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A Vagabond Compamy of Harlots and Artful Dodgers
The New Richmond Theatre
By Rober Hancock
It all started with a little spark. Then, a box of fireworks, used in the previous night’s performance, exploded.
John Hewitt, the stage manager of the Richmond Theatre who had lodgings in the building, described the scene: “Suddenly there were several loud explosions and I thought I heard the roar of flames. I immediately jumped up, opened the door of the office and found the entire stage and the proscenium wrapt in the fiery element. The heat was intense, and the flames like hungry serpents were twisting around the columns that supported the family circle of boxes…and tongues of fire lapped the damask curtains of the private boxes.” The Richmond Theatre was no more.
According to The Daily Dispatch the theatre was a complete wreck with nothing left but a portion of the walls. Arson was suspected. Thousands of dollars’ worth of scenery, props, and costumes were lost. But like a Phoenix from the flames, Elizabeth Magill, the owner, immediately started to rebuild the theatre on the ashes of the old.
Richmond had a long history of “legitimate” theater. The Marshall Theatre, later known as the Richmond Theatre, was built on the corner of 7th and Broad Streets in 1818 and had seen many of the leading lights of American theater on its stage, including the 1821 premiere performance of Junius Brutus Booth, the father of the infamous John Wilkes. All the Booth boys, John Wilkes and his brothers Edwin and Junius, Jr., would tread the boards of the Marshall before the war.
John Wilkes, Edwin, and Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., shown here in Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar," played the Richmond Theatre before the war.
In 1861, despite the war, the Richmond Theatre was in full swing. Since November, John Hill Hewitt had offered the ever growing population of the Confederate capital dramas and farces such as “Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady,” “How to Win a Husband,” and “Romeo and Juliet,” interspersed with musical and dance numbers. Many of the best theater people had fled north of the Mason-Dixon Line at the beginning of hostilities, so Hewitt was hard pressed to put together a company of performers.
"I was induced by friends to undertake the management of the Richmond Theatre, one of the oldest and best appointed establishments of the kind,” he wrote after the war. “The chance for making money was good…. But, how to gather a company was the question. I, however, managed in a short time to collect enough of the fag-ends of dismantled companies to open the theatre with a passable exhibition of novelty, if not of talent. The thing took well, and money flowed into the treasury, but often had I cause to upbraid myself for having fallen so low in my own estimation, for I had always considered myself a gentleman, and I found that, in taking the control of this theatre and its vagabond company, I had forfeited any claims to a respectable stand in the ranks of society — with one or two exceptions, the company I had engaged was composed of harlots and ‘artful dodgers.’"
So, Hewitt’s vagabond company played their parts as best they could with the women, due to a lack of sufficient actors, taking on some of the male parts. Reviews were generally favorable, if not gushing with praise, and money was rolling in. However, fate is a fickle muse and just as things were looking up the theater burned down.
“Immediately on the destruction of the Richmond Theatre,” wrote Hewitt, “I engaged the old Trinity Church, gave it the title of the ‘Richmond Varieties’ and continued to attract crowded houses.” The Varieties was located close to the Exchange and Ballard hotels, which ensured a constant influx of customers. “Taken collectively the little theatre on Franklin Street presents many attractions to a person who desires to pass an evening pleasantly,” wrote the Richmond Dispatch. “The Dramatic Company at the Varieties having succeeded admirably in the representation of light pieces, will commence this week with discreet selections from the ‘legitimate drama.’” The bowdlerized versions of Shakespeare’s plays could always ensure legitimacy. “During the past week the little Theatre [The Varieties] has been literally crammed; the audiences have been orderly, and everything tends to make it an attractive place of amusement. The Willow Copse, Macbeth, and Richard III have been produced with good effect.” Meanwhile, work continued on building the new theater, which was advertised as being even more magnificent than the old one.
