On August 8, 1982, the American rockabilly-punk band The Blasters came to Lobero and brought down the house. Literally.

Though it’s hard to distinguish legend from truth, stories were told of fans leaping from the stage into a punk mosh pit; wooden armrests on velvet fabric chairs being broken off by kids dancing on the seats. Some blood may have been shed. It was rock ‘n’ roll at its most energetic – and loudest. As the Los Angeles Times wrote of the band’s Hollywood Palladium concert the following night, “Forget nuclear war. Just hire The Blasters.”

The Blasters were formed in Downey, California in 1979 by brothers Phil and Dave Alvin. Their sound combined 1950’s rockabilly with elements of 1970’s punk – an energized rock & roll which led them to be billed with emerging Southern California acts like X, The Cramps, and Black Flag.

But compared to the snarling nihilism of hardcore Southern California punk bands like Black Flag, The Blasters sound was much more good-time rock ‘n’ roll. With Dave Alvin’s songwriting and twangy lead guitar, and brother Phil’s rhythm guitar picking and vocals, The Blasters high-spirited, driving energy had the unique ability to trigger crowds into swing-dancing or heading to the stage-front mosh pit.

The Lobero evening opened innocently enough with a set by Huntington Beach’s Red Devils, led by cowboy-booted Emmy Lee on vocals. Check out this footage. http://ow.ly/G7L950AWOPY

Then out came The Blasters. In retrospect, the Lobero management should probably have read more into the title of The Blasters’ summer tour – “Work up a Sweat on a Summer Night.” The venerable Lobero was a theater where polite, well-dressed ushers escorted guests to their assigned seats – and expected them to stay there. Blasters’ fans had other ideas.

When Dave Alvin returned to the Lobero to play in 2011 he jokingly reminisced about the 1982 concert,

“Different kinds of people showed up to our show at the Lobero, some wanted to swing dance, but others wanted to dive off the stage and make a mosh pit…Funny how 28 years ago that caused bloodshed, damage, chairs flying, windows busted, helicopters policing. Now, I don’t see one person dancing.”

The Lobero management was not amused by the evening’s antics, and they banned The Blasters from ever again appearing at the Lobero. Even more significantly, all other rock and roll bands were effectively nixed from the Lobero stage for the next 20 years. Amped up rock ‘n’ roll didn’t make its way back into the Lobero until the 2000s, when new Executive Director David Asbell booked acts like INXS and Smashing Pumpkins, and more recently when Neil Young and Promise of the Real appeared for three rocking nights in 2018.

Sources:

• Special Thanks to Memories of Old Santa Barbara Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/159226190820935/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blasters
• https://www.newspapers.com/image/400570015/?terms=%22the%2Bblasters%22
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHLN3JoRmf8&fbclid=IwAR3H1jf-evo5fLSTERga7YeAX5YuNgr5FmFL3yfVQhfP11RVJ_xQxqHj8qI
• https://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/print/102711_jeff_moehlis_dave_alvin

On August 4, 1924, the new Lobero Theatre was finally opened with the off-Broadway premiere of an audacious play about a dream called Beggar on Horseback.

It was an appropriate choice – as the new Lobero itself was a dream realized. In 1916, the lights had been turned off at the old Lobero Opera House and it had taken 8 years and $200,000 in community fundraising before the Lobero was reborn as a George Washington Smith designed Spanish revival community theater.

To inaugurate the new theater, the Lobero’s owner – the Community Arts Association – at first hoped to find a suitable Spanish / Old California-themed play. Failing this, a committee led by talented director Nina Moise settled on a play that was having record-breaking success in New York.

Beggar on Horseback was a wildly creative, satirical comedy written by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. The play is a parable about trading one’s artistic talents for financial gain and features a young composer who is tempted to marry for money. One night, while working on a musical score, he falls asleep and has a surreal, “Alice In Wonderland-like” dream/nightmare of his life as the husband of a rich woman.

