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Holliday Street Theatre
The holliday street theater which opened in 1794, hosted touring productions and traveling musicians. In 1814, the “Star Spangled Banner” received its first public performance in the theater. Soprano Adelina Patti was among the visiting artists who performed there. Pianist, conductor, and composer Alexander Reinagle (1756-1809), a cofounder of the Holliday Street Theatre, settled in Baltimore to manage it. Reinagle also arranged music for the theatre, painted sets, and played the piano and a host of other instruments. In 1813, the original wooden theater was replaced by a brick structure that stood until 1917. The theater hosted a wide range of presentations, from grand opera and Shakespeare plays to popular entertainments where boisterous audiences would call out for favorite tunes like Yankee Doodle and Mad Bess. In 1855, the hall hosted a benefit performance that raised $275 for victims of a yellow fever epidemic raging in Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia. —Elizabeth Schaaf
Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University
Further Reading Note: Much of the information for this entry comes from original source material, including newspaper and microfilm, from the archives of The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Historical Society, and the vertical files at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The following secondary source may be of help for general background information on American and Baltimore theater:
Engle, Ron and Tice L. Miller, eds. The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present. England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. |
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