Gem of Bar Harbor to Shine Criterion Theatre to host ragtime music festival, silent film at special weekend celebration

Picture chauffeur-driven cars lined up the length of Cottage Street and around the corner to Main.

Doors swing open, and, clad in fedoras and fur, the elite of Mount Desert Island’s summer society emerge: Rockefellers, Fords, Vanderbilts – perhaps Evelyn Walsh McLane, with the Hope Diamond glittering at her neck.

In its glory days during the 1930s, the late show at the Criterion Theatre was the place to be seen before dancing the night away at the Bar Harbor Club.

The show could be the newest Hollywood studio feature or a traveling vaudevillian spectacle of song, dance and acrobatics “replete with chills, thrills and laughs,” as an old advertisement reads.

On June 22-24, the Bar Harbor Ragtime Weekend hopes to reclaim some of that glory as the Criterion is host to a slate of events ranging from the screening of a silent film, to contemporary vaudeville acts, to live piano concerts featuring ragtime compositions.

Ragtime is a style of piano music that pairs a syncopated melody played by one hand, with a steady beat played by the other.

Ragtime grew from the African dance rhythms that syncopated plantation music, and found its way into minstrel shows and vaudeville acts, becoming America’s first musical phenomenon at the turn of the last century.

It was “a strange, insistent music, changing the tune, changing the time,” sings the cast of “Ragtime,” a Broadway musical based on the E.L. Doctorow novel of the same name.

While the circa 1932 Criterion missed the ragtime craze by just more than a decade, the waning Jazz Age that gave life to the theater was a direct successor to ragtime’s vast influence on American society.

The Criterion’s original owner, George McKay, was a businessman who made his name in transportation. He was also one of several infamously successful bootleggers on Mount Desert Island who provided alcohol to the wealthy summer visitors throughout Prohibition, said his son George McKay Jr., who was 10 years old when the theater was being built.

“That was big business everywhere in those days,” he said.

Local legend tells that the senior McKay needed to find a legitimate way to spend his fortune, so he poured funds into the theater, furnishing it in the newest art deco style, and adding modern conveniences like phonograph jacks for the hearing impaired.

When the theater held its grand opening, Monday, June 6, 1937, such notables as Greta Garbo and the Barrymore family sent congratulatory telegrams.

“The guy had money, so he really spent it,” said Michael Boland, who purchased the theater with partners Sam Hamill and Martin Sheriden in February.

The walls are lined in raw silk, woven with a geometric design in silver and gold. The original “tangerine plush” curtains still frame the stage. Hand-painted geometric designs in peach, gold and verdigris adorn the 32-foot-high ceiling, where a giant frosted glass chandelier bathes more than 600 orchestra seats in diffused light.

“Every light fixture was designed just for the Criterion – this stuff wasn’t bought at Home Depot,” Boland said.

A 77-foot-wide flying balcony was considered an engineering marvel when it was constructed – no posts are required for support. Luxurious private boxes were rented by the town’s famed residents, and an Italian restaurant in the basement provided food and liquor – illicitly for the first year – to theater patrons.

“He was kind of hedging his bets, so he built a speakeasy in the basement,” Boland said.

The massive structure, which at the time of its construction towered above its neighbors, cost about $150,000 to build, according to documents at the Bar Harbor Historical Society.

More than 50 men were employed through the Depression-era winter of 1932, building the theater despite heavy snow; “For every thousand bricks laid, the workmen had to spend 10 hours clearing snow,” reads a newspaper account of the project.

When he took over management of the theater, Boland said he hoped to restore the Criterion to its former status as a social center for he community, so his team has begun scheduling live performances and community events

on the stage for the first time in decades.

The upcoming Ragtime Festival, with its emphasis on Bar Harbor’s history, was a perfect choice for the Criterion’s first community event, Boland said.

“It all just fits – and we wanted to show this place off,” he said.

Bar Harbor Ragtime Weekend tickets are available at the following locations: Sherman’s Bookstore, Criterion Theater, Song of the Sea, Carroll Drug Store, Port in a Storm Bookstore, Grasshopper Shop, Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce and Arcady Music Society. For more information, call the Chamber at 288-5105, or Arcady at 288-2141.