Beggar on Horseback was enjoying a successful run in New York when permission was granted by the play’s producer and part-time Santa Barbara resident, Winthrop Ames, to run the play concurrently at the new Lobero. The play was scheduled to run for two weeks starting August 4, with opening night also serving as the inaugural event of a new community summer celebration called “Old Spanish Days Fiesta.”

As historian Hattie Beresford wrote, “On August 3, two masked men on horseback – one in the costume of a Spanish caballero and the other in rags – rode the streets of Santa Barbara advertising the opening play at the Lobero the following night. Since the Lobero had only 670 seats, the first night’s audience consisted of the people who made the theatre a brick and concrete possibility – the stockholders of the Lobero Theatre Company. The next two nights were reserved for members of the Community Arts Association, and then the doors were opened to the general public.”

Beggar on Horseback was an extremely challenging play to produce, especially at a brand-new theater. The play was directed by Nina Moise and required twenty professional stagehands to build and maintain the set. All told there were nineteen individuals who assisted in costumes and stage decorations, and the cast consisted of sixteen men and five women. Ticket prices for the Lobero play started at fifty cents and went up to $2.00 for premium seats.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggar_on_Horseback
• Hattie Beresford “The Way it Was” in the Montecito Journal
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015612/mediaindex?ref_=tt_mv_close

The annual Santa Barbara Fiesta play which debuted at the Lobero Theatre on August 1, 1939 was especially rich in pageantry and drama. 20 singing señoritas filled the entrance loggia to greet arriving guests who had come to see the classic melodrama The Mistress of the Inn.

In the audience were 12 couples representing the city’s oldest families. And commanding the stage in the role of the nefarious, women-hating Caballero De Rippalda, was a new Hollywood star a lanky 28-year-old actor named Vincent Price.

Vincent Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1911. After graduating from Yale University, Price moved to London, where he intended to study for a master’s degree in fine arts. Instead, he was drawn to the theater and made his first stage appearance at the age of 24. In 1938 Price had his cinema debut, and just months after his Lobero appearance Price appeared in his first leading role in the 1940 horror film The Invisible Man Returns.

There was something about Vincent Price’s demeanor and voice which made him a perfect villain. As the website Rotten Tomatoes explains, “everything about Price suggested malice, with each line reading dripping with condescension and loathing.” But rather than complain about being type-cast, Vincent Price relished his career portraying creepy, ghoulish, and murderous characters.

From the 1940s to the 1970s Vincent Price was known as the “master of the macabre” and ruined the peaceful sleep of a generation of teenagers with memorable performances in horror films like 1953’s 3-D hit House of Wax, The Fly, House on Haunted Hill, and The Pit and the Pendulum.

Price also continued to do theater, and in 1951 he returned to the Lobero for several nights to perform in the role of the debonair (and non-murderous) doctor Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.

In an interview, Price explained, “I don’t play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge. The best parts in movies are the heavies. The hero is usually someone who really has nothing to do. He comes out on top, but it’s the heavy who has all the fun.”

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Price
• https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/vincent_price

Special thanks to the Santa Barbara Public Library and Jace Turner, Community Relations Librarian.

On Wednesday evening, July 30, 1941 Hollywood paparazzi and autograph seekers swarmed the entrance to the Lobero Theatre.

A live radio broadcast corralled celebrities for sound bite interviews in the theater foyer. This was opening night for Eugene O’Neill’s play Anna Christie, starring Ingrid Bergman. In the packed audience were playwright O’Neill, and a large Hollywood contingent including Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Lana Turner and Olivia De Havilland.

In the spring of 1941, famed Hollywood producer David O. Selznick (Gone with the Wind) announced that he would be producing a summer series of plays at the Lobero Theatre. The Selznick Company’s ambitions were grand – using top film and stage stars to create a renaissance of drama in Southern California and “making the Lobero the birthplace of important contributions to the American theatre.”

