This week, a little more on the Providence theatres of Lovecraft’s youth. In the form of an evocative 1905 programme cover showing the frontage…

Keith’s Theatre (it used the British spelling) was where Lovecraft later recalled having seen Houdini…

it happens that I saw him at the old Keith’s Theatre here nearly a quarter of a century ago

Though for some unknown reason he elsewhere stated he had never seen an entire Houdini stage show. It seems unlikely he was late for the show, since he would not have been admitted after the show had begun. Possibly he left before the finale, for some reason? It’s difficult to imagine that he fell asleep and missed part of the show that way. We might then consider the faint but amusing possibility that he was the audience member invited up onto the stage, to step inside the magician’s ‘vanishing’ cabinet — and thus in that way he missed part of the show. But in that case we would surely have read about it in the Letters, so the amusing notion can only be a possible plot point for someone’s future Mythos story.

In the 1930s Lovecraft recalled memories from his youth that seem to associate him with further this place. In 1900, aged five, hearing the…

quartette at Keith’s Continuous Vaudeville — ‘When the Harvest Moon is Shining on the River’

At this time one “Charles Lovenberg” was the Providence manager, which may have amused the boy Lovecraft due to the similarity to his own name. Lovenberg “saved the publicity about Providence vaudeville from area newspapers” in extensive scrapbooks, along with the theatre’s own publications. These books and papers survive and are now part of the archival Keith Albee Collection located in Iowa City.

The Christmas line-up at Keith’s, 1907.

Lovecraft also recalled how the theatre’s management used the (presumably very dull)…

new Biograph travel films to chase the [vaudeville] audiences out of Keith’s at six-o’clock

These were short documentary cinema films made by the American Mutoscope & Biograph company, as it was named until 1909.

The interiors of the Keith’s theatres were palatial, if the rest of the chain is anything to judge by. The Providence venue apparently became the Victory in 1924, being renovated and renamed while Lovecraft was in New York City.

Incidentally, here is a possibly useful tip for Archive.org searchers. There is no partial search, and thus “Keith” will not find “Keith’s”.