Hewitt, however, did not await the completion of the new theater. Whether he fell out of favor with the owner, Mrs. Magill, or just needed a change of scenery—for actors are cosmopolites and claim citizenship nowhere—he left Richmond for a theater in Augusta, Georgia. Management of the Richmond Theatre players fell to Richard D’Orsey Ogden, an actor in the company whom Hewitt described as “a fawning sycophant, with just enough brains to know how to fascinate a frail woman and keep himself from the clutches of the conscript officer.” More on that later.
On February 9, 1863, a little more than a year after the old theater burned down, the New Richmond Theatre opened its doors to the public, “unequaled for elegance and comfort.” It was four stories tall with a Greek revival front of fluted columns. A central pit with benches was surrounded by raised, horseshoe-shaped rows of balcony seating. The seats and backs were cushioned and divided by cast-iron scrolls. The stage was sixty-one feet deep, on either side of which, between the footlights and curtain, were four private boxes within the proscenium flanked by more Corinthian columns. Every care was taken to make each seat in the building desirable, which was not the case in the old Theatre.
The New Richmond Theater opened on February 9, 1963.
Their inaugural production was Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Reviews, however, were not favorable. One critic stated flatly that “As You Like It was ‘not as we like it.’” Richard D’Orsey Ogden, the new manager, was not off to a great start. The Southern Illustrated News was probably the theater’s harshest critic. “We laugh at the tragedies and are disposed to weep over comedies and farces,” they stated. “Hamlet’s advice to the players is nightly ignored, and managerial skill woefully lacking.” “Will this company never learn their respective parts? It seems that were they to repeat any one piece till doomsday the prompter would still be the most important personage in the dramatis personae.” In defense of the actors, the theater was open six days a week and often performed upwards of 10 different plays and one-act farces a week not including the dance and musical interludes.
Original war dramas were popular and, according to Hewitt, “replete with the most gushing patriotism.” Occasionally this gushing patriotism turned violent and some audience members had to be reminded that the “Yankees” they saw on the stage were only actors playing a part.
When The Virginia Cavalier premiered, The Southern Illustrated News did not hold back its disdain. Penned by an anonymous “Captain,” (actually Capt. Alexander, a member of General Winder’s dreaded military police enforcing martial law in Richmond) “’Twas the same old story of ‘virtue rewarded—villainy foiled’—interspersed with singing and dancing. As the plot began to unfold itself, some of the literary gentlemen groaned inadvertently, and despondingly moved toward the door….The dialogue is stupid, the incidents stale, and the plot ridiculous.” The critics obviously held little sway with the public as The Virginia Cavalier became the greatest hit of the Confederate stage.
The editors of the Richmond Whig lamented the “elevation of the drama” that seemed to be nightly ignored at the theater. “The thing is impossible!” they wrote. “The stage is controlled by persons whose primary object is to put money in their purses. They, occasionally, make a pretense of ‘elevating the drama’ by presenting some standard play which will afford intellectual entertainment to ‘judicious’ playgoers, but the moral lessons of such a performance are sure to be neutralized by meretricious dance, a vulgar farce, or double entendre.”
Despite what the critics might think, the theater’s manager, Richard D’Orsey Ogden, knew how to attract an audience. Ogden gave them The Angel of Death! Just the sort of thing the drama critics deplored. Reviews were mixed, but most decried the cheap sensationalism and, to some, the blasphemous content. Ogden, ever the opportunist, printed side by side both good and bad reviews, inviting the audience to decide for themselves. Thus, he packed the house, with many eager to catch a glimpse of Miss Katie Estelle’s appearance as not only the Angel of Death but also as the personification of “Love,” minus her pasteboard wings and in a flesh-colored costume that “began too late and left off too soon.”
“D’Ogden [the Examiner’s regular perversion of Richard D’Orsey Ogden’s name] as the ‘moral elevator,’ has descended from the high perch to which he promised to raise the drama, and has gone down into the slough of bawdery [sic] and of ribaldry, and made the temple of Thespis a cesspool of excrement and foul vapours.”