The play chosen to open the series was Anna Christie, Eugene O’Neill’s drama of a former prostitute who falls in love but runs into difficulty turning her life around. O’Neill had won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christie and in 1930 it had been made into a film starring Greta Garbo. To direct the Lobero play, Selznick hired John Houseman, who was Orson Welles’ film and stage producing partner.

Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1915 and had made her first English-language film in 1940 – a David O. Selznick production called Intermezzo. When she took to the Lobero stage for the first of her 5 performances in July 1941, Bergman was considered a rising Hollywood talent, but was not yet the superstar she would become a year later with 1942’s Casablanca. Bergman wrote in her autobiography that her Lobero appearance was her first real glimpse of stardom,

“People were turned away every night even after the orchestra pit and every corner were filled with extra chairs. The autograph hunters not only stormed every window and door, they even tried the roof. I felt like a real star!”.

The opening night of Anna Christie was a huge hit and the enthusiastic audience demanded 10 curtain calls. Bergman’s performance received glowing reviews from both the local and national press, with Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times writing, “The third act climax in which Miss Bergman limned the past of Anna had notable inspiration … it took its place as one of the most memorable scenes ever done on the stage of Southern California.”

Anna Christie was also notable for the effort made by producer John Houseman to engage with the Santa Barbara community, especially students. The UCSB El Gaucho newspaper wrote, “Houseman has announced that a special rate of 55 cents for seats will be made for students wishing to attend the Saturday matinee. A cordial invitation has also been extended by Houseman for students interested in stagecraft to come out on stage after the performance and inspect the sets, properties, special effects, etc..”

And for her part, Ingrid Bergman showed why she is remembered as one of Hollywood’s most gracious and accessible actors.

The UCSB El Gaucho wrote, “Following the matinee performance, Miss Bergman will meet any who care to come backstage and will autograph programs for them.”

Sources:

• Ingrid Bergman: My Story
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Bergman

On July 28, 1970, American classical pianist Jerome Lowenthal first appeared under the spotlight on the Lobero stage.

50 years and exactly 100 glorious Lobero concerts later (yes, we counted), Maestro Lowenthal continues to be a force in the world of classical music. At the age of 88, he performs annually in music festivals around the globe and conducts numerous masterclasses with exceptional young pianists.

Jerome Lowenthal was born in Philadelphia in 1932 and made his debut as a solo pianist at the age of 13 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In an interview, Mr. Lowenthal explained how piano came naturally to him at a very young age.

“There was a piano in my family home and that was true of almost everybody from even lower-middle-class circumstances when I was a child. And piano lessons were considered something that had to be done. My sister was taking lessons and not doing particularly well, and when she left the piano I would toddle over and play her pieces by ear. I went to the piano as if I had been born to do that, and I never looked back.”

In his long career, Jerome Lowenthal has performed with famous conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, Eugene Ormandy, and Leonard Bernstein. He has played with major orchestras across the United States and has been a frequent judge at international piano competitions.

Jerome Lowenthal is regarded as a specialist in Franz Liszt, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Béla Bartók. He has been described as a “virtuoso of the fingers and emotions” who plays with a “youthful intensity and eloquence born of vast life experience.”

In his decades of performing at the Lobero Theatre as part of the Music Academy of the West’s summer seasons, Lowenthal has twice played sonatas with violinist Itzhak Perlman. He has also shared the Lobero stage and performed a piano duo with Ronit Amir (his late wife).

Besides his stellar performing career, Jerome Lowenthal is also known as a master teacher. For 50 years he served on the faculty of Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West, and he continues to teach at New York’s Juilliard School, where he has been a faculty member since 1991. Known for his dry wit and positive and encouraging mentoring, Maestro Lowenthal has helped thousands of talented pianists define their concept of sound and find their calling as musicians.

Sources:

• https://www.musicacademy.org/profile/jerome-lowenthal/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Lowenthal
• https://www.facebook.com/jeromelowenthal/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfoQyLRKJSg

On July 27, 1964, the actress Ethel Waters mesmerized an opening-night Lobero audience by reprising her Broadway award-winning performance in the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding.

