Bangorians in throes of cabin fever found arts

As the ice was clearing out of the rivers and bays of eastern Maine a century ago after one of the coldest winters in memory, people were looking for ways to cure their cabin fever. Always active in chronicling the area’s entertainment, the Bangor Daily News outdid itself on Saturday, March 26, setting up an entire page with this banner headline: “All the Latest News and Gossip of Bangor’s Amusement World.” Ten stories, three drawings and two of the photographs that were increasingly finding their way into the paper informed area people of what was happening in “Stageland.”

Musical performances including concerts and plays dominated the mix. The amount and variety seems remarkable.

Commanding a large line drawing at the top of the page, Edward Barrow, “the brilliant young English tenor,” was singing Mendelssohn that night in the Memorial Parlor. He was able to command 50 cents a ticket.

Local musicians were also in plentiful supply. The Bangor Symphony Orchestra would be wrapping up its eighth season Monday night at City Hall featuring a solo violinist from Portland. Earlier in the week, the pupils of the Bangor Piano School had also held recitals, as had the Schumann Club at the First Parish Church.

But it was the traveling musical plays full of the glitz and glamour of Broadway that attracted the most attention in the newspaper.

One of the promotional pieces announced, “‘The Silver Slipper,’ John C. Fisher’s latest musical comedy, the most successful musical play produced this season, will be presented at the Opera House in the near future. The tuneful, merry, musical play fairly bristles with women of The Silver Slipper, pretty and graceful, but it cannot be said that they are ‘beauty unadorned,’ for the women of The Silver Slipper are at all times arrayed in the most expensive gowns and costumes from the most famous modistes in Paris.”

The play featured something called a “Champagne Dance,” a drawing of which showed what appeared to be a chorus line of bedecked damsels sitting at small tables adorned with a bottle of champagne and a glass against the backdrop of a Paris street. Needless to say, this purposely vague description only confirmed the suspicions of the upholders of civic virtue in the Queen City that theaters were a sink of immorality. At least the women remained “at all times arrayed,” but the exact nature of business going on at The Silver Slipper is never explained.

A brief description of the plot further confirms the differences between then and now in Stageland: “Unlike most musical plays there is a story and a plot in ‘The Silver Slipper.’ The story deals with an inquisitive young Miss on the plant Venus who when caught in the act of peeking over the edge of her planet at this wicked world, petulantly kicks her slipper, a silver one, into space. The slipper when kicked from Venus, falls into the gardens of an eccentric astronomer….” I’ll reveal no more here.

Two other plays, “Lovers’ Lane” “by the famous Clyde Fitch” and “An English Daisy,” featuring such popular tunes as “I’m a Little English Daisy,” “Indian Chief” and “The Coon, the Moon and the Little Octoroon,” were also coming soon to the Opera House.

Bangor audiences liked to be assured they were getting the very best, so the stories mentioned that both plays had recently enjoyed long runs and favorable reviews in theaters in New York and other big cities.

Of course, there was no audience rating system back then, so the reviewer occasionally had to point out, as in the case of “Lover’s Lane,” that “it is extravagantly funny without being unwholesome.” That apparently could not be said for the daisy play, which involved two “financially embarrassed” young men traveling in Europe who are given the option of paying their bills or marrying an innkeeper’s ugly daughter. “The plot is soon submerged in a flood of music, songs following one after the other in rapid succession, and in the mix-up everything ends happily.”

I have avoided mentioning too many of the principals in these productions, having never heard of any of them, which could be more a reflection of my ignorance than their obscurity, but I expect it also reflects the low probability that anyone will have heard of Britney Spears or similar pop stars of the instant a century from now.

The BDN page also contained a little piece for the reader who had forgotten the history of repertory theater companies in Bangor, or was too young to remember. A letter from Frank A. Owen, manager of the Opera House, said the first “popular price” company to do a “week stand” in Bangor was the Lucier Comedy Company in 1885.

“Their prices were 10 and 20 cents,” he explained. “Crowded houses were the rule.” Sam Bernard, “now a famous comic opera comedian,” was a member of the company.

There were two upcoming events not mentioned on that page as winter waned in 1904, and they were doubtlessly the two events that were on the minds of most people interested in theatrical sorts of things.

In early May, the play “Ben-Hur,” adapted from Gen. Lew Wallace’s popular historical novel, was coming to the Opera House. The performers included 12 horses for the famous chariot race, which was observed on stage thanks to the mechanical wizardry of treadmills and other special effects. The reader was assured that these horses were “well trained.”

But for the music lovers in the Bangor area a century ago, the event that would eclipse even “Ben-Hur” was the appearance on April 6 at City Hall of Madame Lillian Nordica, the internationally renowned opera singer and Maine native. Tickets had been on sale for weeks, ranging in price from $1 to $2, and the railroads were offering reduced rates.

In the end, many years later, it’s difficult to tell if the return of the native and her renditions of Grand Opera overshadowed in the minds of the average person all the glittter and glitz that Broadway had to offer, except in the promotional pieces published in the newspaper, which called Nordica “the pride of all Maine and the greatest vocalist America has ever produced.”

But today she triumphs. I can still find her in the encyclopedia, and it’s nice to know she always considered Maine her home.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War-era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.