Colorado Opera House Holds Centuries-old Painted Sets in Attic

LEADVILE, Col. — Three years ago on a summer’s day, Wendy Waszut-Barrett, Tabor Opera Househigh in the Colorado Rockies.

“I’m still excited right now and my face is red,” he said in a recent interview.

Waszut-Barrett, period theater painting specialist who ran the company Historical Stage Serviceswas visiting various venues by car from her home near Minneapolis to Santa Fe, NM. Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Waszut-Barrett had heard rumors that ancient sights were hiding on the top floor of the Italian theater and asked if he could stick around.

“I basically said, ‘Sure, but you’re on your own,'” she said. “I went there too, and it was unrealistic.”

What he found might not seem like much to the untrained eye: Leadville mayor Greg Labbe recently said in succinct surprise that “there were rolls of dusty goods in the attic.”

Waszut-Barrett knew better: “It was this incredible landscape coverage from 1879 to 1902 that was unheard of in North America,” he said. Tabor’s hitherto hidden collection included examples illustrating both the theatrical design’s flap and louver system (where the sets move horizontally across the floor) and its replacement fly system (where they move vertically with strings and pulleys).

And it’s all local deers When they bought the opera house in 1901, they put the old scenery aside and everyone forgot about it.

Waszut-Barrett, who went on a longer tour last fall, documented his findings for the Tabor Opera House Conservation Foundation, revealing the wings and shutters; circles stacked on the walls; and painted sets 12 feet wide and 16 feet high – a mountain landscape, a living room, a forest. All in all, there were around 250 “painted compositions”, some reflecting the fact that they were double-sided.

Accompanying Waszut-Barrett on one of his visits to Tabor earlier this month – the building is open for regular guided tours as it’s being renovated and performances continue next year – I stare at the large painted canvases that lie ready. moved onto the stage while others rolled.

Gently brushing with a dry sponge, Waszut-Barrett showed how he could reveal images hidden under decades of soot. A centuries-old landscape would be recreated, and what was remarkable was that if you looked at it through your phone’s camera, it magically gained three-dimensional depth: “The sets are painted in such a way that both distance and stage lighting make them pop, and the camera does a similar function,” Waszut explained. -Barrett.

Design was a vital part of the Tabor audience’s entertainment. In 1899, a local newspaper ran a weekly job posting by the Kyle Thomas Comic Opera Company (“The Chimes of Normandy”, “HMS Pinafore”, “The Pirates of Penzance” and “Olivette”) boasting “new and great” . costumes” and an “augmented cast” of 25 artists.

A set member representing the door of a shed was used in a performance of the Viennese operetta “Fatinitza” and may have been left behind by visiting Bostonians after their performance in Leadville in 1889. According to a newspaper ad, the Calhoun Opera Company descended on Tabor with “a strong staff of directors, a strong choir, and OWN ORCHESTRA under Carl Martens.”

Strolling through the opera house is like being teleported to one of their glory days, where you might be settled for a melodrama, a circus show, an Oscar Wilde lecture, or the African-American Hyers Sisters’ musical “Out of Bondage.” An ad in a Colorado newspaper described as “the elite serious-comic queens of song and opera prima donnas.”

Or you might have seen superstar soprano Emma Abbott, whom Katherine K. Preston, author of “Opera for the People,” called a “cultural activist” in a recent video chat—because Abbott made opera accessible to American audiences. Singing in English.

“The history of the Tabor Opera House is immensely fascinating and it is remarkable that we can physically share it through the historic building and stage scenery,” said Jenny Buddenborg, president of the opera house conservation foundation. current owner, city of Leadville.

Only a select few today will recognize the name of theater devotee Horace Tabor, but he played an important role in the cultural history of the American West. In the 1880s, Leadville was at altitude (a little over 10,000 feet) and using mining money, and Tabor was the top dog. He had amassed a large fortune in silver—the town also turned JJ and Molly Brown of “unsinkable” reputations into millionaires—and, like many wealthy men, converted some of it to a temple of fun, “the biggest and best west of the Mississippi.”

The Tabor Opera House quickly caught the attention of a bustling and noisy city filled with competing theatres, saloons and brothels. (The Commander opened the even larger Tabor Grand Opera House in Denver in 1881, but it was demolished in 1964.)

Tabor didn’t just present performances; became one. He scandalously traded his wife, Augusta, for a younger woman. Elizabeth McCourt Doeand when silver collapsed he lost all his money. After her death in 1899, Baby Doe, nicknamed Baby Doe, was moved to a cabin next to Horace’s old mine. Colorado’s harsh winter struck the final blow, and one day he froze to death; The saga was the subject of the 1956 Douglas Moore and John Latouche opera The Ballad of Baby Doe. The best returns of Beverly Sills. Cycling at the mine site, Mineral Belt Road, acting strangely, the isolation of the setting underlined the strangeness of the whole Tabor story.

Exploration of sets adds a new chapter. Not only do they give us a rare glimpse into 19th-century American landscape design, they also evoke a time when entertainment was not as quiet as it is now and when what we call classical music was part of the local culture along with vaudeville. and plays.

“The artists that painted this landscape were the opera, the middle-of-the-road exhibits of the World’s Fair, the big circus shows for the Ringling Brothers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show,” Waszut-Barrett said. “They were creating the same visual aesthetic.”

As exciting as all of this was, the sets created a new headache for the little foundation that runs Tabor, as it now has to figure out how to care for and repair it as well as repairing the building. Waszut-Barrett came up as a potential inspiration. Drottningholm Palace Theater Near Stockholm, which offers staging using 18th century machines and sets.

“Ideally, we would love to continue using the sets in productions and sharing them with the public through our building tour program and other educational programs,” Buddenborg said. “We still revolve around what we have.”