Waters was an African-American blues singer and actor who consistently broke the color barrier during her long career, and her 5 nights on the Lobero stage were considered the highlight of the 1964 summer stage season.

Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania in 1896. She first married at the age of 13 and began singing blues at a Philadelphia nightclub when she was 17. In the 1920’s she received her first recording contract and toured the nation on what was known as the “white time” vaudeville circuit – performing live for white audiences and combined with screenings of silent films.

In 1933, Ethel Waters was cast in a starring role in an Irving Berlin Broadway musical and became the first African American woman to integrate Broadway. A few years later, she would become the first African American to star in her own television show, a 1939 NBC special called The Ethel Waters Show.

Carson McCullers’s 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding was adapted into a Broadway play in 1950 and into a Fred Zinnemann film in 1952. Considered to be one of the great “coming-of-age” stories in American literature, the story is set in a small town in Georgia where twelve-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams (played by on stage and screen by Julie Harris) and Frankie’s surrogate mother, the cook and housekeeper Berenice Sadie Brown (Ethel Waters), sensitively explore the era’s gender and racial expectations. Waters won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for her performance.

The Santa Barbara News-Press raved about Ethel Waters’ Lobero appearance. “Miss Waters, truly a legend in her own time, put on a display of emotions ranging from immense dignity to giggling little-girlishness, and the opening-night audience which almost filled the Lobero loved her shadings and nuances, her easy naturalness and her command of the stage.”

Sources:

• National Museum of African American History & Culture Library of America
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Waters
• Santa Barbara News-Press

Special thanks to the Santa Barbara Public Library and Jace Turner, Community Relations Librarian.

On July 23, 1942, just seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II, the Lobero stage was the setting for a live broadcast of one of radio’s first talk shows, “America’s Town Meeting of the Air.”

The subject of the evening’s discussion was a topic that was suddenly thrust to the forefront of the minds of American youth – “War Marriages, are they Good or Bad?”.

“America’s Town Meeting of the Air” was an NBC public affairs radio series which began in 1935. It was created and hosted by George V. Denny, Jr., a former New York stage actor. NBC wanted to create a program that would replicate the local town meetings of Colonial America, and began each program with the ringing of a town crier’s bell and an announcement, “Town meeting tonight! Come to the old Town Hall and talk it over!”

“Town Meeting” was not radio’s first debate program but it was innovative in that it opened its weekly discussion to live audience questions. Audience participation was highly encouraged – people cheered or applauded when they liked what a speaker said, and they hissed or booed when they felt the speaker was wrong.

The weekly live series was usually broadcast from New York City’s Town Hall, but several times a year the show traveled the country. July 23, 1942, was the first Santa Barbara broadcast, and audience participation was so lively that “Town Meeting” returned to the Lobero Theatre each of the next four years.

“War marriages” became a topic of debate not long after the United States joined World War II in December 1941. In 1942 alone, 1.8 million weddings took place, up 83 percent from 10 years before. And two-thirds of those brides were marrying men newly enlisted in the military.

UCSB’s El Gaucho newspaper (the predecessor to today’s Daily Nexus), encouraged readers to attend the Lobero broadcast, and a student columnist wrote:

“The topic this week is the all-important one of war marriages…. Older people probably don’t have to worry about a problem like this one, but believe you me, it is uppermost in the minds of a lot of the so-called younger generation.”

“Those in favor of these marriages look at the whole situation from what is to me, a purely Hedonistic viewpoint. ‘What the hell,’ they say, ‘I’m going to war… If we do get married now at least we will have had a taste of happiness.”

“These are the young in heart and the strong in body. These are the men who can’t conceive of lost sight, missing limbs, or any of the other catastrophes which make war the hell that it is.”

