On New Year’s Eve 1947 the comic whirlwind that was Lucille Ball took to the Lobero stage in the ambitious comedy-fantasy Dream Girl.

Lucille Ball had begun acting 14 years earlier and had appeared in supporting and even lead roles in a number of Hollywood movies. But quality pictures and stardom had eluded her, and by the age of 36 she had been labeled with the nickname “Queen of the B’s.”

Lucille Ball saw Dream Girl as a chance to showcase her innate comic abilities in front of a live audience, and she opened a 5-month national tour of the play in Princeton, New Jersey in June 1947. The tour was scheduled to wind up with New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day performances in Santa Barbara, followed by a couple of weeks in Los Angeles.

Lucille Désirée Ball was born in 1911 in the small western New York town of Jamestown. Her father died when Lucille was only 3 years old and her mother worked several jobs, so Lucy and her younger brother were raised by her grandparents. When Lucy was 15, her mother enrolled her in the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City, where Bette Davis was a fellow, and star, student. Ball’s drama school experience was a disappointment and only lasted 6 weeks. Ironically, given her legacy as a madcap, extroverted comedienne, Lucy’s drama school instructor wrote Ball’s mother, “Lucy’s wasting her time and mine. She’s too shy and reticent to put her best foot forward.”

A year later, at the age of 16, Lucille decided to try her hand at show business one more time, and first got work in New York as a model at a dress shop, and then as the poster girl for Chesterfield cigarettes. Her big break, and literal ticket to Hollywood, came in 1933 when she was cast in an unbilled role as one of the Goldwyn Girls in Eddie Cantor’s musical comedy Roman Scandals. Throughout the rest of the 30s and into the 1940s Lucille Ball was a contract player with RKO Pictures and then a B-movie star at MGM Studios. In 1940, Lucy married Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz and settled permanently in Los Angeles.

While Lucy had begun her show business career in film, it hadn’t turned out to be a great fit for her talents. ”I never cared about the movies,” she said later, ”because they cast me wrong.” 1947’s national tour of Dream Girl showcased Lucy’s wacky comedic talents and made her realize she was most comfortable performing in front of a live audience.

Dream Girl was about a young woman whose attempt to run a bookstore was constantly sidetracked by her imaginative and romantic daydreams. The play’s fantasy scenes were tailor-made for Ball’s wit and style, and some critics loved her acting so much they suggested she never return to film. The Los Angeles Times wrote,

“here is a young lady who could, if she would, have a dazzling footlight career…she is, in a sense, wasting her time in the pictures.”

After completing New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day performances at the Lobero, Dream Girl moved to the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles where it was scheduled to run for two weeks. But after only a couple of performances, Lucille Ball – and many other members of the cast – came down with Strep throat and the remaining performances of the play were canceled.

Several months after her Lobero appearance in Dream Girl Lucy was cast in a weekly radio comedy series for CBS Radio. My Favorite Husband was so successful that CBS asked her to develop it for television, which she agreed to do if she could cast her real-life husband as her costar. The couple’s Desilu Productions developed the series, which premiered in 1951 as I Love Lucy.

Based on her positive theater experience with Dream Girl Lucille Ball insisted that I Love Lucy be filmed in front of a live audience, and not use a pre-recorded laugh track. I Love Lucy was the first multi-camera sitcom to be filmed before a live studio audience and a 2012 ABC News/People Magazine poll voted the series as the best-ever TV comedy.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucille_Ball
• https://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/27/obituaries/lucille-ball-spirited-doyenne-of-tv-comedies-dies-at-77.html
• https://www.newspapers.com/image/380667324/?terms=%22dream%20girl%22%20%22lucille%20ball%22%201947&match=1
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Lucy
• https://www.amazon.com/Desilu-Story-Lucille-Ball-Arnaz/dp/0062020013

It was the holiday season in Santa Barbara in 1883, and the town was in the throes of roller-skating mania.

The Lobero Opera House was skating-central, with wooden chairs removed to provide a large skating rink on the floor of the gas-lit, cavernous hall. Almost every night in December dozens of skaters would clatter around the Lobero on their wooden-wheeled skates, moving in accompaniment to the sounds of a brass band. Ladies were admitted at no charge, with boys and gents having to pay 25 cents.

Surprisingly, roller skating was nothing new at the Lobero. On Saturday, December 16, 1871 – more than a year before the opera house’s official opening – the Santa Barbara Press wrote, “Lobero’s Theatre is to be opened soon as a skating rink. This is good news for young people. It will make a grand rink.”

Roller skates had existed for 100 years, but it wasn’t until American inventor James Plimpton patented a four-wheeled skate in 1863 that the average person had a fighting chance of surviving the sport. The earliest roller skates featured an inflexible row of 3 in-line wooden wheels which meant turning was only possible if the skater constantly lifted one of their feet. To make things worse, there was no easy way to stop.

In fact, the inauspicious debut of roller skates took place in 1760, when inventor John Joseph Martin entered a fancy London masquerade party on a pair of his new skates and while playing the violin. “When not having provided the means of retarding his velocity, or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to atoms, broke his instrument to pieces, and wounded himself most severely.”

In contrast to Martin’s in-line skates, Plimpton’s quad skates included springy carriages called trucks which allowed the skater to turn by leaning in the direction of travel. For the first time, skaters could easily move next to each other in a circle, which made skating fun for couples and groups. A couple of years later, the toe stop was invented which allowed the skater to tip the skate onto the toe to stop.

Roller skating was marketed as being family-friendly, and importantly, free from the “hoodlum element.” The Santa Barbara Roller Skate Association advertised the Lobero rink as a “pleasant place for the better classes to pass their leisure moments. The respectable public will be admitted, but the association reserves the right to exclude persons they do not approve of.”

