Variety Theater Years
The New York-born Cort started his career as a stage actor of little distinction and as part of a comedy duo, Cort and Murphy. He first became a theater manager in Cairo, Illinois, then headed west to take over the Standard Theater, a Seattle box house (a cross between a variety theater, a saloon, and—often—a brothel), which he turned into the city's leading such establishment. A pioneer of theater circuits—booking the same act successively into multiple cities to make it worth their while to tour to his remote part of the country—he was so successful that in 1888 he built a new 800-seat Standard Theater at the southeast corner of Occidental and Washington streets. This was Seattle's first theater with electric lighting, more modern than the gas-lit Frye's Opera House, the city's leading legitimate theater at the time.
The Great Seattle Fire (June 6, 1889) burned this new Standard and nearly all of Seattle's other places of entertainment. Cort reopened two weeks later in a tent, and by November he had erected a replacement for the Standard.
Read more about this topic: John Cort (impresario)
Famous quotes containing the words variety, theater and/or years:
“His reversed body gracefully curved, his brown legs hoisted like a Tarentine sail, his joined ankles tacking, Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of gravity, and moved to and fro, veering and sidestepping, opening his mouth the wrong way, and blinking in the odd bilboquet fashion peculiar to eyelids in his abnormal position. Even more extraordinary than the variety and velocity of the movements he made in imitation of animal hind legs was the effortlessness of his stance.”
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—Elizabeth Wilson, U.S. crime victim. As quoted in People magazine, p. 88 (May 31, 1993)