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Town_Meeting_of_the_Air
• https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/NHC/NewPDFs/USA/USA%20War.Department.Ed.Man.Can-War-Marriages-Work.pdf
• https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/weddings/165-years-of-wedding-announcements/world-war-two-weddings
• https://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/downloads/79407×6

From July 14 to 19, 1948, Lobero Theatre audiences were treated to an enthralling portrayal of one of the great tragic figures of American literature – the character of Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”

Appearing in the role was Lon Chaney Jr., who years earlier had starred in the original, Academy Award-nominated film version of the story.

John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella “Of Mice and Men” is the story of two men – intelligent and quick-witted George, and big, lumbering Lennie, who was mentally challenged “on accounta he’d been kicked in the head by a horse.” The two are farm laborers in California’s Salinas Valley during the Great Depression, hustling for day jobs on valley ranches, and dreaming of a time when they can own a small piece of land and a simple shack and not have to live hand-to-mouth – when disaster strikes.

Lon Chaney Jr. was born in 1906 and was the son of the famous silent film star Lon Chaney. In the 1920s Lon Chaney had brought to life two of the most haunting and unforgettable characters in cinema history – Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and the Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera.”

Lon Chaney Jr. struggled his entire life to escape the shadow of his father’s fame, and only began to act in films after his father’s death. Chaney Jr. was 33 years old and had appeared in bit parts in more than 50 films when he finally won his first major, career-making role as Lennie. Appearing alongside Burgess Meredith as George, Variety Magazine wrote, “Lon Chaney Jr. dominates throughout with a fine portrayal of the childlike giant.”

While Lon Chaney Jr.’s portrayal of Lennie in “Of Mice and Men” was his most acclaimed role, his most popular and iconic came two years later with his casting as the werewolf in 1941’s “The Wolf Man.” Unfortunately, playing the Wolf Man would largely typecast Chaney Jr. as a horror film actor for the rest of his career, and he would go on to star in other movies as Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, and Dracula. Lon Chaney Jr.’s cinema legacy – and his enduring and terrifying memory to baby-boomer TV viewers – is that from the 1940s–1960s when he portrayed many classic horror characters in movies.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031742/

On July 12, 1887, an audience at Lobero’s Theatre was astounded by gravity-defying feats of acrobatics provided by the visiting Oura Japanese Troupe.

Proclaimed to be “Direct From the Court Theaters of Japan,” the troupe was one of many brought to America in the late 1800s.

In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon famously invited the National Acrobats of China to perform at the White House as a symbol of normalizing relations with China. But gymnastic entertainment groups had been all the rage since the 1860s.

In 1866, “Professor” Richard Risley Carlisle brought a group of 11 Japanese acrobats and jugglers to San Francisco, where they gave a month-long series of sensationally popular performances. The traveling Japanese Troupe was so popular that they triggered a number of imitators, each with grander claims of royal pedigree and international fame than the next.

Santa Barbara finally got its chance to experience breath-taking theatrical acrobatics when the Oura Japanese Troupe came to the Lobero Theatre for two nights in July 1887. The shows included astonishing exhibitions of flexibility and balance such as the spinning of tops on the edge of a sword, a performer using his feet to balance a child on top of a tall ladder, tight-rope dancing, and the celebrated “Butterfly Trick” where a performer tore pieces of tissue paper into the shapes of butterflies, and they seemed to come to life and flutter above the stage.

“A tremendous house welcomed the Royal Japanese Jugglers last evening… To say that the performances of the troupe are marvelous is to speak tamely of their wonderful feats in the balancing and acrobatic line. Go, if you wish to see a wonderful assortment of feats. None are tricks, none delusion. It is simply the result of careful training.” – Santa Barbara Daily Independent

Sources:

• “Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe,” by Frederik L. Schodt
• “The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature”
• Newspapers.com

Comedian Richard Pryor brought his raw and unfiltered act to the Lobero Theatre on the night of July 9, 1971.

The sold-out, tightly-packed audience roared with laughter- sometimes nervously. Due to his status as a controversial comedian, the conservative Santa Barbara media was, needless to say, thoroughly unamused.

