The Tivoli's music plant: an organ, two pianos, and ten pieces

THE THEATER ORCHESTRA ECONOMY · 1925 TO THE TALKIES

The Tivoli's building, fight and fate stand in the Theaters record of this history; its music plant stands here, because for four years it was the largest standing musical establishment in Mishawaka. The house that opened 21 May 1925 on North Main Street — 950 seats on the main floor, 450 above — carried, in the National Register nomination's inventory, a music plant of a $22,500 Marr-Colton-Wonder pipe organ (the name as the nomination prints it), two Star grand pianos, and a ten-piece orchestra, with an orchestra pit and its surrounding balustrade among the auditorium's original fittings. Ten pieces was a working theater orchestra of the vaudeville-and-photoplay economy: pit music for the pictures, accompaniment for the stage acts — the house opened with three vaudeville acts and a photoplay — and the organ for the intervals, under a silvered dome with vari-colored lights the nomination describes in the same breath as the plant. For a city of Mishawaka's size this was a payroll of professional musicians unmatched by any other institution in the record, school and church included, and it is printed at that standing.

Its end is the era's end, and the Theaters record dates the turn: some seventy percent of America's vaudeville theaters closed or converted under the motion picture's rise, and the house that opened with a stage, dressing rooms and a ten-piece orchestra "closed the decade as a full-time picture house." A picture house needs a projectionist, not an orchestra; the organ fell silent as an accompaniment instrument within the first years of the talkies, and Mishawaka's professional pit-musician class — its members unnamed in the sources reached, a gap the Enterprise's amusement columns would settle — dissolves from the record with it. The pit and its balustrade survived the music: the nomination's account of the preservation years records nearly all the original interior elements intact beneath the paint, the empty pit among them, until the building's demolition in 2005, which the Controversies record carries whole.

Sources:

1. The Theaters record of this history — the Tivoli's nomination inventory (the organ, pianos and ten-piece orchestra; the pit and balustrade), the opening program of 21 May 1925, the vaudeville economy's collapse and the house's conversion, the 1990s condition survey.
2. The Controversies record of this history — the demolition of 2 February 2005, pointer only.