History
With cinematography getting popular in the early 1930s, the opera house was modified for screening films and holding fashion shows, and held movie shows after 1935. As single-theatre cinemas took a down turn in the 1980s, the opera house too ran in loss. It was in January 1991 that the last film show was held here. There after the premises has been acquired by the erstwhile princely state of Gondal family on a 999 year lease. In 1993, the last public event: the Kathiawad fashion show was held here. The area around the theatre is also referred to as the Opera House in Mumbai.
Ultimately, in 1980s it was closed down. Till recently, it was in a dilapidated condition but in March 2008 the Maharashtra Government agencies announced that they were undertaking conservation measures to restore the heritage structure to its original grandeur. The operational wings of the opera house at the time of restoration works were only a tea stall and shops on the ground floor.
Read more about this topic: Royal Opera House (Mumbai)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)