Overview

An illustrated history of the Lexington Opera House in Lexington, Kentucky. Since its opening in 1887, the Opera House has welcomed many of the greatest entertainers, including Sarah Bernhardt, W. C. Fields, Carol Channing, Julie Harris, Maude Adams, Will Rogers, Josephine Baker, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Bert Williams, Fred and Adele Astaire, Eubie Blake, and Ethel Barrymore. Its stage has hosted Shakespeare's plays, burlesques, light operas, grand operas, farces, musicals, melodramas, and spectacles, including Ben-Hur with an onstage chariot race featuring live horses. After a period of neglect in the mid-twentieth century, the theatre was revived as a cultural hub for the performing arts in Lexington, and continues today to offer a rich mix of theatre, dance, music, and comedy.

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A Kentucky native, Kevin Lane Dearinger is a retired Broadway actor-singer and English teacher. Publications: The Bard in the Bluegrass, Marie Prescott, Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre, Eleanor Robson Belmont: A Theatrical Life, two memoirs, Bad Sex in Kentucky and On Stage with Bette Davis, and six volumes of poetry. Plays: Regarding Mrs. Carter, Naked on Request, and Expiation. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines. He has lectured on Lexington's theatrical history for the Blue Grass Trust Hopemont Lecture Series, the Lexington History Museum, Special Collections at the University of Kentucky, and the Opera House. He is honored to chronicle the accomplishments of The Lexington Musical Theatre. He remembers the thrill of playing Freddy Eynsford-Hill in a touring production of My Fair Lady at the Lexington Opera House in 1977.

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