Historians see the roller-skating craze of the 1880s as an important, though short-lived, step in the evolution of women’s rights. Roller skating was especially popular with women, as the rink provided a place for young ladies and men to meet which was free from the sharp eyes and tongues of ever-present and judgmental chaperones. As one newspaper of the time observed,

“The skating rink is the neutral ground on which the sexes may meet without all the pomp and circumstances of society.”

And for a population that was unused to aerobic exercise, roller-skating was proclaimed as something of a panacea for vitality and overall health. The Santa Barbara Roller Skate Association wrote,

“We predict for the Association a long and vigorous life, giving the rosy hue of health to many a pale cheek, appetite and refreshing rest to the bilious dyspeptic, and results generally beneficent to the community at large.”

Skating exhibitions and races were regularly held, with one Santa Barbaran named Silva completing 10 laps or one-half mile in an impressive one minute 38 seconds.

The Lobero roller-skating season which had begun in November 1883 culminated on Saturday evening March 8, 1884, with a grand masquerade, skating ball. Elaborate costumes were brought from San Francisco and Los Angeles and Santa Barbara’s own Boy’s Band provided live music.

Previous Next

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

After the 1884 grand finale, roller-skating moved out of the Lobero to make way for a busy schedule of melodramas and vaudeville theater. But the skating craze continued in Santa Barbara, and small rinks were created wherever skaters could find adequate space and level flooring. In 1885, the Santa Barbara Skating School was established in Gaspar Orenas old warehouse on De la Guerra Street and had dedicated nights for ladies and for guests of the exclusive Arlington Hotel.

By 1885, it was estimated there were 50,000 roller-skating rinks across the country. Roller-skating returned briefly to the Lobero for the 1890 holiday season, but by then the craze was waning. “Rinkomania” declined nationwide in the 1890s, and by the early 1900s had largely been eclipsed by newer amusements.

Sources

• https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31831110
• https://www.familytree.com/blog/the-fun-our-ancestors-had-in-1880s/
• https://www.rollerskatingmuseum.org/inline-skating
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joseph_Merlin
• https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol2/QMM/TC-QMM-66673.pdf

1952 was the year America fell in love with José Greco and classical flamenco dance.

That was the year Greco – almost single-handedly – revived the art of flamenco and became a household name through appearances on popular television shows and in movies. In November 1952 the José Greco Company came to Santa Barbara and brought their riveting showmanship to the Lobero Theatre for 4 performances.

José Greco was born to Spanish-Italian parents in Montorio nei Frentani, Italy in 1918. When he was 10 years old his family moved to Brooklyn, New York and as a teenager, Greco started training in Spanish dance. His career as a serious concert-dance performer began in 1942 when the famous Spanish-Argentine dancer “La Argentiñita” invited him to partner with her and join her company. In 1945 Greco moved to Spain and a couple of years later formed his own classical flamenco dance company.

At the end of 1950, after six years in Europe, the José Greco Dance Company returned to the United States and soon became a national sensation after performing on Broadway and appearing on national TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show.

Previous Next

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

To Americans, José Greco’s aristocratic elegance, fiery temperament, and Latin sensuality were irresistible, with one critic quipping, “All men want to be José Greco, and all women want to be loved by José Greco!”

Arlene Croce of the New Yorker magazine called José Greco

“the undisputed Spanish dance star of the ‘50s and ‘60s…in terms of box-office power he may have been the greatest of all dance stars until the advent of Rudolph Nureyev.”

Nearly 50 years after his first performance at the Lobero, José Greco and his Spanish Dance Company returned to the theatre in 1991. With Greco serving as artistic director and dancing in character roles, the company starred his adult children including his daughter Carmela, son José II, and his eldest son José Luis.

José Greco’s last live performance came in 1995, when he was 77 years old. Anna Kisselgoff, dance critic of The Times wrote, “Now a bit stout, sometimes quaint looking, he can still burst into a blazing display of dynamic heelwork. He never loses his star luster.”

Enjoy José Greco in this short clip from the 1956 movie Around The World in 80 Days. 

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Greco
• https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/04/arts/jose-greco-82-fiery-master-of-spanish-dance-is-dead.html
• https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-04-me-8269-story.html
• https://www.dancemagazine.com/tbt-jose-greco-2617223566.html

Browsing the calendar of events at American theaters and opera houses in the late 1800’s can be an uncomfortable experience for the modern sensibility.

It was a time when stage acts were often booked for their racial and physical novelty and curiosity values. The Lobero Opera House was no exception to this trend.

In 1892, one of the most fascinating global celebrities of the 19^th century appeared on the Lobero Opera House stage. Lavinia Warren was a petite entertainer who rose to fame under the promotion – and exploitation – of American showman Phineas T.  Barnum. On October 19, 1892, her troupe of performers billed as “Mrs. General Tom Thumb (Countess Magri) and the Lilliputians” appeared in matinee and evening performances as a benefit to support Santa Barbara’s Free Kindergarten.

Lavinia Warren was born in Middleboro, Massachusetts on October 31, 1841. Her growth stopped before she was one year old, and as a child, she reached her full adult height of only 32 inches. At the age of 16, after a successful career as a well-respected schoolteacher, Warren decided to market her “proportionate dwarfism” and began working in show business on her cousin’s floating museum of curiosities.

After American showman, huckster, and circus pioneer Phineas T. Barnum purchased the museum, Warren went to work at his five-story “Barnum’s American Museum” in New York. Barnum’s Museum was a combination of zoo, wax museum, and freak show, and was a cultural and business sensation. It was there that Warren – who Barnum promoted as the Little Queen of Beauty – met another little person named Charles Stratton, known worldwide by his stage name of General Tom Thumb.

Twenty years earlier, in 1843, P. T. Barnum had read about a Connecticut boy named Charles Sherwood Stratton who had stopped growing at seven months old. Barnum promptly paid a visit to Stratton’s home, and incredibly, convinced the 5-year-old boy’s parents to allow him to become the child’s guardian and manager. Barnum taught young Charles to act, sing, dance and tell stories – as well as drink wine and smoke cigars – and when the boy was only 6 years old took him on a tour of Europe, where he met Queen Victoria and became an international celebrity known as General Tom Thumb.

In February 1863, Barnum introduced the 25-year-old Charles Stratton to 21-year-old Lavinia Warren. After a brief courtship, the two were married in a ceremony that was paid for by P. T. Barnum and promoted as the wedding of the century. While Barnum didn’t sell tickets to the actual wedding, he did charge a $75 entrance fee to the reception at New York’s extravagant Metropolitan Hotel, which more than 2,000 attended. Three days after the wedding, President Abraham Lincoln invited the couple to visit the White House.

Previous Next

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

When some newspapers wrote that the wedding was simply a publicity stunt, Stratton was quick to react,

“It is true we are little but we are as God made us, perfect in our littleness. We are simply man and woman of like passions and infirmities with you and other mortals. The arrangements for our marriage are controlled by no showman.”

As a married couple, Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren traveled the world for 20 years working for P.T. Barnum. And while their marriage and affection for each other were obviously genuine, so too was their willingness to let P.T. Barnum exploit their small size to create a global business enterprise – and a fortune. As the BBC explained, “The wedding boom indeed made the enterprise more successful. The next plan to increase their fame further would be the addition of a child, and Barnum was, as ever, happy to fix this. He rented babies from foundling hospitals for photoshoots and personal appearances, and the crowds went crazy. When that idea had run its course, Barnum simply said the child had died.”

Charles Stratton died in 1883, at the age of 45, and 20,000 people attended his funeral. Two years after her husband’s death, Lavinia returned to showbusiness and married a 45-inch-tall Italian piccolo player who was known as Count Primo Magri. Together they formed a troupe composed of other little people and toured the world performing plays as an act named “Mrs. General Tom Thumb (Countess Magri) and the Lilliputians.”

Lavinia Warren died in 1919 at the age of 77 and was buried next to her husband’s elaborate cemetery monument with a simple gravestone that reads “His Wife.”

While we wait in the wings for things to return to normal, we hope you enjoy a peek into the Lobero archives.

We hope you’re staying safe and enjoying the arts from the comfort of your own home. Go ahead and read more stories below.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Tom_Thumb
• https://www.britannica.com/art/freak-show#ref1206212
• https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-30034409

On a wintery evening in February 1938, American singer Marian Anderson enthralled a Lobero audience with her extraordinary contralto voice.

Known for her warm and modest personality, few audience members knew that just 3 months earlier she had defied Nazi death threats and given a sold-out, European farewell concert in Vienna, Austria.

As an African-American, Marian Anderson had found 1930’s Europe to be a refuge from the institutional racism she had experienced in the U.S. But by 1937, and the rise of Hitler’s Germany, Europe was no longer a safe haven. Anderson’s performance at Vienna’s Musikverein concert hall represented the end of an era. As explained in the New Yorker Magazine,

“One Viennese music critic stated that the audience had witnessed something bigger than itself—a performance of musical brotherhood despite a rising tide of racial hatred.”

Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1897. From the age of 6 Anderson sang in the choir of the Union Baptist Church, where she so impressed the congregation that they raised money for her to attend music school. In 1925, Anderson entered a contest with 300 competitors and won first prize – the opportunity to sing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Several years later, at the age of 30, she received a scholarship to study in Berlin.

In 1933, Marian Anderson made her European debut in London. She spent much of the 1930’s touring in Europe, where audiences and critics alike were awed by her incredible vocal range. Anderson’s pure vocal quality, richness of tone, and tremendous range made her, in the opinion of many, the world’s greatest contralto

Marian Anderson’s most famous performance came in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for her to sing before an integrated audience in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of many prominent DAR members who resigned in protest, and at the invitation of the federal government, Anderson was invited to perform at the Lincoln Memorial. On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, Marian Anderson sang for a live crowd of 75,000 and a radio audience in the millions.

The New Yorker Magazine explained the significance of the performance, “The impact was immediate and immense; one newsreel carried the legend “Nation’s Capital Gets Lesson in Tolerance.” But Anderson herself made no obvious statement. She presented, as she had done countless times before, a mixture of classical selections. Perhaps there was a hint of defiance in her rendition of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee;” perhaps a message of solidarity when she changed the line “Of thee I sing” to “Of thee we sing.” Principally, though, her protest came in the unfurling of her voice—that gently majestic instrument, vast in range and warm in tone.”

Sources

• https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/when-marian-anderson-defied-the-nazis
• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/04/13/voice-of-the-century
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Anderson

On Saturday, October 17, 1896, the Lobero Opera House’s 1300 seats were filled – and hundreds were turned away at the door – when women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony came to Santa Barbara to speak.

Anthony was in Santa Barbara to urge voters to support California Amendment 6, which would allow women the right to vote. “You have given her all the other rights under the law. You have educated her. And yet you deny her the right to respect herself and to command the respect of others. Women must have the ballot to fight the battles in the field of labor!” Anthony declared. The raucous audience replied with “We will! We will!”, and Anthony replied, “Good for you. I knew Santa Barbara was going to give us equal suffrage. The head under the bonnet should be made under the law as good as the bald head.”

Susan B. Anthony was born in Massachusetts in 1820 to a Quaker family who was strongly anti-slavery. In 1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the two first created a temperance society (the movement to outlaw the production and sale of alcohol), and then founded the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans.

In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York – a violation of state law which only allowed men to vote. After a widely publicized trial in which the judge told the jury to find Anthony guilty, Anthony was convicted and fined $100. The guilty verdict, and Anthony’s refusal to pay the fine helped make women’s suffrage a national issue.

From the 1890s to the 1910s, the Lobero Theatre was an important venue for the women’s suffrage movement in California. Lectures and rallies promoting women’s right to vote were regular features on the theatre’s schedule and often overlapped with temperance gatherings. Lobero suffrage rallies were sometimes bilingual.

Susan B. Anthony’s visit to the Lobero in 1896 came just two weeks before California voters cast ballots to decide if women would be allowed to vote in the state. Between 1867 and August 18, 1920 – the final passage of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote – 54 ballot measures to grant women’s suffrage were on the ballot in 30 states. California’s Women’s Suffrage Amendment in 1896 was considered important enough that Susan B. Anthony spent 8 months in the state on the campaign and spoke in 30 cities.

Her Santa Barbara visit was the social and civic event of the year, and received glowing coverage by the liberal Santa Barbara Daily Independent,

“Susan B. Anthony, sometimes spoken of as a sour old maid by those who never saw her, is a sweet-faced, lovely, earnest woman who in all of her seventy-odd years of life…has never been heard to utter one harsh or cutting word concerning those opposing her.  She stands today loved and honored by every intelligent man and woman on the continent.”

“Never has Santa Barbara seen an audience to equal the one gathered Saturday last, to greet a plain, silver-haired woman – the new woman – alert, alive, and well poised. To those who sat on the stage and could view the amphitheater of faces, reaching to the very ceiling of the opera house…the memory is one to last as long as life.”

Interestingly, Anthony’s support for Amendment 6 was not enough to bring about its passage. While the amendment was supported by Santa Barbara voters, statewide, women’s suffrage was soundly defeated 55% to 44%. California women would not be able to vote for another 24 years – until 1920.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_B._Anthony
• https://www.independent.com/2020/03/04/starshine-reflects-on-the-womens-suffrage-centennial/
• https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/susan-b-anthony

Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner and the Lobero Theatre had a relationship that spanned 34 years and helped establish the Lobero as one of the premier live jazz venues in the country.

It all began on October 7, 1977 when promoter Steven Cloud brought the MyCoy Tyner Sextet to the Lobero stage.

Alfred McCoy Tyner was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 11, 1938, and started taking piano lessons when he was 13. When Tyner was 19, he met fellow-Philadelphian John Coltrane and was asked to join the saxophonist’s quartet in 1960.

For the next 5 years, the Coltrane “Classic Quartet” recorded some of jazz’s most important experimental, free-jazz albums, which emphasized melodic improvisation and rhythm. Tyner’s rich, percussive piano playing was a grounding force for Coltrane’s improvisations, as Coltrane explained,

“…Tyner holds down the harmonies, and that allows me to forget them. He’s sort of the one who gives me wings and lets me take off from the ground from time to time.”

McCoy Tyner left the Coltrane Quartet in 1965 when he felt the music was becoming too atonal, free, and loud. Tyner complained that the percussion playing was drowning out the piano. “I didn’t see myself making any contribution to that music… All I could hear was a lot of noise. I didn’t have any feeling for the music, and when I don’t have feelings, I don’t play.”

Previous Next

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

Close

In the immediate years after leaving Coltrane’s band, Tyner struggled to get gigs and even considered giving up music. In 1967 however, he signed with Blue Note Records and produced “The Real McCoy,” an album that sparked his solo career. In the following decades, Tyner composed, formed trios, a big band, and won 5 Grammy® Awards. In 2002, McCoy Tyner was named a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Master.

Atlantic Magazine summed up McCoy Tyner’s importance to jazz, “Tyner’s great achievement was the creation of a sound rooted in the blues but suited to the avant-garde…Walk into any jazz room, anywhere on Earth, on any night, and you’ll probably hear a keyboardist copping McCoy Tyner’s licks and tricks.”

Given his recognized success performing in trios and quartets, McCoy Tyner’s 1977 sextet tour with 5 bandmates was something of an anomaly. While audiences – including the Lobero packed-house – responded favorably, some critics felt the group’s sound overwhelmed the brilliance of its leader. The Los Angeles Times wrote, “The clutter of two saxophones and the clatter of two percussionists hampered the leader more than they helped him…There were several awesome moments, when, unencumbered by the other musicians, he was able to give free rein to his unique imaginative powers…Tyner’s most effective recordings are those on which he is assisted simply by drums and bass.”

Sources:

• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/music/mccoy-tyner-dead.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCoy_Tyner
• https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/how-mccoy-tyner-dead-81-reinvented-jazz-piano/607717/
• https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/09/mccoy-tyner-obituary

 Over the past few COVID influenced months, the Lobero has worked hard to keep the theater relevant, and one avenue we’ve managed to keep that enthusiasm up was to borrow, quite literally, from our storied past- through our ongoing Lobero Intermission series. I was excited to sit down with my good friend who serves as a Lobero Board member, Ghostlight Society member, Streaming Series supporter, and of course, unofficial Lobero historian, Brett Hodges, and interview him around his often retrospective Lobero perspective:

Questions About Brett

BM:  Where are you from originally?

BH:  I grew up in West Los Angeles.

BM:  What brought you to SB?

BH:  I went to college in England and while I was away, my family relocated to SB. After graduating I moved here to be with my family. It was a better west LA!

BM:   Tell me a little about your community involvement here in Santa Barbara? What organizations have you gravitated toward in offering time and support locally?

BH:  Our daughter was a lifer (K – 12) at Laguna Blanca School, and we all loved the school and I was honored to be able to serve on the board. My wife and I are also involved with the local equine community and riding trails network. I’m also currently a Santa Barbara Historical Museum board member.

Questions About the Lobero, and Support

BM:  What was your first show at the Lobero?

