CENTER STAGE IN VIRGINIACITY

“A strange opera house is this one in Virginia City. I peep out its back windows and see the desert.”

So mused American humorist Charles Farrar Browne, better known by the nom de plume Artemus Ward, prior to a speaking engagement at one of the best known Victorian-era theaters outside of San Francisco—Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada. In the Western boomtowns of the 19th-century the theater was a place where hooting, hollering, clapping and foot-stomping miners met fallen women who would exchange sex for money, as financial constraints often forced theater owners to take drastic measures to protect their investments, preserve order and make customers happy. It made for strange theater indeed and left a staggering imprint on the history of the region.

After the 1859 discovery of rich silver deposits in the Comstock Lode, Virginia City became Nevada’s foremost boomtown. Four years later Irish-born Thomas Maguire built the city’s first opera house, on D Street between Union and Taylor. Seating some 700 patrons, his namesake “temple of the muses” hosted touring companies from San Francisco theaters, eventually facilitating a Western theater circuit. Maguire had journeyed west during the California Gold Rush and in San Francisco on Oct. 30, 1850, opened the Jenny Lind Theater, named for a popular Swedish opera singer of the era, though Lind never appeared there, and Maguire’s place was upstairs from a saloon. When back-to-back fires in 1851 destroyed that building and its replacement, he rebuilt the Jenny Lind in the grand style of the leading New York City theaters, opening to an eager public on Oct. 4, 1851. Exploiting a thirst