The stage has been dark and the curtains closed at the Newport Casino Theatre for more than 20 years, but little imagination can conjure up images of Will Rogers spinning a monologue here or Orson Welles or Oscar Wilde entertaining the crowd.
The building was designed by Stanford White, a New York architect for the rich and glamorous whose murder by a girlfriend's jealous husband became a tabloid sensation, and contributed to the glimmering landscape that made Newport a popular summer resort for affluent industrialists and their families during America's Gilded Age.
Now after years of vacancy and deterioration, the building — owned by the International Tennis Hall of Fame and located at the Newport Casino complex — is being revived through a roughly $4.5 million facelift that will return it to a functioning theater.
This fall, workers will install heating, air conditioning and new electrical systems, make the building handicapped accessible, restore the exterior and touch up other signs of structural defects that led the building to close in 1987. The theater is expected to reopen as soon as next summer.
The theater, built in 1880, occupies prime Newport real estate on the grounds of the Newport Casino, a National Historic Landmark home to the tennis hall of fame and the traditional venue for the opening night performances of the city's heralded folk and jazz festivals. It lays claim to being the first — and only remaining example — of Stanford White's theater architecture.
An architect responsible for Fifth Avenue mansions, the palatial Rosecliff property in Newport and one of the original incarnations of Madison Square Garden, White also occupied high-society circles around the turn of the 20th century.
Evelyn Nisbet, an actress and model who became one of White's lovers as a teenager, famously recounted swinging nude for him on a red velvet swing he had installed. She went on to marry Harry Thaw, who shot White at close range in 1906 during a rooftop performance at the old Madison Square Garden. Thaw's first trial ended with a hung jury, and he was later acquitted by reason of insanity.