Performing Arts

Boston's radio history begins with pioneering station 1XE/WGI, one of America's first radio stations, and includes the first station to receive a commercial license, WBZ; the first FM radio network, W1XOJ and W1XER; and one of the first news networks, the Yankee News Service. Nationally known bandleaders like Joe Rines and Jacques Renard were first heard on Boston radio, as was one of the first weathercasters, E. B. Rideout. The city has been home to a number of legendary announcers, such as Bob and Ray, Arnie Ginsburg, Dick Summer, Dale Dorman, and Charles Laquidara; talk show giants like Jerry Williams and David Brudnoy; and sports talkers like Eddie Andelman and Glenn Ordway. Many Boston radio personalities, such as Curt Gowdy, "Big Brother" Bob Emery, Don Kent, and Louise Morgan, found fame on television but first established themselves on Boston's airwaves. Since 1920, Boston radio has remained vibrant, proving that live and local stations are as important as ever.

Downtown Boston once thrived as a dazzling bohemia of burlesque halls, movie palaces, dime museums, and regal stages. By 1915, more than 20 theaters crowded along a quarter-mile stretch of lower Washington Street. The theater district gave birth to vaudeville and incubated some of America's most darling musicals and daring new dramas en route to Broadway. Theatergoers flocked to Tremont and Boylston Streets to watch the latest tryouts. Some productions flopped; others, like Oklahoma! and Paul Robeson's Othello, were runaway hits. Still others earned the coveted seal of disapproval, "Banned in Boston," from zealous city censors. Overrun by seedy venues in the 1970s, the Combat Zone, as it came to be known, seemed to justify old Puritan fears that the stage would corrupt public morals. Only in recent years has the district rebounded through careful restoration of storied playhouses like the Boston Opera House, the Majestic, and the Colonial--grand vestiges of a booming cultural corridor still vibrant today.

Since the late 1800s, Boston has been a trendsetter in the development of the movie business. It was here that many of the earliest public showings of moving images took place and the name nickelodeon first appeared on a storefront theater. In 1896, B.F. Keith added film to his Washington Street theater, then throughout his national chain of vaudeville houses. In 1914, Boston's Modern became the country's first theater with an installed sound projection system. Several years later, the city had its first movie palace: Marcus Loew's Orpheum. A magnet for theater architects, Boston became a center for elegant movie houses, including the Metropolitan, Keith Memorial, and Paramount. Thanks to civic leaders and academic institutions, many of Boston's theaters have been preserved and restored and are alive and well today.

Theater on the Cape began in 1916 when a group of artists and writers in Provincetown mounted a production of a one-act play, Bound East for Cardiff, by a little-known playwright, Eugene O’Neill. They staged the play in a rickety old theater on a wharf in what was then little more than a sleepy fishing village. From that artists’ colony—and others like it across the Cape and Islands—it grew into the constantly expanding theater universe it is today. The theatrical descendants of O’Neill and the Provincetown Players continue to present classical drama, contemporary hits and new, experimental works to audiences that have come to expect the best. In her tour of the theaters from Provincetown to Falmouth, author and entertainment columnist Sue Mellen reveals the rich past behind a unique cultural treasure.