Orlando’s stages hosted greats from opera to Elvis
We’re wrapping up a big month for Orlando music fans with the opening of Steinmetz Hall at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. Billed as one of the world’s most acoustically perfect spaces, the new hall could be the biggest deal to hit downtown since Barney the bison escaped from Buffalo Bill’s touring show and ran amok on Orange Avenue.
That was in 1912 and, to be honest, it’s a not fair comparison, but when a chance to write the phrase “running amok” comes along, one should take it.
But years before the drama of Barney’s escape, Orlando’s 1884 Opera House served as the city’s first grand venue for music and other entertainment on a downtown site that was quite close to the present Dr. Phillips Center.
Bewigged society
Built of entirely of wood, the Opera House faced Court Street between Pine and Church; the stage door opened on Main Street (now Magnolia). At the entrance, double doors opened directly into the performance space, lined with benches. Kerosene lamps with tin reflectors and candles on brackets provided the only lighting.
There, a New Year’s Eve party in 1887 drew all “the society people of South Florida,” according to memories published in the Orlando Reporter-Star in the 1930s. Dressed up for a costume ball, the elite sported old-fashioned costumes and wore their hair powdered white.
Entertainment at the Opera House included hometown talent, traveling
shows and occasionally a big name such as Emma Thursby, an acclaimed concert singer and teacher who had shared stages with humorist Mark Twain and
famed violinist Ole Bull. In Florida to visit a brother in Melbourne, Thursby drew an audience from all over Central Florida in a benefit for the Episcopal Church’s
building fund.
Breezes through the large windows and double doors offered the Opera House’s only air-conditioning. A rare photograph of an October 1891 meeting of World’s Fair Convention delegates there shows the double-door entrance.
By 1915, the 1884 building was remodeled into a garage and auto-repair shop, and a second opera house, which had opened in December 1911, became the gold standard for Orlando performance venues. Eventually called the Lucerne Theater, it boasted a 75-foot-tall scenery loft, an elevated floor for seating up to 1,000 patrons and a steel ceiling decked out in white and gold.
‘Aida’ at ‘Muni Aud’
Real opera marked the 1920s opening of Orlando’s next grand home for the performing arts: Orlando’s Municipal Auditorium on West Livingston
Street — or “Muni Aud,” as longtime Orlandoans often called it. In the 1970s, it was transformed into the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center and is now an official Orlando Historic Landmark.
On Feb. 21, 1927, the auditorium’s grand opening featured the La Scala Grand Opera Company of Philadelphia presenting Verdi’s “Aida.”
“Back before air conditioning, we used to call it the West Livingston Turkish Baths,” Jean Yothers, retired director of the Orange County Historical Museum and former Sentinel columnist, once told Sentinel theater critic Elizabeth Maupin.
When the Rainbow Girls had a convention at Muni Aud, Yothers recalled, “just about all of them fainted from the heat.”
Over the years, the auditorium drew other complaints. The sound system was so bad, one theater promoter said of a performance, that one night (probably in the 1960s) star performer
Liberace’s body microphone was picking up police calls.
But the venerable venue holds a special place in the hearts of many Central Floridians. Thousands of folks experienced their high school graduations there. During World War II, the city turned the auditorium over to members of the armed services twice a month for dances. The touring Ice Follies show was a very big deal at Muni Aud in the 1950s, and it was there that Orange County schoolchildren long ventured on expeditions to hear the Florida Symphony Orchestra and to learn about the various instruments.
Many notable performers took the stage at Muni Aud in its pre-Bob Carr days, among them Elvis Presley, who made three stops there in 1955 and 1956 — the last of which took place on Aug. 8, 1956, just a month before his famous first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
The heat Yothers mentioned was in full force that August, as she knew well, because she was among the crowd of about 6,500 who saw Presley. Yothers interviewed him and wrote about his show, in comments that proved especially astute about the perils that fame held for him.
There’s much more about the importance of Presley’s early barnstorming days in and around Florida in Bob Kealing’s 2017 book, “Elvis Ignited, The Rise of an Icon in Florida.” It’s just one of many fascinating chapters in Orlando’s concert history, from kerosene-lit stages to state-of-the-art sound.