1209

Vaudeville Play Poster

Currency:USD Category:Art / General - Posters Start Price:100.00 USD Estimated At:200.00 - 300.00 USD
Vaudeville Play Poster
Preview
Holabird-Kagin Americana Office
3555 Airway Drive Suite#309
Reno, NV 89511
Thursday April 11, 10am-6pm
* Preview also available by appointment

Live Auction
Friday & Saturday
April 12-13, 2012
9am PDT starting time, both days

Location
Atlantis Casino & Resort
Grand Ballroom #4
3800 S. Virginia Street
Reno, NV 89502

Lot Pick Up
Holabird-Kagin Americana Office
3555 Airway Drive Suite #309
Reno, NV 89511
Sunday April 14th, 10am-1pm

An early and colorful Vaudeville play poster for a Denver CO performance of "Empress," with additional acts. This is a production of Sullivan and Considine Varieties. Measures 14" x 42" in colors of red, black and bright yellow on white paper. Sullivan and Considine are colorful characters in their own right. Initially from Chicago, John Considine (1868-1943) was an itinerant actor who landed in Seattle where he became a card dealer and then eventually manager of the People’s Theater, what was known as a box house. Concert saloons were sometimes called box houses because the theater boxes could be closed off for greater privacy. He was innovative in his management but when local ordinances put an end to box houses and the sale of liquor in theaters, he ran afoul of the police chief and local government. His vendetta with the chief of police escalated into an eventual showdown on June 25, 1901 in which Considine shot and killed the police chief. Considine was acquitted of the murder. He began buying up saloons and other properties on his way to becoming a powerful and prosperous personage in the northwest. In 1906 on a talent scouting trip to New York he teamed up with "Big Tim" Sullivan, a Tammany Hall boss who was a state senator on Manhattan’s lower east side. They created a booking agency to supply talent for their new vaudeville circuit, and Sullivan also brought to the partnership money and contacts. They were co-owners of what were now legitimate theaters--the saloon aspect being left behind. Things went well until Sullivan was declared insane in 1913 and the economic downturn of 1914 revealed that their empire had been built on a house of cards--purchasing new properties by mortgaging an earlier one. Pantages and Loew were waiting in the wings to buy up the foreclosed properties.



HKA#63764