Everything about Benjamin Franklin Keith totally explained
Benjamin Franklin Keith (
January 26,
1846 –
March 26,
1914) was an American
vaudeville theatre owner, generally credited for the evolution of variety theater into vaudeville.
Early years
He was born in
Hillsboro Bridge,
New Hampshire. He joined the circus after attending Van Amburg's Circus and then worked at Bunnell's Museum in
New York City in the early 1860s. He later joined
P.T. Barnum and then joined the Forepaugh Circus, before he opened a curio museum in
Boston, in 1883, with Colonel
William Austin. In 1885 he joined
Edward Franklin Albee II, who was selling circus tickets, in founding and operating the Boston Bijou Theatre. Their opening show was on
July 6,
1885. The theatre was one of the early adopters of the continuous variety show which ran from 10:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night, every day. Previously, shows ran at fixed intervals with several hours of downtime between shows. With the continuous show, you could enter the theatre at anytime, and stay until you reached the point in the show where you walked in.
Moving pictures
Albee and Keith opened the Union Square Theatre in New York City, and it was the site of the first American exhibition of the
Lumière Cinématographe. The first showing was on
June 29,
1896, they'd obtained the exclusive American rights to the Lumière apparatus and their film output. They then opened theatres in
Philadelphia, and
Boston, and then smaller theatres in the East and Midwest of the United States, buying out rival smaller chains. They signed a contract with
Biograph Studios in 1896 which lasted until July of 1905 when they switched to
Edison Studios as their supplier of
motion pictures. Keith and Albee merged their theatre circuit with
Frederick Freeman Proctor in June of 1906.
Death
Keith withdrew from business in 1909 and married for a second time on
October 28,
1913 to Ethel Bird Chase (1887-?). She was 26 years old and Keith was 67. Her father was
P. B. Chase. Kieth died at the Breakers Hotel in
Palm Beach, Florida in 1914. After his son, Andrew Keith, died in 1918, control of the company went to Albee.
Legacy
After Keith's death, the
Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) corporation was formed in
Marysville, Washington.
Timeline
Further Information
Get more info on 'Benjamin Franklin Keith'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://benjamin_franklin_keith.totallyexplained.com">Benjamin Franklin Keith Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