Plunging necklines and bare legs were just the beginning. “The illegitimate and spectacular drama has long ago supplanted the legitimate,” lamented the newspapers. The next spectacle offered was The Ghost of the Dismal Swamp, a play especially written to exhibit the new technology able to produce on stage the spectral image of a translucent apparition. The illusion was known as “Pepper’s Ghost” (named after the 19th century patentee). A strong light was shone upon an actor below the stage which was reflected on a large piece of glass set at an angle on the stage. The newspapers stated that The New Richmond Theatre spent $19,000 setting up the apparatus. The “ghost” was a subject of great wonder to all who saw it. The critics, of course, hated it. “It [the ghost] was first produced in a play written especially for its representation, ‘The Ghost of the Dismal Swamp,’ and a very dismal piece it was, bearing the unmistakable earmarks of the ‘unknown Captain,’ [Capt. Alexander, the author of the Virginia Cavalier] booted and spurred. Shakespeare says, ‘the play is the thing,’ but in this case the play was nothing—a huge mass of words, formed into a variety of ungrammatical and unmeaning sentences, which could have had their origins nowhere else but in the brain of the ‘unknown Captain.’” No matter, Ogden used the illusion whenever he could whether or not a play called for it.
The crowds flooded in as did the cash. All seemed to be going swimmingly for “Count D’Orsey.” That is before the conscript officers showed up. The Richmond Whig reported: “The conscript officer has been after the players at our two places of public amusement— the [New Richmond] Theatre and Metropolitan Hall—with a sharp stick. On Friday, Mr. Ogden, of the Theatre, and Mr. Thorpe, late an actor at the same popular place of resort, were arrested by him and taken to Camp Lee.” Ogden took the case to court, claiming he was an English subject with papers from the British consulate to prove it. After many long speeches from both sides (Ogden’s lawyer siting the 1794 treaty between the United States and Great Britain which protected domiciled Englishmen from conscription, perhaps forgetting that he was sitting in a Confederate States courtroom), the judge decided Ogden was a fit subject for conscription into the army.
An illustration of Pepper’s Ghost effect.
Despite the court’s ruling, Ogden decided he did not wish to join the army and hopped on a train heading north. Authorities caught up with him at Bowling Green, Virginia, but, according to a newspaper report, “Ogden leaped from the cars as gracefully as he ever leaped from the tower in ‘The Romance of a Poor Young Man,’ and on gaining ground, took to the woods, much to the chagrin of his custodians.” He was finally caught, brought ignominiously back to Richmond, and put in prison. He was soon put on the sick list. The papers reported with ill-hidden sarcasm and with tongues firmly in cheeks that Ogden had been transferred from his prison cell to a hospital “where he can be furnished by his friends with the delicacies of the season—things he has been used to and can’t do without. It is said Ogden is to be severely reprimanded by the military authorities for allowing himself to be caught.”
Well, the war soon ended, and Ogden found himself back on the stage apparently none the worse for wear.
The Richmond Theatre had survived a devastating fire, soaring inflation, bad acting, hostile critics, the loss of actors to the army or to the theaters in the north, ersatz costumes, and the “best abused” manager in America. Yet, even the poorest exhibition could not help drawing a crowd. From a theatrical production point of view, those four years in the history of the Richmond Theatre probably deserve to be forgotten. However, it served its purpose of entertaining a war-weary public and gave the newspapers something to write about other than the latest slaughter on the battlefield. In trying times, people needed to be amused and entertained. The quality of the production did not matter.
The Richmond Whig may have summed it up best when they opined: “We believe the audience generally were as well satisfied as they expected to be.” High praise, indeed.
Robert Hancock is the museum’s Senior Curator and Director of the Collections Department and would have loved to have seen the over-acting Ogden’s personation of Othello. For further reading, he highly recommends Richard Harwell’s Brief Candle: The Confederate Theatre, reprinted from the proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1971 which is available online through Google Books.
