The touring record: what the road brought to Mishawaka's rooms

1908 — THE VAUDEVILLE DECADES — THE PRESENT AT POINTER SIZE

The touring record of Mishawaka is thin, and its thinness is printed, because the record reached names few acts at billing strength — and those few are printed whole. The first is political theater of the literal kind: the Fairbanks convocation of 28 October 1908, an hour's address to a packed Republican hall inside the Century, at the climax of an evening that had already drawn five thousand into the street — carried whole in this section's opening entry and in the culture record, and standing here as the documented summit of the hall era's road. The second is the Tivoli's own opening bill of 21 May 1925 — three vaudeville acts and a photoplay, the standard palace mixture, the acts unnamed in the nomination's account of the night — and the third is the pattern the nomination states for the decade: vaudeville phasing out of the Tivoli across the late 1920s as it phased out of the country, seventy percent of the nation's vaudeville houses closed or converted between 1920 and 1930, the Tivoli's stage economy converted with them. No individual vaudeville act, road company, lecturer or touring production is named at billing strength for any Mishawaka room in the record reached, beyond the acts of the opening bill as a class; the contrast with the neighboring city's archive — the Dunkle Collection's playbills and posters for South Bend theatre, 1890 to 1940, named in that city's record as its deepest single archive — is printed as the state of the two records, and the settling sources for Mishawaka's road are the same papers' amusement columns that settle the Century and the Temple: the Enterprise and the South Bend News-Times and Tribune, 1900–1940, read week by week.

Two stage uses of the palace years stand in the file at their documented size and belong to no circuit. The first is wrestling: the Tivoli's 1960 reopening bill paired live wrestling with movies, in the nomination's plain words — the palace's stage, in its second life, given to the mat, in the years when professional wrestling was a small-city hall attraction of the first rank. The second is the school stage as the city's stage: Mishawaka High's concert, style show and dramatic performance stood among the city's own exhibits at the centennial of 1932, in the culture record's account — the schools performing the city to itself, in the pageant week, as the ethnic societies performed their dances. And the epidemic bound of 1918 stands at the head of the whole record, from this section's first entry: for one season the road did not stop, the halls did not open, and the silence — mid-October to 15 November 1918, by public order — is the touring record's one total entry. What the road brings to Mishawaka in the present is carried in the live-stage entry above: a community company's seasons, a school auditorium's rentals, and a college's halls — the road, in the end, became local, and the rooms it plays are the rooms this section has already named.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — the opening bill of three vaudeville acts and a photoplay, 21 May 1925, the acts unnamed; vaudeville's phase-out and the national conversion figure, 1920–1930; the 1960 reopening's combination of live wrestling and movies.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, as carried in the culture record — the Fairbanks convocation of 1908; the influenza closure of 1918; Mishawaka High's concert and dramatic performance among the centennial exhibits of 1932.
3. The South Bend theaters record of this history — the Dunkle Theatre and Circus Collection at Saint Mary's College named there as that city's deep early-bills archive, printed here for the contrast of the two records.