes laced with the radioactive substance that killed its famous discoverer, Marie Curie.
More than anything else, however, the Thearle brand was becoming known for major disaster re-enactment spectacles, such as “The Great Fire of London” and “The Siege of Sebastopol”. Here he was able to bring together his love of scenery, costumes, music, fireworks and extreme theatricality. A Milwaukee newspaper described how an old ballpark had been turned into the spectacular “Last Days of Pompeii”:
The play opened with the streets filling with people at the ceremonies held in honor of the goddess Isis, with the temple facing the paying spectators. With Mount Vesuvius in the background, the crowd’s eyes saw in the foreground area a lake be-decked with gondolas and galleys, and bordered with gardens and palaces, the streets of an ancient city alive with people in odd, picturesque dress…Massive buildings of quaint architecture were on the sides and a marble palace of a rich nobleman stood next to the lake. In addition the set contained a large triumphal arch, a marble bathhouse, the temples of Iris and Neptune, the coliseum and forum of ancient Rome…A trumpet sounds, flower-strewn barges pass across the ornamental lakes. Soldiers and priests enter, followed by dancing girls, ladies, and then a guard of honor in front of Arbaces, clad in purple and gold.
Action included all the ancient games and sports, Roman marches, a magnificent ballet and an elaborate pageant of priests, priestesses, Roman guards, flower girls and chariot racing (which took place on a course encircling the lake). As the scenes progressed in this story of love, passion and wealth the earth began to quake and the volcano of Mount Vesuvius vomits forth flames and clouds of smoke, as the people of Pompeii scatter in wild confusion in every direction. The characters Glaucus, Nydia and Ione board a boat and escape across the man-made lake, amid flashes of lightning and the glows from the torrents of flaming lava. The rich Egyptian, Arbaces, is killed by a falling column. After this volcanic eruption and destruction of the city the elaborate fireworks display continued…
Harry Thearle knew how to pull out all the stops. He seemed to have found his niche in reproducing fiery disasters, on an epic scale, as mass entertainment. He would not have known that the public taste for these was to wane, or that his own personal fiery destiny awaited him.
Go on to read the last chapter about Harry’s life and times.
Sources
- “Thearle and Buckley”, The Billboard, America’s Leading Theatrical Weekly, Volume XVII, No. 10, Cincinnati, New York, Chicago, 11 March 1905, available at http://www.circushistory.org/Pdf/Billboard11Mar1905.pdf on 29 December 2013
- “Marie Curie”, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie on 18 April 2020
- Two Gold Mining Companies Stock Selling on the Chicago Mining and Mineral Board”, The Economist, Economist Publishing Company, 15 February 1896, available at http://books.google.com/books?id=XlxOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA203 on 2 September 2014
- This version of events, particularly about Ernest’s health being a factor, is family legend told by one of the surviving San Diego Thearle grandchildren to Beth McNellen in 2014
- “REDONDO. Shipping Arrivals and Departures—Local Affairs.”, Los Angeles Herald, Volume XXXIX, Number 161, 21 March 1893
