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:
“A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theater that only one man in it can count on steady work—the night watchman.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“Without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as at present; that men were but men then as well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better than they are now.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)