By Tom Collins
A horse! A horse!
My kingdom for a horse!
When those words rang out from the stage of Patton’s Opera House on March 10, 1896, Prescottonians knew that the villainous King Richard III was about to meet his doom on the battlefield. They also knew that they were probably witnessing one of the farewell performances of America’s greatest living tragedian Thomas W. Keene. It was a truly momentous occasion.
The 1890s were the glory years for the touring professional theater in Prescott, thanks to architect Samuel Eason Patton. Patton was a Phoenix contractor and theater enthusiast who had recently built an opera house in Phoenix and in 1920 designed the handsome 42-bedroom Hotel Burke in Prescott. When this talented designer moved to Prescott with his family in 1894, one of the first things he noted was that the town’s little opera house on the second floor of the old M. Goldwater & Bro. building on the corner of Goodwin and Cortez was failing into decay and ruin. Known as Howey’s Hall, it had been since 1879 the center of social life in Prescott: a lecture hall, concert hall, dance hall, skating rink and the place where traveling theater companies performed over 50 melodramas, farces and operettas. Lately, few plays were being staged there. It was time for someone with a vision to fill the void, and the enterprising Patton stepped up to the plate.
Wasting no time, he designed and constructed his new theater between June and October 1894. It was located near the corner of Gurley and Marina, east of the old Yavapai Club. The building was 140 feet in length by 70 in width. The main hall, which comfortably seated 600 people, was to be a ballroom as well as a theater. The stage measured a generous 43 feet wide by 24 feet deep and 30 feet high. The dressing rooms were beneath it. Apparently the three-story building also served as a public hall and meeting place for it had clubrooms at the front.
The new theater did good business, as Patton traveled to Los Angeles and even to the East Coast to find good acts and plays. The arrival of the railroads (Dec. 31, 1886) had made it possible for professional touring companies to bring their full-scale productions with carloads of scenery and costumes. Even though the decoration was as yet incomplete, Patton opened the theater in Oct. 18, 1894, with a performance of the Lone Star Minstrels, followed by Prof. Zamlock, King of Conjurers, on Oct. 31. The official premiere was Nov. 12, with the arrival of the Eunice Goodrich Company performing a repertoire of contemporary comedies. For the next two years, Patton’s Opera House bustled with theatrical activity, hosting prestigious troupes, such as the Augustine Daly Company and the Payton Stock Company, as well as a spectacular production of Victorien Sardou’s “Cleopatra,” starring Lillian Lewis and Edmond Collier.
By far the most historic performance was that of Thomas Wallace Keene (1849-98), the versatile and eccentric Shakespearean actor who at age 56 played Richard III for a one night only (March 10, 1896) at the opera house with a strong supporting company in the age of modern realistic acting. Keene was decidedly “retro.” He blended the styles of the “heroic” and “romantic” schools of acting, both represented by his forerunners Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth. Little is known about his childhood. He was born Thomas R. Eagleson in New York City. His father, a journalist, died when Thomas was a small child. In his boyhood Thomas frequently attended the Bowery Theater, where he became stage struck. The actors and managers who came to know him hired him for bit parts, and in 1856, at the age of 15, he made his New York debut as Lucius in “Julius Caesar.” Through determination and hard work he honed his skills in touring companies on the Eastern seaboard. His first big break came in 1865, when he was hired by James Henry Hackett to play King Henry IV in support of the elder actor’s Falstaff in Albany. From 1870 to 1875 he toured with companies that performed in England and in the American West. In 1875 he moved to San Francisco to join the California Theatre Stock Company. Edwin Booth, the greatest hamlet of all time, joined him there in 1876. They alternated in the roles of Othello and Iago; and in “Julius Caesar.” Keene alternated with Booth and the great actor-manager John McCullough in the roles of Brutus, Cassius and Antony. Then, striking out on his own, Keene moved to the East Coast in 1880 and almost overnight became a star as Coupeau the alcoholic in a Boston production of Emile Zola’s “Drink.” From that point on he began to star in his own productions, selecting as the signature vehicle for his talents Richard III, a role he played more than 2,500 times. For more than 16 years he toured widely in small towns in the United States. He was Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo, Brutus, Shylock and Othello. He starred as Cardinal Richelieu in Bulwer-Lytton’s “Rochelieu” or “The Conspiracy,” and as King Louis in Casimir Delavigne’s “Louis XI,” both popular star vehicles at the time.
