Calumet Theatre Plays

It's 1900. On the tiny Keweenaw Peninsula jutting into Lake Superior there is a vibrant copper mining town with a rich social and cultural life. The owners of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company live far away in Boston, Massachusetts. But they have imported miners from Cornwall, England, farmers from Finland, and immigrants from many other European countries to work deep underground in hot, dangerous copper mines in the secluded Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In 1900 Red Jacket, soon to be called Calumet, is not a frontier town of rough bachelors. The Bostonian mine owners have brought workers' wives and children, built churches and social halls for each national group, constructed a handsome library containing bath house and swimming pool. They've built schools, a hospital, low rent houses for miners' families. Calumet has Culture! The town has handsome buildings. The architecture would fit into Beacon Hill or Back Bay! It has a large park, stores, restaurants, social clubs, taverns, cultural societies, sports teams. How is it possible for such a rich cultural and social center to have blossomed in a forest on the way to nowhere? It's on the railroad. In the age of railroads. (Bostonians also have shares in railroads.) Calumet's copper mines are making people rich. Those behind it all are not only from Boston itself. Some are from across the river from Boston - Cambridge. Harvard University. Alexander Agassiz, manager of the Calumet and Hecla mine is the son of Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born naturalist, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Longfellow, founder of Harvard's Museum of Natural History. Alexander Agassiz is a marine biologist and oceanographer, who gives vast sums of his own money to Harvard to enlarge the zoological museum his father founded. He also uses his income from managing Calumet and Hecla Mining Company to go on research voyages to the Caribbean and South Pacific. The Harvard/Boston inventors of Calumet were highly educated humanitarians with a feeling of noblesse oblige. Yes, as some have complained they got rich off the hard, dangerous work of the miners and their attitude toward them was "paternalistic." But it's a fact, the miners in Calumet probably lived richer lives than miners anywhere else in the world, before or since. In 1900 Calumet's town government has just completed a gorgeous new theater. The famous Shakespearean actress "MADAME" HELENA MODJESKA will appear as Lady Macbeth. Everyone is thrilled. In coming years all the famous stars of the era will travel to Calumet Theatre: John Philip Sousa's band, Lillian Russell, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Lon Chaney, Sr., Jason Robards, Sr., James O'Neill, William S. Hart, Wallace and Noah Beery. In 1911 SARAH BERNHARDT will come to Calumet Theatre. She travels not just in a private train car as Madame Modjeska's troupe did, she hires a whole train! "The Divine Sarah" tours the world with her players from the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris. In Calumet they will perform the most popular play of the era "Camille" -- in French! (She always performed in French. You could buy a program with the translation.) All the above is history. Besides Madame Modjeska and Sarah Bernhardt the characters in these plays are, of course, invented. Between these two short plays is an "optional interim act" that takes place at the local FINN HALL, the social hall for immigrants from Finland. It calls for Finnish folk music and dancing. Even if you know nothing about Finland or folk dancing this optional act is worth putting on. It carries on the story from "Calumet 1900." The music will make you happy! Your actors and audience will have FUN! (Remember fun?)