South Bend Theaters: The Stages and Screens

Theaters — The Stages and Screens

South Bend played its first professional bills in an opera house the Oliver brothers built in 1885, and it has never since been without a stage. What follows is the whole documented course of that playing: the opera house and the legitimate houses that succeeded it; the Palace of 1922, saved from the wreckers by one woman's purchase and a one-dollar sale, restored at the century's turn and still the city's working room; the four downtown movie palaces and the small houses of the neighborhoods; the drive-ins that ringed the city in the fifties; the mall screens and the one multiplex that outlasted them; the community stage that has played continuously since 1957; and the touring road — vaudeville circuits, road companies and Broadway tours — that has stopped in this city for a hundred and forty years. The buildings of two of these rooms, the State and the Palais Royale, are carried in the architecture record; their lives are carried here. The deepest single archive of the early bills is the William W. Dunkle Theatre and Circus Collection at Saint Mary's College — playbills, posters, photographs and press for South Bend theatre from 1890 to 1940, which the college describes as the most complete history of the theatre in South Bend for those years — and it is named here because the particulars of a hundred individual bills rest in it and in the newspaper files, beyond what any summary can carry.