Keene’s electrifying but almost eccentric interpretation of Richard III gave his audiences a thrill ride of black humor, horrifying villainy and moving tragedy. His larger-than-life, heroic energy grabbed audiences by the throat. Critics commented that his versatility in facial expression was both an asset and a flaw in the role of Richard.
While his facial gymnastics clearly conveyed everything he was thinking, they sometimes bordered on the burlesque. (Vincent Price comes to mind.) Ina the famous tent scene on the night before his fateful battle with the young hero Richmond, when Richard is haunted by the ghosts of those whom he has murdered, Keene writhed in his agony like “a man who had been brought up on green applesauce.” A cranky critic of the La Crosse, Wisconsin Chronicle complained that “Keene’s idea of expressing emotions other than of the violent howling kind is to do so by ugly grimaces and contortions that suggest the cramp.” (April 1882). Kinder critics admire his superb diction and described his acting as intelligent, florid, emotional and overly demonstrative, perhaps verging on the melodramatic. However, there was no denying his powerful emotional impact on audiences.
Keene’s script for “Richard III” was a retroactive as his acting style. Instead of following the modern trend of restoring Shakespeare’s original scripts to the stage, Keene followed the example of his predecessors by using much of Colley Cibber’s adaptation (1700), which “Improved” on Shakespeare’s original. It was, in fact, a tidier and more coherent version that made this tumultuous story of the English monarchy more accessible to audiences.
Written for a series of elaborate painted drop-and-wing settings instead of the neutral architectural background that Shakespeare had used, Cibber’s version of the play afforded plenty of spectacles. Keene brought to Prescott beautiful pictorial settings of a street before St. Paul’s Church, the garden of the Tower of London, a gloomy chamber in the tower, a magnificent throne room, Richard’s military tent, and Bo Worth Field, the site of Richard’s “Waterloo.”
The Arizona Miner noted one important innovation in Keene’s staging. He shortened the time between acts. “But a few moments would elapse from the time the curtain dropped on one act until it would rise on the next, while the average troupe devoted as must time to between acts as they do to the play itself.” In other words, Keene appreciated the need for momentum and continuity in the staging of the play as well as the limits of the audience’s attention span. This was a decidedly modern innovation.
It is a pity that the Miner failed to mention the names of the supporting actors (Sarah A. Baker played Richard’s grieving mother, the Duchess of York, for 16 years) or to comment upon Keene’s interpretation of the title role. Only the depiction of him on his poster remain to give us an idea of the way he looked and how he staged the play. At the height of his powers and only a few years away from this death, Keene would not be returning to Prescott again.
The Miner lamented that “When Keene passes away he will leave no successor… There will be no melancholy Dane, no dusky Moor to doubt the fealty of his wife, no crooked-back Richard, striding through treachery to a bloody throne.” Just a few years later, Keene died of appendicitis.
On July 14, 1897, Patton old his opera house to Charles A. and C.E. Dake, who owned a Whiskey Row saloon. Charles Dake remodeled the theater to include an impressively larger stage, 50 feet wide and 25 feet deep. It was provided with a high loft, so that all scenery might be hoisted, a big improvement over the cumbersome old style of sliding scenery (The Courier-Aug. 23, 1897). The idea was to make this the most splendid and well-equipped theater in Prescott, one that could accommodate the technical requirements of any traveling troupe. As their crowning achievement, the Dakes booked professional productions of two spectacular melodramas: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Ten Nights in a Bar Room” in October 1900.
The glory years continued until 1903, when the building was torn down and ultimately replaced by a bowling alley. What a shame that his grand opera house was not preserved for posterity. However, what a boon for Prescott that the Elks immediately constructed a new opera house to carry on the great tradition.