BH:  This is funny, but back in the 70’s travelogues were a big deal. It’s a genre that has now completely disappeared, but I remember going to the Lobero and watching films about trips in exotic locations like Tibet and Australia. I also remember a fantastic evening where Hal Holbrook portrayed Mark Twain. And as I got older, I would say that the Sings Like Hell series really reconnected me with the Lobero.

BM:  As your involvement has grown, have there been any Lobero performances that have stood out?

BH:  Randy Newman, Bonnie Raitt, Aimee Mann, Richard Thompson, Marc Broussard. Neil Young’s three-night appearance a couple of years ago was really memorable. Bluegrass great Ricky Skaggs was a fantastic recent evening.

BM:  How were you introduced to the Lobero board?

BH:  Through my childhood friend, Steve Hayes, who as a Lobero board member kept raving about the theater. As I started to attend more and more concerts, I think I joined Steve in morphing into a Lobero “superfan.”

BM:  What does the Lobero mean to you and what is its place in the SB community?

BH:  I think the Lobero has historically been Santa Barbara’s cultural epicenter, and I love its rich pedigree. I think its relatively small size of 600 seats has been a blessing in many ways. From a programming perspective, Lobero managers can take risks on more edgy and relevant acts because their bookings aren’t as driven by the need to appeal to mainstream tastes in order to fill a huge theater. From the ticket buyer’s perspective, a small theater means you’re going to be closer to the artist on stage, and that creates a more intimate and memorable experience.

BM:  You serve as the chair of the Development Committee. What makes the Lobero worthy of private support?

BH:  For nearly 150 years, the Lobero has proven its value as a venue which brings world-class talent to our town. Its relationships with organizations like CAMA and the Music Academy of the West have also been all-important. And just as meaningful, it is Santa Barbara’s community theater – collaborating with local schools and youth arts organizations. I don’t think you can underestimate how being able to stand on a stage in front of an audience of people can be a life-changing, self-esteem-boosting experience for a child.

Questions about the Lobero Intermission series, and the “Live from the Lobero” streaming series

BM:  Thank you again for all your countless hours of research over these past couple of months in finding some incredible Lobero memories. What about this research appealed to you?

BH:  Working on the Lobero archive and writing the Intermission series posts has been really eye-opening. I find it fascinating to see the Lobero’s historical calendar of events as a lens to better understand the cultural tastes and belief systems of times gone by. I think it can certainly be argued that the modern Lobero Theatre (1924 – present-day) is one of the most important cultural venues in the country, and it’s fun to chronicle the important artists who have appeared here. But I’m particularly enjoying archiving the old Lobero Opera house (1873 – 1924) and seeing how its scheduling reflects how society at the time was trying to come to terms with fundamental issues like gender, race, and spiritualism. (check out our Intermission blog archives to see the many entries).

BM:  What have been some personal favorites/highlights from your ongoing Lobero research?

BH:  I love to be surprised by the unexpected!

• Who knew (well at least I didn’t) that roller skating was a national craze in the 1880s, and that all the seats were removed from the Lobero and that for months at a time the theater was used as a nightly roller skating rink? There was even a Mardi Gras “grand masquerade” roller skating party to end the season – elaborate masks and costumes, presumably liquor while moving at speed in a crowd – what could possibly go wrong?
• Interesting one-off appearances by cultural icons of the day, like 1880’s boxing world champion John L. Sullivan appearing in a stage performance which also included a boxing match. Celebrity superstar Lillie Langtry starring in a play in 1904.
• Ingrid Bergman on stage, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Eugene O’Neill and dozens of other Hollywood celebrities in the audience in June 1941. Just a few months before Pearl Harbor and the end of the world as everyone there that night knew it.

Final Questions

BM:  The pandemic has been a game-changer in every sector, but very few are as impacted as much as live music venues like the Lobero. What has changed, if anything, in how you view the Lobero in this current COVID landscape compared to previously?

BH:   I’m so proud of the way the Lobero board and management have decided to try to use the pandemic as a learning experience. We didn’t shut the doors and turn off the lights for a year plus – instead, we’re experimenting with a live-streaming series. While there will be inevitable wins and losses in the series, and while watching a screen can never replace a genuine bum-in-the-chair experience, I love the way we’re keeping the Lobero brand alive and relevant.

BM:  What are your hopes moving forward for the Lobero?  What exciting directions would you like the theater to move in?

BH:  I think it would be really interesting if we can find a cost-effective way to incorporate live-streaming into the Lobero’s future – even after the pandemic has gone and real bodies are taking seats in the theater. For 150 years the Lobero has been limited to selling tickets in a relatively small geographical area. But if we can do deals with talent to allow for live streaming their concerts to locations that aren’t on their current tour, we could conceivably broaden their earnings while at the same time making the Lobero Theatre more of a national and even international brand.

INTERMISSION IS GENEROUSLY SPONSORED BY EARL MINNIS

On the evening of October 4, 1977, a petite woman with a Swiss-German accent held a standing-room-only Lobero audience spellbound as she spoke about what she called the greatest mystery in science – death.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross could joke about being the “death-and-dying lady,” but her pioneering work in changing the way Western culture dealt with death, dying and bereavement made her one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1926. The first of triplets, Kübler-Ross weighed only two pounds at birth and was not expected to live. By the sixth grade, she announced to her parents that she wanted to be a doctor, and at the age of 16 – and defying her parents – Kübler-Ross left home and volunteered at the largest hospital in Zurich to help refugees from Nazi Germany.

When World War II ended, Kübler-Ross joined the International Voluntary Service for Peace, a European organization that served as the model for the Peace Corps, and she was one of the first outsiders to visit the Maidanek concentration camp in Poland. There she found the walls covered with drawings of butterflies, scratched by children who were about to be sent to the gas chambers. It was at Maidanek, she later wrote, “in the midst of suffering that I found my goal.”

