Actors, Audiences, and Historic Theaters of Kentucky by Marilyn Casto

Abstract

Book Review WINNER OF SESAH 2000 BooK AwARD Marilyn Casto, Actors, Audiences, and Historic Theaters ofKentucky, Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2000, 196 pp., 59 illus., $29.95, ISBN 0-8131-2162-0. stunning replications of important places constructed along the Las Vegas strip. Marilyn Casto's Actors, Audiences, and Historic Theaters ofKentucky suggests that "entertainment architecture," in its fullest implications , existed long before theme parks and shopping malls became hallmarks of America's popular architecture. From modest opera houses that rose on the Main Streets of Winchester and Bowling Green to sumptuous Victorian halls that thrilled audiences in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky's nineteenth-century theaters manifested in the performances presented there and the structures themselves the delicate intermingling of high cultural values and popular delights that resonate so strongly with contemporary postmodern culture. In her introduction, Dr. Casto points out that this is an account of how architects designed Kentucky's theaters and how actors and audiences used and perceived them. In relating this history , she understands the spectacle of the theater to be the product of a mutually dependent relationship between the dramatic arts and architecture. It is a framework that actively engages the gazes of audiences and performers, making each of them one with the space and function of the theater. The author's interest in these multivalent aspects of the theater results in a study that extends far beyond the limits of traditional architectural historical scholarship, for Casto's work is dedicated to demonstrating how theaters reflected the cultural values and social order of the communities they enlivened. "Entertainment architecture," a term popularized in the 1990s, is a label handily affixed to the fanciful postmodern buildings of the Disney empire and to the As for so many building types, the architectural history of theaters usually has been devoted to high style monuments, the Teatro Olimpico, the Paris Opera 107 House, and the Chicago Auditorium, for example, and legendary landmarks from Radio City Music Hall to La Scala. Yet, particularly in the American chronicle, this history is also constituted of scores of nineteenth-century opera houses, concert halls, and amphitheaters together with their twentieth-century counterparts-the familiar Loews, Saenger, and Rialto movie houses. Using the micro-context of Kentucky, Casto demonstrates that collective memory ofAmerican entertainment was formed in those less-heralded local theaters, and she lavishes upon them the critical attention they deserve. Readers unfamiliar with the regional vernacular of the mid-South may well be surprised by the richness of the subject. In spite of its remote situation, Kentucky emerged as a "prime site" of western theater. The author meticulously traces theater architecture and culture in the state beginning in the early 1800s, when traveling troupes brought the high culture ofeast coast theaters west, and concludes a little more than one century later when the motion picture irrevocably changed the nature of the neighborhood theater and the culture it produced. Casto approaches the Kentucky theater from an interdisciplinary framework that recognizes the historical links among art, literature, architecture, and technology . Without apologies to those seeking a compendium of historic theaters or a strictly formal analytic discussion , the author makes clear the emphasis of her study: "the social meaning of theaters and the manner in which they reflect the society for which they were designed." This "meaning" is meticulously traced through four chronologically arranged chapters. The first chapter, "Rough but Substantial," addresses the formative years of Kentucky theater, the late eighteenth century through the 1830s, when a bit ofcarefully placed scenery could transform an inn or a cattle shed into a make-shift performance hall. Two chapters follow that cover the period from the 1840s through the first years of the twentieth century. The first of these, "Neat and Commodious Halls," focuses on the building and design of theaters. More than any other section ofthe book, this chapter deals with the theater as a building type, tracing the susceptibility of its interior design and exterior expression to the nineteenth century's battle of the styles as well as commenting upon issues of urban and 108 ARrus town planning. The companion chapter, "Thrills, Spectacles , and Glittering Lights," delves into the use of the theater...