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Show By JOHN BAUER General Manager, Volley Music Hall When Valley Music Hall had dancing on the stage after Phyllis Diller's New Year's eve performance last December it revived a tradition tra-dition established at the dedication of the old Salt Lake Theatre. On Thursday Thurs-day evening, March 8. 1862. Following the nrayei of dedication, an address by President Young, and brief addresses by Heber C. Kimball Kim-ball and John Taylor, honor hon-or was paid to William H. Folsoni, the architect and designer. The choir and solofsts sang an anthem to close the dedication. The curtain rose nd "The Pride of the Market" was played. The evening's entertainment enter-tainment ended with dancing danc-ing on the theatre stage. It is recorded: "The Salt Lake Theatre, in fact, at the outset, was elevated to the caste of a dramatic temple, and made a high scl.ool to the public for the study of i.uman nature, na-ture, which was the object of all the plays of our Solomon of the Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxon stage. Not in the whole history of the stage, ancient or modern, was ever a theatre before thus endowed as a sajred dramatic dra-matic temple for the people. True, Shakespeare and the rest of the great dramatic composers, with Garrick, the Kembles, the Keans, Macready, Booth, Forrest, and others of their illustrious class, in their imperial dignity of character char-acter and in matchless splendor of thir genius, before whose bright con stellation the galaxy ol th pulpit have bowed in humility have al firmed that the theatre at their designing is a Temple for the people. Hereafter perchance per-chance it may be regarded as one of the strange things of dramatic history that Brigham Young, a man of no art culture beyond be-yond that which was self-evolved, self-evolved, but the high priest of a despised church, should have so lifted the theatre to the conception of the great high priests of the stage; and, if 'Brig- v ham's Theatre' had fallen from its pinnacle, we shall not debit the fall to him nor his counsellor, whose dedicatory prayer is before be-fore our eyes." Following this quotation in the Romance of An' Old Playhouse the author, George D. Pyper states: "It is a remarkable fact that while the theatres were originally fostered by the churches as was the case with the early miracle plays, in later days the playhouse was almost universally uni-versally condemned by them, and these institutions have grown far apart. But Brigham Young, with great wisdom, saw that, properly regulated and directed, the stage offered a great field for education and progress, and he sought to bring the theatre close to the church instead of ostracising it. In this way he hoped to elevate ele-vate the standards of the stage and educate the people to the b:st there was to offer. |