Returning to Switzerland, Kübler-Ross earned her medical degree at the University of Zurich, and met Emanuel Ross, an American doctor. They married in 1958 and moved to New York, where she completed her psychiatric residency. In 1962, Kübler-Ross was a teaching fellow at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and was shocked by the way the hospitals she worked in dealing with dying patients. “Everything was huge and very depersonalized, very technical,” she told the BBC in a 1983 interview. “Patients who were terminally ill were literally left alone, nobody talked to them.” In response to what she felt was an unhealthy approach to death and dying, Kübler-Ross started a seminar for medical students where she interviewed people with terminal diagnoses and asked them to talk about how they felt about death. Although she met with stiff resistance from other physicians, the seminars were soon standing room only.

In 1969, Kübler-Ross wrote a book called On Death and Dying. In it, she described how patients talk about dying and discussed how end-of-life care could be improved. The most publicized part of the book was Kübler-Ross’ description of 5 common emotional stages to dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While the public, and even surprisingly the medical establishment, responded enthusiastically to the “5 Stages of Dying,” Kübler-Ross felt most took it too literally. According to the New York Times, “Not all dying patients follow the same progression, Dr. Kübler-Ross said, but most experience two or more stages. Moreover, she found, people who are experiencing traumatic life changes like divorces often experience similar stages. Another conclusion she reached was that the acceptance of death came most easily for people who could look back and feel that they had not wasted their lives.”

By 1972, Kübler-Ross was frustrated by the way her research had been misinterpreted by her medical colleagues and decided to devote herself full-time to lecturing and teaching a seminar called “Life, Death, and Transition.” Unfortunately, it was also at this time that Kübler-Ross’ professional reputation began to decline when she expanded her work on end-of-life care into theories about what happens after death and started researching near-death experiences and spirit mediums. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, her lectures – including the two she gave at the Lobero Theatre – were evenly divided between her groundbreaking work on death-and-dying and the hospice movement and spiritualism.

As explained by the New York Times,

“In 1976, she fell under the sway of Jay Barham, a former Arkansas sharecropper who had founded the Church of the Facet of Divinity and said he was able to channel spirits and communicate with them. Dr. Kübler-Ross talked about setting up a worldwide network of franchised centers with him and his wife to counsel on the problems of dying and living. His program was investigated by the San Diego district attorney’s office because of accusations of sexual misbehavior. She severed ties with him, and years later acknowledged that she had been mistaken about him and that he had deceived many people.”

In the 1990s, Kübler-Ross suffered a series of debilitating strokes and moved into a hospice. She died on August 24, 2004, of natural causes, surrounded by friends and family. Not long before her death, she had finished work on her 20^th and final book, On Grief and Grieving.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_K%C3%BCbler-Ross
• https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/us/elisabeth-kubler-ross-78-dies-psychiatrist-revolutionized-care-terminally-ill.html
• https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53267505
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1470196/Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross.html
• https://www.economist.com/obituary/2004/09/02/elisabeth-kubler-ross

On September 15, 1988, Burl Ives, a 79-year-old, white-bearded icon of music and film took to the Lobero stage in a one-man show about another American legend, poet, and essayist Walt Whitman.

The Mystic Trumpeter – Walt Whitman at 70, was written by Ives and his wife, Dorothy, and was Burl Ives’ final appearance on stage, marking the end of a remarkable 7-decade performance career.

Burle Icle Ivanhoe Ives was born in 1909 to English Irish tenant farmers in southern Illinois. He learned about music from his tobacco-chewing, pipe-smoking grandmother and first sang in public at a soldier’s reunion when he was only 4 years old. In 1928, Ives enrolled at Eastern Illinois Teachers College but dropped out before graduating and spent much of the early 1930s hitchhiking and riding boxcars across America with his banjo, doing odd jobs and learning songs from cowboys, miners, hoboes, and itinerant preachers.

In 1937 Ives moved to New York City, where he was a regular performer at the newly opened Village Vanguard club – the epicenter of Greenwich Village’s budding folk scene. It was also at this time that Ives began acting and he made his Broadway debut in 1938. By 1940, Burl Ives had his own national radio show on CBS, called The Wayfarin’ Stranger, where he popularized many of the traditional folk songs he had learned while hitchhiking around the country a few years earlier.

Many music historians feel that the American folk music revival began in New York in 1940 with the Almanac Singers, a folk group founded by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.

The group specialized in topical and political songs – many reflecting personal experiences during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl – and advocating anti-war, anti-racism, and pro-union philosophy. Burl Ives sang with the Almanac Singers on occasion, though he was more well-known for non-political ballads and traditional folk songs like “Foggy Foggy Dew,” “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and “On Top of Old Smoky.”

“Burl Ives is America’s most beloved singer of folk songs. He has sung America high, wide, low and long….In his songs, he has made American history and legend shine like stars.” – Horace Reynolds in the Christian Science Monitor

Previous Next

Close

Close

Close

In 1955 Burl Ives was cast in the role of “Big Daddy” in the Broadway play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He also starred with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in the 1958 film version of the Tennessee Williams story. In 1958, Ives won the Academy Award for best-supporting actor for The Big Country, a story of two families feuding over water rights.

From 1975 – 1990 Burl and his wife Dorothy lived in Santa Barbara. Home was “Casa del Sueño,” a grand Montecito estate which had been built by the philanthropist Amy Du Pont. The couple was active in Santa Barbara social life and were frequently spotted cruising State Street with their little white poodle in Burl’s bright red, vintage Cadillac convertible.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burl_Ives
• https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-burl-ives-19950415-story.html  
• https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/15/obituaries/burl-ives-the-folk-singer-whose-imposing-acting-won-an-oscar-dies-at-85.html

On Saturday evening, September 8, 1962, jazz singer Sarah Vaughan stepped onto the Lobero stage.

