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Orpheum tours benefit efforts to relight the marquee (with slideshow)

Jane Burns  —  8/21/2008 11:53 am

Click here to watch a slideshow of the Orpheum Theatre tour.

For more than 80 years, people in Madison have been able to saunter through Peacock Alley, pass under Goat Boy and head downstairs to walk past one of the Three Boys.

They just haven't known it.

Decades of movie and music fans have been inside the Orpheum Theatre at 216 State St. but probably haven't looked at it up close. That will change on Saturday when a new walking tour will peer closely at some of the details of the movie palace that has maintained its unique look since it was built in 1927.

"This is intact the way that it was," said Erica Fox Gehrig of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation. The trust has gotten the cooperation of owner Henry Doane to bring tours through some generally unseen portions of the landmark building.

The tours, which cost $5, will benefit the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation's "Relight the Marquee" campaign. The current vertical marquee is not original; it's just a painted piece of metal. The horizontal marquee is original but not lit the way it was in its glory days.

"People are walking down State Street and are probably not thinking about it," said Kris Warren, who is organizing the building tours and started the "Relight the Marquee" campaign. "The marquees on Broadway or in Chicago are just so amazing, and I thought that would be a neat task to take up."

The Orpheum is Madison's last remaining example of the movie palace era. In 1913, there were eight theaters in Madison just showing movies, and two more did both live performances and film, Fox Gehrig said.

When it came time to build the Orpheum, Madison indeed got a palace. Architects Rapp and Rapp chose the Royal Palace style for the theater, and many of the elements are still there.

"The whole idea was that it would be a fancy place to go," Fox Gehrig said. "There were box seats, there were places to be seen, there was a smoking lounge downstairs. There was a theory that people went to the theater and not to the movie."

The entryway's floor is still original, but the ticket booth was in the middle, Fox Gehrig said. The concession stand was always way in the back, she added, where the Orpheum Theatre Lobby Restaurant's kitchen now is.

The lobby was known as Peacock Alley, after the lobby of New York's Waldorf Hotel, where women showed off their fanciest outfits.

"It was the place to be seen," Fox Gehrig said.

There are details that remain from those glory days. If you look close, you can see where the rope had been to divide the double staircase. At the top of the stairs there is a statue called "The Young Shepherd" that Fox Gehrig said is referred to by locals as "Goat Boy."

Upstairs, one bathroom still has an original Art Deco-style toilet and soap dispenser. The dressing rooms show that no one, from Liberace to Feist, lived in much luxury during their Orpheum appearances.

The projection room hasn't changed all that much, and a door opens next to the film projector to show where the spotlight once shone onto the stage.

"(The projection room) was the heart and soul of the theater," Doane said. "There's a lot of original stuff in there, and it doesn't look that much different, but it is a relic."

On the main level, small trap doors on either side of the stage sit empty where signs once announced which vaudeville act was onstage or coming up. What is now the Stage Door theater was once the Orpheum's off-stage area, and there are still small posts on the floor where animals were tied down before they went onstage in vaudeville acts.

Downstairs, a small marble fountain with a young male figure remains, one of three that was created for the Orpheum. One is also upstairs but is more damaged. Another is in storage. Collectively, they are known as "the Three Boys."

The boys used to have the girls next door, too. Three matching statues with female figures were made for the Capitol Theatre across the street.

"Nobody's seen the girls," Warren said. "Star-crossed lovers."

Warren, a Madison native, worked at the Orpheum while he attended the University of Wisconsin. Until last year, he lived in California and worked in the film and TV industry.

"I came home one summer and was on the balcony of MMoCA there, looked over here and thought, 'The sign is so dilapidated, it looks terrible,' " he said.

Warren has a love of old movie palaces and wondered if there was anything he could do to help. In 2006, while he still lived in California, he organized a screening of the film "We Are Marshall" to begin the fundraising.

With the movie and another fundraiser, Warren says about $30,000 of the $200,000 needed has been raised to buy a new vertical marquee and restore the horizontal one.

The trust is also working on getting an easement from the city to protect the theater's marquee, so that no matter who owns the building or what its use is, the marquee will remain. Warren said he expects donations to pick up if the easement passes.

"If people give money, they know it's for the sign," Warren said. "It's not going to pay for someone to mop the floors or fix a projector. You always know it's going to go for the sign, and the sign will be there forever."

Other than that, Warren has another little project he'd love to see accomplished if there ever is a chance: to find those statues to keep the Three Boys company.

"People know of them, but nobody knows what happened to them," he said. "We'll have to reunite them one of these years."

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ORPHEUM THEATRE WALKING TOUR

When: 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 23, and 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 27

Where: Orpheum Theatre, 216 State St.

Cost: $5; reservations required. Call 441-8864

More information: www.madisontrust.org

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CINEMA CHRONICLES

Fans of old movie palaces can get lost in the nostalgia on a Web site dedicated to old theaters long gone and still around.

Using the Internet, Cinema Treasures (http://cinematreasures.org) "unites movie theater owners and enthusiasts in a common cause -- to save the last remaining movie palaces across the country."

The site lists 21,500 theaters throughout the world. There are 361 listed in Wisconsin, from long-gone places such as the Strand in Mount Horeb or the Prairie in Sun Prairie to those in Madison that remain, like the Orpheum, Barrymore and Majestic.

Theaters can be sorted by architect, architectural style, location, status and other categories. The site includes theaters throughout the world.

-- Jane Burns

Jane Burns  —  8/21/2008 11:53 am