Before it was destroyed in a fire in 1927, the Academy of Music was Richmond’s premier theater for 40 years.
A red glow permeated the predawn sky over the rooftops of homes on Grace Street in downtown Richmond on Saturday, Feb. 19, 1927, as the Academy of Music theater burned.
The Wallerstein Apartments at Eighth and Grace streets housed the repertory troupe that had been performing since the previous November at the distinguished theater. Vincent Dennis, described by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as the group’s “juvenile and character comedian,” peered from his window to see the Academy ablaze. He dressed quickly and alerted company director James H. Doyle, as well as University of California student and “leading man” Arthur Howard.
Albert Dean, the Academy’s watchman and janitor since its opening 40 years earlier, had left the theater for coffee at 3:30 a.m. A breeze blowing through an open backstage window fluttered scenery into a gaslight that ignited the blaze. He returned to witness the building burning down to its first floor.
The conflagration summoned 13 of the city’s 22 firefighting units. Swift flames roaring from the rear of the Academy across the roof caused a backdraft to sweep the stage and race over the orchestra seats. The roof collapsed and crashed into the basement. Bricks tumbling into the alley entrance of the Federal Reserve and Foster buildings bruised several firefighters.
Manager Leo Wise, who started working at the Academy as a boy 30 years earlier, arrived to witness a smoking ruin. The theater’s records were destroyed, and Richmond’s primary legitimate playhouse was wrecked. Yet he needed to plan for the now-orphaned players.
Losing most of their apparel and accessories were the four women in the troupe: Miriam Cordell of Maryland; “the ingenue,” Oklahoman Franqui Colburn; New Yorker and “character actress” Kathleen Comegys (later Aunt Ev in the play and film adaptation of “The Miracle Worker”); and Gilberta Faust, who found some of her personal items destroyed, reported the Times-Dispatch, though “her make-up shelf was practically untouched.”
Architect Albert Lybrock designed the Academy of Music theater along with other notable pre-Civil War structures, including the bow-fronted Morson’s Row of Governor Street (1853) and the Bolling Haxall House (1858), its arched pediment and windows resonating with the Academy Theater’s design.
The German-born and trained Lybrock oversaw the 1858 construction of the United States Custom House, at 1000 E. Main St., over protests of nativists who insisted a born citizen supervise the work. The building, which was commandeered for Confederate government offices, survived the 1865 Evacuation Fire and today comprises the central portion of the much-expanded Lewis F. Powell Jr. Federal Courthouse. Lybrock’s best-known structure is the elaborate cast-iron Gothic reliquary (1859) in Hollywood Cemetery that encloses the sarcophagus of president James Monroe.
Lybrock became acquainted with the German-born musician Jacob Reinhardt, who, in addition to his decades of service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and Beth Ahabah synagogue, also led the German “Gesangverein” (Singing Society) and co-founded the Mozart Association, which performed every Thursday in their barrel-vaulted hall on Eighth Street.
A program from 1917 production of “Chantecler,” starring Maude Adams at the Academy of Music theater
The space didn’t suit expanded programing or contemporary taste, and Lybrock received the commission for what became the Mozart Academy of Music. The arched doors and windows and garlands framing the entabulature were theatrical, but in photographs, the Academy looks stylish though reserved. Later, an illuminated sign on the facade and another on the roof enlivened its appearance.
Generations of audiences settled into the horseshoe-shaped balconies rising in perpendicular rows to “the peanut roost,” the stage boxes and 1,492 “neat, comfortable and substantial opera chairs, with folding seat, foot-rest, and rack for a hat.”
Edith Lindeman Calisch, a Richmond Times-Dispatch entertainment writer and lyricist (her songs include “Red-Headed Stranger” of Willie Nelson’s notable interpretation), recalled the Academy as a “rococo gem of a place.”
When disembarking from a horse-drawn streetcar, architect Lybrock suffered a debilitating hip injury. On Jan 11, 1886, at his 205 E. Clay St. residence, he died on the same night as the Academy’s opening and one day short of his 60th birthday.
Under Reinhardt’s baton, the Petersburg Musical Association, the Richmond Oratorio Society and the 30-instrument orchestra marked the theater’s premiere with “Gloria in Excelsis.”
The Academy received a constellation of traveling performers riding careers on the way up — and down. Several ancestors of Drew Barrymore performed in various productions at the Academy: her great-great-uncle John Drew Jr.; grandfather John Barrymore (“The Great Profile,” celebrated for his Hamlet); and her great-uncle and great-aunt, the siblings Lionel (Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life”) and Ethel, a true star of stage, screen and radio.
The “divine” Sarah Bernhardt played the Academy in 1891, 1911 and 1917. She delivered lines in French, and in later appearances was immobilized due to having had her right leg amputated from an injury, but the world, including Richmond, treated her as royalty. For her 1917 farewell tour in “La Dame aux Camélias,” she arrived in a special five-car train with 43 cast members, four servants, a St. Bernard, a mastiff, a parrot and 140 trunks.
James O’Neill came, famous for his 6,000 career performances of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and as the father of playwright Eugene O’Neill. Among his works was “The Emperor Jones,” featuring groundbreaking Black actor (and native Richmonder) Charles Sidney Gilpin.
William Gillette’s play “Secret Service,” about Union espionage in Richmond during the Civil War, played the Academy, then a short time later, he successfully adapted “Sherlock Holmes,” appearing in the title role. His interpretation of the Baker Street detective’s intellectual aloofness, the deerstalker hat, the briarwood pipe and the phrase “Elementary,” influenced all those who came after.
Maude Adams created the role of Peter Pan on Broadway and reprised the role 3,000 times, including in 1907 and 1916 performances at the Academy.
Ana Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky danced on the Academy’s stage; Alla Nazimova, the Russian American interpreter of Ibsen and Turgenev, declaimed to the balconies; Henry Ward Beecher preached; bare-fisted boxing champion John L. Sullivan tried to act and during his stay got into a fistfight at Murphy’s Hotel; a 17-year-old Douglas Fairbanks Sr. performed at the Academy in one of his first roles; and the wildly popular showman George M. Cohan (“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy”) took center stage. Lillie “Jersey Lil” Langtry opened in a 1919 Academy show so bad she fled town.
Comedies and melodramas that entertained but proved forgettable leavened the fare — imagine sifting through Netflix choices but instead live theater. Here came vaudevillians and traveling spectacles. The play “After Dark” employed Richmond firefighters to fill a tank for a climactic diving scene, then three days later they returned to pump it dry.
The 1905 and 1917 productions of “Ben Hur” wowed audiences by using a massive turntable for the climactic chariot race using real horses.
The last curtain at the Academy came down on the Friday-evening performance of “Alias the Deacon,” a show about a traveling card shark in a clerical disguise.
The Academy’s fiery end accompanied a major shift in Richmond entertainment venues. On Oct. 28, 1927, the Acca Temple Shriner’s Mosque Auditorium (today’s Altria Theater) of 3,600 seats opened; on April 9, 1928, the 2,200-seat Loew’s movie palace (now the Dominion Energy Center) turned on its stage lights; and then on Christmas Eve, the 1,396-seat Byrd Theatre made its debut.
The Academy site went to the Federal Reserve Bank, which in turn became the Supreme Court of Virginia, where a different sort of drama is enacted today.