The Santa Barbara News-Press summarized the theme of the evening, saying,

“The monologist spices his tales with pungent language. No, that’s not strong enough. He talks dirty. And he does it a lot, far too much for an audience which included women and small children.”

Richard Pryor was born in the river town of Peoria, Illinois in 1940. He faced adversity and hardship at an early age, having to deal with the alcoholism of his family members and a rocky, unstable home life. In 1963, after two years in the Army, Pryor moved to New York City and began performing in Greenwich Village clubs alongside iconic performers such as Bob Dylan and Woody Allen.

At the beginning of his career, Richard Pryor’s stand-up was clean and mild-mannered like that of his idols Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson. By the late ’60s, however, Pryor had found his unique voice, which was famously irreverent, and found caustic humor in sensitive topics like race, sexuality, and his own painful childhood and adult drug use.

As Cosby himself once said,

“Richard Pryor drew the line between comedy and tragedy as thin as one could possibly paint it.”

The Lobero in 1971 was an unlikely venue for a performer as controversial as Richard Pryor, whose act had been banned by three national television networks. Until July 9, that year’s theater calendar had been rich in travelogue and surfing films, classical music, light rock, and musical theater. A strange but welcome blip in programming was the performance by the widely debated standup comedian.

Pryor arrived in Santa Barbara directly from several weeks of small nightclub bookings in San Francisco. His Santa Barbara performance was partly a benefit fundraiser for a hometown group called “Operation Solidarity,” which was “an organization of Black photographers committed to broadening the dimensions of education and information through the excellence of visual images.”

“Richard Pryor: Live & Smokin’” was a 48-minute film of a club performance he gave in New York City on April 29, 1971. The film brilliantly records Pryor at this early point in his career – unpolished, rambling, brutally frank – and likely captured the essence of his Lobero appearance just two months later. Pryor’s opening lines, characteristically crude, in the film were, “I’m really nervous because I ain’t had no cocaine all day. I love cocaine.”

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pryor
• https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/obituaries/arts/richard-pryor-who-turned-humor-of-the-streets-into-social.html

On July 9, 1926, a 25-year-old Clark Gable appeared at the Lobero alongside veteran headliner Pauline Frederick in the drama “Lucky Sam McCarver.”

Gable was just kicking off his acting career and had only recently arrived in Hollywood from Ohio as a gangly young man with a high-pitched voice and poor teeth. Against all odds, he would rise through the ranks to become a household name, and became historically known as “The King of Hollywood.”

“Lucky Sam McCarver” had debuted in New York in 1925 but had closed after only 29 performances because audiences, and reviewers, found its structure confusing. While it was a love story, it was described as an “experimental dramatic biography” and was set in four different times and locations. Nevertheless, producer Louis O. Macloon took the play on a national tour with Pauline Frederick and Broadway veteran John Cromwell as the leads. Clark Gable had a secondary role as “George, the House Manager.”

Pauline Frederick was an experienced theater and silent film actress who was known for her charismatic stage presence and willingness to take on challenging and even unsympathetic roles. In the 1930s, Frederick appeared in a number of sound films. However, she preferred acting on the stage to Hollywood and spent the remainder of her career touring in theater productions across the globe.

At the time of his Lobero visit in 1926, Gable was 25 and married to Josephine Dillon, a theater manager and acting coach. Dillon had been instrumental in improving Gable’s posture and voice and had paid to have his teeth fixed. Gable had appeared as a bit player in a couple of two-reel (20 minutes) silent films but only began to show promise as an actor during his two-stage roles alongside Pauline Frederick.

Clark Gable’s sound film career began in 1930 when he signed on with MGM Studios. His screen persona, described as equal parts “man’s man” and “ladies’ man,” landed him roles alongside well-established female stars like Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, and Claudette Colbert. By the mid-1930s Clark Gable was one of Hollywood’s most famous and well-paid actors.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Frederick
• https://web.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/PF/Essay.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Gable
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clark-Gable

On July 6, 1939, Helen Hayes – known as the “First Lady of American Theatre” – took to the Lobero stage in the world premiere of a modern comedy-drama “Ladies and Gentlemen”.

