text: In 1889, an itinerant actor named John W. Considine (born this day in 1868) blew into Seattle and became a card-dealer at the Theatre Comique, a so-called box house. (Concert saloons were sometimes called box houses because the theatre boxes could be closed off for greater privacy).
  Within a few months he was managing the People’s Theatre, where he began to make improvements to the presentation of the show. Unlike his Bible-thumping contemporaries on the East coast, he also supplemented his income by pimping, an important part of early variety entrepreneurship. The sign out front read “Come in and pick one out—they’re beautiful.” In the height of the Alaskan gold rush, his “box house” flourished. A lot of marks blew through town, and Considine was sure to get them both going and coming.
  In 1894 the Seattle city fathers passed a law against selling liquor in theatres. Considine did what any self-respecting bar manager would do under the circumstances: he moved to Spokane. There he flourished with another People’s Theatre until 1897, when the local city government passed a law outlawing box-houses. Fortunately, they were now making a comeback in Seattle. He returned there and brought with him the exotic dancer Little Egypt (who’d made a splash at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair) to town, and made a big hit. With the profits, Sullivan began buying up saloons and other properties, including Edison’s Unique Theatre (a movie and vaudeville house), making him one of the very earliest exhibitors of silent films.
  On a trip to New York to book acts, Considine hooked up with Tammany Hall machine politician and sometime theatre producer Big Tim Sullivan. The two launched a new circuit, with theatres in Spokane, Portland, Bellingham, Everett in Washington, as well as Vancouver and Victoria, in Canada. These were now respectable theatres—Considine, like his predecessors, had left the saloons behind for the bigger profits available through legitimacy.
  The enterprise flourishsed untrammeled until 1902, when Alexander Pantages came to town and harried Considine with competetion for over a decade until bad luck hit, and the Sullivan and Considine chain was revealed to have been built upon a Ponzi scheme, each succeeding house bought by mortgaging an earlier one. All it took was one setback to start all the dominoes toppling. First, Big Tim Sullivan was declared legally insane in 1913. Then, the following year, the country experienced an economic downturn. Foreclosure proceedings were begun on Sullivan and Considine properties and the house of cards collapsed. Pantages and the Loew’s chain (which by that time was national) picked up Considine’s theatres for a song. Considine passed away in 1943.
  […] Keith and William Morris circuits in the east as “The Operatic Blackface Comedian”, Al worked Sullivan and Considine in the West as “the Blackface with the Grand Opera Voice”. Harry tried to sue Al to have him […]
  […] Kelly. He started out in an amateur capacity, making his fellow Democrats laugh at a smoker at Big Tim Sullivan’s club in 1900. Vaudeville engagements resulted and within a few weeks, he climbed up the ladder from […]
  […] his first move was to open a combination fruit store and shoeshine parlor across the street from a Sullivan and Considine house. In a few months he opened his first Seattle theatre, the Crystal, in a narrow storefront. He […]
  
  I just got wind (thanks Andrew Martin) that Christopher Jones has died, a fitting time to pay tribute to one of my favorite movies Wild in the Streets (1968). This movie was a major influence on my show Willy Nilly –– released at the height of domestic turmoil in the rebellious 1960s, it’s one of those exploitation fests that tries to have its cake and eat it too, deploring hedonism and excess even as it dishes it out to you on a silver platter. Jones plays a cat named Max Frost, leader of the fictional rock band Max Frost and the Troopers (the drummer of which, one “Stanley X” is played by a young Richard Pryor.) But this outfit is MORE than just a rock band…it is also a cult and also, most importantly a political party. It is startling in some ways how much the story of the rise of Max Frost mirrors that of Charles Manson, or at least the family’s fantasies of Manson. Frost’s followers dose congress on LSD, getting them to lower the voting age to 14 (their rallying song “14 or Fight”), which allows Max to get elected President of the United States (just go with it). But there is a tinge of fascism to it. In time, there are concentration camps for anyone over 30!
  Only the most paranoid of old farts would be alarmed by this movie’s nightmare scenario, in part stoked by the drive at the time to lower the voting age to 18. Hal Holbrook plays a Bobby Kennedy-esque lamoid liberal, only too glad to give “young people” enough rope to hang him and all the other squares, just so long as they’ll vote for him in the next election. None other than Walter Winchell is the voice of unreason, played quite appropriately, by himself. Shelley Winters begins her slide into “late Shelley gonzo” as Frosts’s con compos mentis mother. And above all there is the magnetic Jones chewing the scenery in one of the coolest of cool sixties performances ever: part Abbie Hoffman, part John Lennon, part Bobby Sherman, and part Mod Squad villain. And the music, baby, the music! If I had one record to bring to a desert island, the soundtrack to this movie would not make me unhappy: