Description

This is an image of H.M.S. Pinafore poster from the Gilbert & Sullivan's comic operetta.  Photo Courtesy of Pictures Now/Almay.  Image was used with Days Past article titled, H.M.S. Pinafore Sails in Prescott Once Again, by Tom Collins and published on January 17, 2023 on the SHMRC Website.

The comic operetta “Pinafore” has been a favorite with Prescottonians ever since December 1879, when the nationally renowned burlesque star, Miss Pauline Markham, rumbled into our territorial capital on the stagecoach from Tucson. Pauline was celebrated for her beauty, her shapely legs, her velvet voice, and her broadly publicized horsewhipping of a Chicago critic who branded her and her fellow British Blondes as harlots.

The show opened on Christmas Day, 1879, accompanied by Fort Whipple’s 12th Infantry Band, and it proved such a hit that it played at least twelve more nights. Nearly every man, woman, and child in our town of 1,836 people attended the show two or three times each. Never expecting to remain in Prescott for more than a week, Pauline formed fast friendships with the local amateurs and stayed until June 1880, performing light operas and comedies. When Frank Roraback left the troupe for a gig in California, Pauline donned a sailor’s costume and played Ralph. She cast Annie Carpenter as Josephine, and the two of them warbled the lovers’ tunes to Arizona’s territorial governor, John Charles Fremont, and his daughter, Lily, in January 1880. Lily wrote in her diary that the show was “right well given and we were quite entertained.”