Almost exactly 20 years earlier, her career had begun on a dare when she had entered an amateur singing contest at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem – and won first place. The prize was the opportunity to appear in a one week show with her idol Ella Fitzgerald. From that auspicious beginning, Vaughan had built a career as one of the most acclaimed singers of the 20th century.

Sarah Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1924. She began taking piano lessons at the age of seven, sang in a church choir, and in her teens dropped out of high school to concentrate on music. When she was 18 years old a friend dared Vaughan to enter the Apollo Theater Amateur Night contest, and she had sung the jazz standard “Body and Soul” and won. A month later, she was invited back to the Apollo to be the opening act for the 25-year-old Ella Fitzgerald.

Sarah Vaughan’s career spanned nearly 50 years, and she is often mentioned alongside her contemporaries Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday as being one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. Vaughan didn’t like being labeled as simply a jazz or blues singer. However, one label that music historians have consistently used to describe her vocal style is “bebop.” Ella Fitzgerald was the “Queen of Swing,” Billie Holiday was the “Queen of Blues,” and Sarah Vaughan was the “Queen of Bebop.”

Bebop was a style of jazz that developed in the early 1940s as a reaction to dance-oriented big band swing music. Bebop wasn’t intended for dancing and featured complex chord progressions and improvisation. As explained by Wikipedia, bebop

“seemed jarringly different to the ears of the public, who were used to the bouncy, organized, danceable compositions of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller during the swing era. Instead, bebop appeared too sound racing, nervous, erratic, and often fragmented. But to jazz musicians and jazz music lovers, bebop was an exciting and beautiful revolution in the art of jazz.”

Sarah Vaughan was the winner of four Grammy^® Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. Her wondrous voice influenced countless other singers, and defied adequate description except by the most adjective-blessed writers. In her obituary, The New York Times wrote that she “had a chocolate-mousse contralto that dipped into bass territory and soared to birdlike highs. Vaughan improvised extravagantly melodic lines; she heard all the harmonic choices in a chord and breezed through them at will. Her voice had the textures and colors of an orchestra. And she swung.”

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Vaughan
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebop
• https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/obituaries/sarah-vaughan-divine-one-of-jazz-singing-is-dead-at-66.html

Video: 

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rShoKi8c1vY

On the night of September 7, 1903, the Lobero Opera House curtain rose and a Santa Barbara audience was introduced to Zamloch the Great, immodestly promoted as “The Wonder Worker of the World.”

Magic was hugely popular in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and so too was interest in spiritualism – the idea that it was possible to communicate with the dead. The marketing genius of touring magicians like Zamloch was combining sleight of hand magic with spiritualist tricks like spirit table-rapping.

Anton Francis Von Zamloch was born in Austria in 1849 and joined a traveling circus when he was 14 years old. After emigrating to the United States, he began his magic career and found a successful niche performing in western mining towns like Silver City, Nevada, and Tombstone, Arizona. Arriving in a town, he typically paid a visit to the local newspaper office, where he would ensure free publicity by entertaining reporters with his conjuring tricks. According to one newspaper clipping, at one office he made three unopened quarts of whiskey and a large box of cigars vanish, at which point the newspaper editors accused him of banditry and he was nearly shot.

In the late 1800s magicians like Zamloch capitalized on the public’s interest in spiritualism. One of Zamloch’s trademark routines involved his spirit-rapping table and goblin drum, which allowed audience members to ask questions and supposedly receive answers from the spirit world. While some audience members obviously understood stage acts like spirit-rapping to be pure entertainment, large numbers of the audience certainly saw them as proof that communication with the dead was indeed possible.

Magicians at the turn of the 20^h century gleefully exploited this overlapping of magic and the other-worldly. A favorite theme of advertising posters at the time showed devilish red imps whispering dark secrets into the magician’s ear. The implication – not always tongue-in-cheek – was that only through a pact with the devil were these astounding acts possible.

The Oakland Tribune wrote about a Zamloch performance, “His extravaganzas of magic were so swiftly executed and so mysteriously subtle that two centuries ago he could have been richly deserved being burned at the stake as a necromancer of the blackest arts and a disciple of his satanic majesty.”

Santa Barbara audiences loved Zamloch, and he appeared at the Lobero for 5 nights between 1899 and 1903. The Santa Barbara Independent proclaimed,

“There is only one Zamloch in the world – men of such marvelous skill have never been plentiful…we expect to see the beautiful Opera House completely filled with the most jolly set of people ever assembled in this city. Many valuable presents will be distributed this evening and we are sure everyone will be pleased and more than pleased.”

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Zamloch
• https://www.newspapers.com/

On this day in 1943, 27-year-old violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin stepped onto the Lobero stage with his 1733 “Prince Khevenhüller” Stradivarius and mesmerized the audience with his flamboyant virtuosity.

His Lobero concert was one of just 3 appearances in California after returning from a wartime visit to England where he had spent six weeks playing at munitions factories and performing concerts for American and British troops.

Yehudi Menuhin was born in 1916 in New York City to Lithuanian Jewish parents and was one of the most publicized musical child prodigies of the 20th century. Menuhin made his solo debut at the age of 7, playing with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. By the time he was 12, he had performed in New York, Paris, Berlin, and London.

As Strings Magazine explained,

“Menuhin was one of history’s great prodigies, a fundamentally open and intuitive player, who some listeners felt came close to the divine—as if he didn’t just perform music but ‘channeled’ it. Menuhin had an instantly recognizable tone, deeply personal at all times. From the first note he played, his vibrato communicated a kind of emotional involvement that seemed to transcend the specific music he was playing.”

