Cobalt: The Making of a Mining Superpower by Charlie Angus

Author:Charlie Angus [Angus, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781487009502
Google: 3r0mEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1487009496
Barnesnoble: 1487009496
Goodreads: 57604568
Published: 2021-12-14T16:02:49+00:00

Fifteen

Cobalt as a Vaudeville Production

On August 23, 1909, The Dollar Mark, a stage play about Cobalt, premiered at Wallack’s Theatre on 30th Street and Broadway in New York.1 The Wallack was an upscale establishment — a palace of elegance holding eight hundred patrons, with a massive chandelier, polished red granite columns, and mahogany seats covered with garnet plush silk.2 There the audience came to watch a showdown over the fictitious Nelly Davis Mine in Cobalt, where prospector James Gresham struggled to protect his property from ruthless New York financiers. The Dollar Mark ran for forty-eight shows on Broadway, at the time when New York was emerging as the North American centre for entertainment — with live theatre, popular music produced out of Tin Pan Alley, and most of all, vaudeville.

The roots of vaudeville lay in the burlesque, minstrel, and medicine shows of the Wild West. By the 1880s, these shows were being adapted for urban audiences, with the rough edges and risqué dialogue of the frontier shows smoothed over. “Something for everybody” was vaudeville’s pitch to audiences looking for an evening of fun.3 The shows relied on the audience’s willingness to suspend belief and go with the flow of a spectacle where comedians, jugglers, and mind readers shared the same bill. Vaudeville was an entertainment frontier that mesmerized people by claiming telepathy was real, and it bent social conventions with male and female impersonators. It was one big ever-changing show.

Stories of the gold rush were popular, so it’s not surprising that Cobalt was considered a good subject for the New York stage. The Cobalt silver boom was like vaudeville in that it relied on the willingness of investors to accept the seemingly unbelievable proposition that a town in the isolated bush could produce a never-ending stream of wealth. By 1908, a second Cobalt stock boom was in full swing, drawing in new investors after the exodus of those who had so recently been stung in the Guggenheim debacle. A sardonic editorial in the Toronto Telegram compared the stock market machinations of the new mining promoters in Toronto to a vaudeville show:

The stirring melodrama the Boom in Cobalt is being revised for a short run. It was played here a couple of seasons ago to splendid business but owing to unforeseen circumstances the curtain was hurriedly rung down … [but is now] supported by several newcomers specially engaged for the occasion at enormously high price. In fact, the salaries paid to all concerned in this melodrama from starts to scene shifters is so extravagant that the only hope there can be for a prolonged run is to find an audience composed of infatuated millionaires.4

But more than that, Cobalt was a place where life itself appeared at times as if it were part of a larger vaudeville extravaganza. Photographs of the downtown give the impression of a half-finished stage set, something slapped together to present an image of sophistication, wealth, and promise.

The North American vaudeville circuit was almost as gruelling for the performers as unearthing silver was for the hardrock miners of Cobalt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.