![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When almost half of the postcard recipients responded, Nina Vance knew that there was a way forward for her venture. Nina Vance, a former high school drama teacher, birthed the theatre from an idea and 214 postcards sent to various locals, asking if they’d be interested in building a new homegrown theatre. Harry Brown’s war play A Sound of Hunting was performed in the packed room of an apartment building in Houston, Texas, marking the premiere production of a theatre company called the Alley Theatre. November 1947 (75 years ago)Ĭover of play program for the Alley’s first production, ‘A Sound of Hunting.’ (Photo from the Nina Vance Alley Theatre Papers, The University of Houston Libraries’ Special Collections) Nina Vance and one of the 214 postcards she sent out to fellow artists and potential sponsors to garner interest in a new theatre. The Palace Theatre reopened in 1988 and was renamed the Connor Palace in 2014. ![]() But beginning in the late 1970s, a massive restoration project in the Square began, which has since reopened all the original theatres and added more venues, making Cleveland’s Playhouse Square one of the largest performance arts centers in the United States. By the late 1960s, only one theatre, the Hanna, remained open, all the others having been shuttered. The Palace, originally part of the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit, was last major theatre to make up Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, a group of five theatres located a few blocks from one another that had opened within the span of a few months, between February 1921 and November 1922. The Palace Theatre opened in Cleveland with its first set of vaudevillian performances: Singer, silent film star, and Ohio native Elsie Janis the dancing Cansino family and newcomer Grace Hayes performed alongside various other acts. The exterior of the present-day Connor Palace Theatre in Cleveland. In the end, the publicity of that event proved so successful that the California Concert Company added seánces to its roster of traveling performances, adding to Houdini’s fame. When the moment arrived for the grand murderer reveal, Bess, in a trance, began to physically describe the killer’s size and facial hair but suddenly and shockingly collapsed before providing the killer’s name. Houdini and Bess further fueled the energy of the crowd through various smaller seánces, doling out messages from beyond the grave to individual residents that had recently lost a child or loved one. When the day arrived, the Grand Opera House was filled to the brim with a buzzing public. Quickly after arriving, Harry and Bess began to gather numerous details about the town, visiting the cemetery and noting names, relations, births, and deaths, while the California Concert Company ran advertisements for a Nov. Harry Houdini-the stage name of Hungarian-born Erik Weisz-had been performing as a magician since 1891, and up to this point struggled to create a successful career. Hill’s California Concert Company, having heard of the grisly murder. Harry and Bess Houdini arrived in Garnett as part of a traveling performance troupe called Dr. The citizens of Garnett were still on edge as a perpetrator had yet to be arrested. 15, while Isaac Paul was away, an unknown assailant broke into the home he shared with his wife, Anne Paul, and stabbed her before ransacking the home. Harry Houdini and his wife and stage partner, Bess, gathered a massive crowd in Garnett, Kans., claiming that, through a live séance, they would solve a recent murder that had terrified the small town. (Photo by Liebler & Maass Lithograph 1895, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) A poster advertising Harry Houdini and his wife Bess. ![]()
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