Set in a courtroom, the play focused on the relationship between two jurors and had been specially written for her by Academy Award-winning writers Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht.

Helen Hayes was born in Washington, D.C. at the turn of the 20th century, and began her acting career in school plays and silent films. After moving to Hollywood, Hayes graduated to sound films and ended up winning an Academy Award for Best Actress for her first talking role in the 1931 movie “The Sin of Madelon Claudet”.

But theater was Helen Hayes’ true love, and in 1937 she appeared on Broadway in the role of Queen Victoria in the play “Victoria Regina”. British law stated that no king or queen could be portrayed on the British stage until 100 years after the start of their rule, so “Victoria Regina” opened one day after the centenary anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the crown.

After an astounding 1,000 performances in which she had to wear a grey wig and billowy black gown to portray an elderly Queen Victoria, Hayes was eager for a more contemporary role. She found it in a play especially written for her by husband Charles MacArthur and his writing partner Ben Hecht. MacArthur and Hecht were the celebrated writing team behind the “The Front Page”, and “Ladies and Gentlemen” also featured their trademark witty and acerbic male-female banter.

“Ladies and Gentlemen” received glowing reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote,

“Miss Hayes’ sorceries would be enough to make any play a success, but “Ladies and Gentlemen” in an excellent show in its own right. It is a lively theater-piece that mixes gayety and seriousness judiciously, and it contains some of the crispest lines that ever crackled across a row of footlights.”

Helen Hayes and “Ladies and Gentlemen” moved from its Santa Barbara premiere to two week runs in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In October 1939 the play opened on Broadway, where it had a successful run of 105 performances.

Helen Hayes’ acting career extended well into the 1970s, and she became one of only a handful of actors to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Hayes
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_and_Gentlemen_(play)
• https://www.genealogybank.com/

Giuseppe (Jose) Lobero really knew how to throw a party. Starting with the Lobero Theatre’s grand opening in February 1873, Lobero used his marketing genius to ensure that the theatre was the center of Santa Barbara’s cultural life.

“Grand Balls” were his specialty, and the one he hosted for Santa Barbarians on July 4, 1874, helped promote the young city – and its showpiece theatre/opera house – to all of Southern California.

The July 4^th festivities began on a dusty State Street with a parade of carts and horseback riders. In attendance was a Los Angeles Daily Herald correspondent who documented the event with a satirical wit reminiscent of Mark Twain.

“At last, they started – two cars, with some of the juvenile fair sex of this city representing the old Colonies and States, and the rear brought up with mounted hoodlums whose name was legion, the whole covered in an immense canopy of dust. They halted at and entered Lobero’s Theatre. The Declaration of Independence was read, some music was indulged in… In the afternoon the Calathumpians paraded the streets in queer and grotesque costumes, mounted on appropriate animals and riding in vehicles to correspond. The whole concluded with a grand ball at Lobero’s, a splendid supper, of course, and two dollars and a half, or we stay out.”

What, you might ask, is a “Calathumpian”? According to Mirriam-Webster, “In the 19th century, the noun ‘calathumpian’ was used in the U.S. of boisterous roisterers who had their own makeshift New Year’s parade. Their band instruments consisted of crude noisemakers such as pots, tin horns, and cowbells.”

There’s no record of the specific entertainment or food provided at the July 4, 1874 ball, but if it was anything like other Lobero grand balls, it featured a cavernous auditorium where all the portable chairs had been removed to allow for dancing, tables on the edges of the room laden with foods, and an orchestra featuring Santa Barbara musicians on stage. All would be brightly lit, as Lobero’s Theatre was high-tech for the day and gas lighting had been installed in the new building in 1873.

Sources:

• https://www.genealogybank.com/
• https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/callithump