Originally aired on October 17, 1997 - In part 164 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson says that the theater in the Confederate city of Richmond held its own against every obstacle during the darkest days of the war.
#164 – The Theatre
War, especially a civil war, can disrupt if it does not destroy every facet of a society. That was not so with one artistic element in Confederate Virginia. For the four years of the Civil War the theatre in the “Old Dominion” held its own against every obstacle.
New Orleans had been the pre-war center for dramatic productions in the South. During the war years, Richmond took the lead as theatrical center. Inside the Confederate capital were four large theatres: The Broad Street, New Richmond, Varieties, and Metropolitan. At least one small theatre existed in such other urban centers as Charleston, Columbia, Atlanta, Savannah, Mobile and Montgomery.
The principle stars in drama companies traveled from town to town, but they spent most of their time in Richmond. Some performers never left the Virginia city. Others one theatre owner snarled, “fled North thinking it the safest ground to stand upon”. For actors claimed citizenship nowhere.
Of the several acting groups the most famous was the Crisp Company. It performed intact throughout the war because all of its male members had served in the Army or were exempt from conscription.
Leading female actresses of the day were Jennie Powell, Mary Partington and Ida Vernon. Male stars were Walter Keeble, Charles Morton, E. R. Dalton and the Booth Family. Two exceptional thespians held center stage at the time, one was comedian Harry McCarthy, who was also a song-writer of note. His composition The Bonnie Blue Flag was the Confederacy’s first national song.
McCarthy was guaranteed a standing ovation when he had a young lady on stage waived the blue standard while he sang the words:
We are a band of brothers
And native to the soil.
Englishman D’Orsey Ogden was even better known than McCarthy. Ogden was both a versatile actor and outstanding theatre manager. He alone kept the New Richmond theatre flourishing in the darkest days of the war.
Minstrel shows remained a great attraction although they were aimed at the lower classes and hence pulled down the quality of performances. Shakespeare was also popular. Dramatic productions of the time tended to shy from serious or war-like themes. One theatre critic explained why, “People who go to the theatre now,” he said, “want something cheerful and amusing. There are horrors enough in the daily walks of life without people going to a theatre to see them.”
Productions as well as theatres deteriorated as the war continued. Abysmal material performed by actors too often of inferior talent and in surroundings made seedy by the shortages of war took a heavy toll on this form of art. At the same time the demand for staged entertainment was so high that theatre managers sometimes sacrificed quality in an effort to have as many productions as possible.
Soldiers on leave, civil servants, industrial workers, and an assortment of trouble-makers all flocked to plays filling the cheaper seats in the upper tiers firing pistols, shouting obscenities, and otherwise offending the more refined theatre purchasers below.
An 1864 Richmond newspaper editor classified theatrical productions as little more than illegitimate and spectacular drama perpetrated by poor acting, greedy managers, and declining public taste. “More often than not,” another critic charged, “the dialog is stupid, the instances stale, and the plot ridiculous.”
When a skit entitled Ogden’s Adventures opened a reviewer concluded, “any half-dozen drunken men picked up on the street and given an injunction to do their worst could have done better”. Yet the Confederate theatre held fast. On April 2, 1865, the New Richmond closed as Confederates evacuated the capital. Two days later the theatre re-opened with a special invitation to officers of the Union army then occupying the city.