1914 at Providence Opera house, the Act 1 backdrop for a celebration of Brown University’s 150th anniversary.
1914 at Providence Opera house. S.T. Joshi dates Lovecraft’s regular theatre attendance at 1896 to c.1911-1915 in I Am Providence, and a letter in Letters to Family implies he visited a show there in 1917. So it’s possible the above 1914 show might have be seen by him, assuming it was not a ‘one-night only’ show reserved for the Brown University crowd. Certainly the ‘historic Providence’ aspect would have appealed to him. Probably he also saw the designs given in the local newspaper or magazines, if not exhibited at somewhere like the Art Club.
The new Letters to Family reveals that in his youth he had trodden the very boards of the Opera House. He had “slung from the stage” of the Opera House great slabs of a Shakespeare tragedy, given with “vigorous, orotund delivery”.
Providence Opera House, Gallery entrance on Eddy Street.
On hearing the news of the impending demolition of the Providence Opera house, in spring 1929 he decried the philistinism of a city that could leave itself without a stage fit for “a high-grade play”. He also recalled…
What a second home the old Opera House used to be to me!” — in Letters to Family
I also recall that Lovecraft once spotted his house on a richly painted theatre curtain showing a similar historic vista of Providence. I can’t find the reference offhand, but it was likely at the Opera House.
By 1936 the place had long gone, as he remarked to a young correspondent…
… alas! Indeed, the Opera House was torn down in 1931, & its manager (with a tragic timeliness worthy of the Muse whose temple he had tended) died the following year.
Many years earlier he had recalled this fellow for Kliener…
… we [the family] were acquainted with Mr. Morrow, lessee & manager of Providence’s chief theatre — The Providence Opera House — (he lived directly across the street) so that it was not thought too shocking to let my aunt take me to see something [there, when a boy]” — H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Kleiner dated 16th November 1916.
Incidentally, the indexing of the entry for ‘Providence Opera House’ is slightly astray in the new Letters to Family. Page ‘1026’ should read ‘1028’.
The label dates the scene to Aug. 25, 1762 and includes the Golden Ball Inn (see post topped by golden ball), but Henry Rice first opened the Golden Ball Inn on Dec. 13, 1783. It seems there is a twenty-one year discrepancy here.