Show Business in Attleboro, Ma.

Watch Show Business!

Coming March 21 to the Attleboro Area Industrial Museum

On March 21, 2013, The Attleboro Historic Preservation Society presents a unique look at show business in a small industrial city that played host to greats like Al Jolson, Duke Ellington and Chet Atkins. Attleboro also produced its own stage and music stars including hitmaker and Grammy Winner Ray Conniff (above) and opera, musical theater and movie star Robert Rounseville.  The free multimedia-live band "documusical" will be held 7 p.m. at the Attleboro Area Industrial Museum, 42 Union St., Attleboro, Ma.

Join the discussion about Attleboro's show business past and learn more about the city's entertainment heritage by visiting this space often.

                               Funded by a grant from the Attleboro Cultural Council  

                                                           

The Bates Building, site of the Bates Opera House

From Vaudeville to Broadway, a Launching Pad for Dreams

By RICK FOSTER
THE SUN CHRONICLE
The cheers and the groans of the audience died away long ago. 
Gone, too, is the music from the orchestra pit, the rattle of tap dancers' shoes and the
laugh lines from comedians.
The dressing rooms and actors' apartments nestled deep within the Union
Theater on Dunham Street in Attleboro lie dark and undisturbed, asleep for
decades.
But in the first quarter of the 20th century the Union and theaters like it
offered live entertainment combined with silent films in a daily pageant
built on showmanship and the hopes and dreams of a thousand singers, dancers
and novelty acts.
It was a daily dose of diversion in a time long before TV. They called it
vaudeville.
These days there are few audience members remaining who remember the smell
of the greasepaint and the comic agony of the bad jokes. Irene Davey does.
"My husband and I loved it, especially the comedians," said Davey, 103.
She remembers the Union mostly as a movie house. But the long-gone Columbia
on Bank Street in Attleboro, was known for its live vaudeville acts.
Davey and her late husband frequently attended vaudeville shows in
Providence or Boston, as well as locally, having been introduced to the
shows during her youth.
When Ann Friedman and her husband bought the now-closed Union Theater many
years ago, she was fascinated with many of the old-fashioned trappings that
hailed back to its vaudeville past.
On a recent backstage tour, Friedman pointed out the ancient stage lighting
controls, ropes used by stage hands to raise curtains and scenery and the
outline of the long ago filled-in orchestra pit.
"Dressing rooms for the performers were very basic," Friedman said.
Steel ladders, not stairways, led upward to two, cubby-size dressing rooms
far above and on each side of the stage. A single door provided access to
each room.
"That wouldn't be allowed today," she said.
Long vacant, small apartments on upper floors could be rented out and shared
by touring musicians and performers.
Built in 1918 to house vaudeville shows, the Union included about 1,100
seats and was operated by the B&Q chain of theaters. Movies, their
popularity mushrooming during the 1920s and '30s, gradually replaced the
hoofers and comics.
But for a time, it was glorious.
Boston businessman B.F. Keith, a showman of the P.T. Barnum variety, earned
the title of father of American vaudeville, establishing a string of
theaters and creating standards for performances and audience members,
alike.

Keith was rapidly copied by other entertainment entrepreneurs, including
future moviehouse mogul Marcus Lowe. Soon, vaudeville was in every large
city and medium-size town in the United States.
Davey remembers at least four theaters within a small area of downtown
Attleboro. Besides the Union and the Columbia, there was the Bates Opera
House at the corner of North Main and Park streets and a small movie house
of sorts inside a three-decker on Pine Street.
In addition, the theater at Tallequega Park in Briggs Corner also offered
vaudeville for a time.
With so much competition, theater operators relied on both wits and
one-upmanship to keep audiences interested.
When the Columbia's manager added an orchestra to his regular bill,
according to a 1913 copy of "Moving Picture World," Bates manager and
ex-vaudevillian John Patten answered by hiring an all-girl orchestra. The
innovation was a hit, the trade magazine reported.
"Both theaters are doing nicely," Moving Picture World said.
Generally, the entertainment, which often consisted of five or more acts
sandwiched around a movie, ranged from the occasionally sensational to the
decidedly low brow.
Supplementing the usual vaudeville acts and silent movies, many hosted
concerts and performances by local and even nationally recognized talents.
The Bates housed a mammoth theater organ played by a resident organist,
recalled Attleboro's Doris Gagnon, 93, who danced in a production of Swan
Lake at the theater.

Al Jolson, 1920s singing sensation and star of the very first talking
picture, is reputed to have put in an appearance there, said Attleboro
Historical Commission Chairwoman Marian Wrightington.
At the height of vaudeville's popularity, most theaters presented daily
afternoon and evening performances. For a brief time, houses in big cities
featured continuous acts, 12 to 24 hours a day.
As exciting as the dancers, jugglers and animal acts might have been for
theater-goers, life on tour for the average vaudevillian was no bed of
roses. Virtually all were independent contractors, relying on booking agents
to get jobs that ranged from one-night stands to a full week at a theater.
Lower-tier comedians and dancers had to string together partial weeks at
several theaters, often hundreds of miles apart, to make up a tour.
For his or her efforts, a small-time performer might gross $20 a week. Room
and board came out of their own pockets, and they were responsible for
booking agent's fees and transportation between engagements.

A few, like actor-dancer Jack Donahue who toured local vaudeville houses like the Lyric Theatre in North Attleboro, graduated to become stars on Broadway and in films.
Other actors, dancers and comedians, who like Donahue cut their teeth in
vaudeville, went on to even greater heights.
Attleboro-born opera and Broadway star Robert Rounseville toured briefly in
vaudeville. Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice went on to achieve immortality on
Broadway, in the movies and on radio after starting out in vaudeville
theaters.
Dozens more followed.
Ex-vaudevillians like Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jerry Lewis
and even Sammy Davis Jr., to name a few, became icons whose popularity
carried over well into the age of television.
But even as vaudeville was superceded by movies, radio and TV, nostalgia
kept the shows lodged firmly in the public mind.
One-time newspaper columnist and impresario Ed Sullivan kept the vaudeville
formula alive for years on his weekly TV show that juxtaposed comics,
plate-spinners and animal acts with appearances by world-renown stars like
Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
The Sullivan show ended in 1971. But while performers like Bette Midler
would later be credited with a limited resurgence in "New Vaudeville," the
cancellation of Sullivan brought an end to the shows as most people had
known them.
The curtain had fallen on a raunchy and fabulous era, never to rise again.