Variety Arts Center

Variety Arts Center. . , Variety Spices Life Of Arts Center, Its life has spanned purposes from good causes to good fun, and still, the Italian Renaissance Variety Arts Center remains as a monument to vaudeville and a testament to the pioneer clubwomen who built it. , For most of the past century, the patrons who flocked to the Variety Arts Center to see such luminaries as Clark Gable, Wallace Beery and Ed Wynn knew it as the Figueroa Playhouse. The more political and poetic-minded knew it first as home to the Friday Morning Club, Los Angeles' first women's political club, where poet William Butler Yeats once read and novelist Hugh Walpole spoke. , The club's motto, taken from the writings of St. Augustine, is still engraved over the entrance: "In Essentials Unity…In Non-Essentials Liberty… In All Things Charity.", Social Conscience And A Bit of Slapstick, The club was founded in 1891 by Los Angeles' leading suffragist, Caroline Severance, an abolitionist who helped Susan B. Anthony found the Equal Rights Association in 1866. A schoolteacher before marriage, she helped establish kindergartens, founded the city's first Unitarian congregation. Her votes-for-women drive prompted California to give women the right to vote nine years before the nation bestowed it by constitutional amendment. At age 91, she became the first woman to vote in California. , Severance, driven by a street-level sense of right and wrong, organized her band of 87 crusaders into the politically minded Friday Morning Club, the center of social reform efforts in Los Angeles. They formed a corporation and issued stock, becoming the first women's group to finance and build its own clubhouse. In 1899, they purchased land at 9th and Figueroa Streets and built a two-story, Mission-style clubhouse graced with arches and patios. , Nearly a quarter-century later, a new five-story clubhouse would rise on the same spot. The clubwomen hired Allison and Allison, the architects who would later build UCLA's Royce Hall. , The club leased the theater to the Figueroa Playhouse, which opened in May 1924, with humorist Will Rogers as master of ceremonies for the hit "Romance" starring Doris Keane and written by playwright Edward Brewster Sheldon. Clark Gable made his acting debut here in 1926 in the play "The Lullaby," where Lionel Barrymore had trodden the stage's boards a few days earlier in the Civil War play "The Copperhead.", The theater where "CBS Radio Playhouse" broadcast the Burns and Allen show from 1932 to 1938 struggled to stay afloat during the Depression. The 1940s and 50s brought it new life, after it was remodeled into a sleek movie house called the Times Theater. , From Serving The Muses To A Museum, The theater's landlord, the Friday Morning Club, peaked at a membership of 3,800. But even though the building was designated a city and national historic landmark, in 1977, higher costs and fewer members forced the club to sell its cherished home to Milt Larsen's nonprofit Society for the Preservation for Variety Arts. , Keeping with the traditions, the society began producing musicals like "An Evening with Buddy Ebsen and Friends," as well as presenting shows such as "It's Magic.", After a meticulous restoration in 1984, the building was reborn as a new theater and a restaurant with theme bars. It had a museum stuffed like a steamer trunk with vaudeville and stage memorabilia. With his own hammer and saw, Larsen remodeled the space; he emptied his own closets to hang theater posters from decades past. He moved in W.C. Fields' trick pool table, comedian Spike Jones' old exploding cello, and the "break-apart" piano that Jimmy Durante destroyed onstage during his comic antics., And atop the building, Larsen installed a 52-foot-long scale model of the Italian cruise ship Contessa di Conte, which MGM used in its 1948 musical "Luxury Liner." Larsen renamed the ship the USS Variety Club. , By 1994, the Variety Arts Center sank as vaudeville itself had, bankrupt and overtaken by other entertainment options. Milt Larsen's private magic club "The Magic Castle" would rise to celebrate its 41st anniversary in January 2004. , Today, the grand old lady of a building, while its future is bright but uncertain, sits among the most exciting redevelopment areas of Los Angeles. But memories of performers past still populate its venerable stage: Laurel and Hardy, Fields, Eddie Cantor, Red Skelton, Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, Ed Wynn - the comics and charmers who kept audiences laughing well before television.