Yehudi Menuhin was one of a gifted generation of violinists who rose to prominence in the early 20th century – a list that included Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, and Isaac Stern. But a quality that distinguished Menuhin from his colleagues and that forms an important part of his historical legacy, was his deep and abiding interest in humanitarian work.

During World War II, Menuhin spent much of his time in Europe – and performed 500 concerts for Allied troops. Troops responded so enthusiastically to his playing that in the summer of 1944, General Eisenhower cabled Menuhin’s manager from Supreme Headquarters, stating, “We request that you definitely cancel all arrangements for Menuhin concerts up to and including 13 October. His presence in Europe with fighting troops at this critical juncture of the war is essential in its effect upon their morale.”

In July 1945, Yehudi Menuhin traveled to Germany with English composer Benjamin Britten, and the two performed for the surviving inmates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after its liberation in April 1945.

Sources:

• https://stringsmagazine.com/a-great-among-greats-where-does-henryk-szeryngs-technique-style-fit-within-his-generation/
• https://www.menuhin.org/
• https://www.abc.net.au/classic/programs/legends/legends/12112626
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_Menuhin

On August 21, 1941, a young Irish actress named Geraldine Fitzgerald took to the Lobero stage to star in the world premiere of an English murder mystery called Lottie Dundass.

A year earlier, Fitzgerald had been nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier, and Lottie Dundass was her highly publicized return to the theater.

Geraldine Fitzgerald was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1913, and made her Broadway debut at the age of 25, starring with Orson Welles in the play Heartbreak House. Hollywood producer Hal Wallis saw her performance and signed her to a contract with Warner Brothers Studio, where she soon appeared in a number of acclaimed films, typically cast as the sensitive and devoted friend of the film’s female lead.

Lottie Dundass was the second offering in producer David O. Selznick’s 1941 Lobero summer season. And just like the first play – Anna Christie starring Ingrid Bergman – the opening night premiere drew a large contingent of Hollywood celebrities, including Bette Davis, Orson Welles, Olivia de Havilland, Delores Del Rio and Raymond Massey.

Lottie Dundass was a fascinating portrait of a psychologically flawed, neurotic heroine.

The San Francisco Chronicle described the plotline – “Lottie Dundass is a mad girl with a flaming temperament; consumed with ambition, she impulsively brushes aside every obstacle in her path, and murders the understudy who turns up on the night which Lottie has set aside for her triumphant stage debut.”

The play received mixed reviews, with most critics saying it swung too wildly between tragedy and comedy and needed rewriting before it was ready for Broadway. But Geraldine Fitzgerald’s acting was solidly praised.

Newspapers raved about Fitzgerald’s performance –

“Her feverish, white-faced Lottie, with her uncontrollable rages, her white-hot intensity, her anguished foreknowledge of the fate in store for her, was an extraordinary study in character.” San Francisco Chronicle

“She virtually took the audience by storm in the final fevered act of the stage piece. There were cheers and stampings of feet to betoken her success and if for no other reason than her presence, the latest production of the Selznick company promises to be a hit during its brief stay here.” Los Angeles Times

Sources:

• https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/arts/geraldine-fitzgerald-91-star-of-stage-and-film-dies.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jul/20/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1

Newspapers.com

On August 13, 1926, Will Morrissey’s Music Hall Revue came to town for the Lobero Theatre’s first (and likely only) “midnight matinee.”

The Revue was an enormous production involving a cast of 50 performers, who made up 28 acts of music, dancing, and comedy. Included in the Revue were two young men from Spokane, Washington, who were billed as “Two Boys and a Piano” – a pianist named Al Rinker, and a precociously talented 23-year-old jazz crooner by the name of Bing Crosby.

Bing Crosby and Al Rinker were two high school buddies from Washington who played together in a jazz band called “The Musicaladers.” In 1925, after 3 years at Gonzaga University studying law, Crosby figured he might make more money as a singer than by pursuing a career in law, and he and Rinker left Spokane for Hollywood in Crosby’s 1916 Model-T Ford. Arriving in Los Angeles, they got some minor performing roles before being hired to appear as a duo in the Will Morrissey Music Hall Revue.

Crosby and Rinker joined Will Morrissey’s Music Hall Revue in April 1926, and each was paid $75 a week. During the Revue’s 14 week run in Los Angeles, there was publicity about Morrissey being arrested for drunken driving and also about checks payable to the cast being dishonored. Partway through a show in July 1926, Morrissey told the audience that the performance could not continue as he hadn’t been paid by his partner. Fortunately, his partner’s agent was in the audience and he put up $1,000 to allow the evening’s show to be completed.

After its run in Los Angeles, the Revue traveled to San Diego, and then to the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, where it played the nights of August 13 and 14. A novelty of the Revue was that each Saturday evening the performance started at midnight, and was called a “midnight matinee.”

Crosby and Rinker’s appearance came midway through the Revue, and the duo was given time for 3 – 4 songs. With Rinker at the piano and Crosby standing to do lead vocals, the two specialized in interesting jazz rhythms and tricky harmonies. Crosby was especially adept at scat singing – improvising with what became his signature “bub-bub-ooing” when he forgot the lyrics.

The “Two Boys and a Piano” lively and modern songs and Crosby’s loose-jointed, relaxed vocal style proved so popular – especially with younger audience members – that the duo was considered a “show-stopper,” and audiences frequently demanded numerous encores. Reviewers often highlighted their performance above even the Revue’s headliners.

In a 1926 review of the show, Variety Magazine wrote,

“Blues of the feverish variety is their specialty, and they are well equipped with material, presumably their own. Young and clean cut…wherever the public goes for “hot” numbers served hot, Crosby and Rinker ought to have an easy time. When they have completed a few weeks locally they will unquestionably find a market for their wares in other presentation houses.”

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Crosby
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzTSFzwJTyc