Response from Thelma60, Owner at Casino Theatre Entertainment Center. Responded Jan 22, 2018. We are thrilled that we were a part of your childhood. As you know we are a family business and currently my wife and I are 2nd generation running the business. Casino Theatre Entertainment Center Scranton; Casino Theatre Entertainment Center, Mt Pocono; Get Menu, Reviews, Contact, Location, Phone Number, Maps and more for Casino Theatre Entertainment Center Restaurant on Zomato. Casino Theatre Entertainment Center specializes in family-oriented entertainment. Two up-to-date movie theaters feature digital projection and 3D capability. Food is served directly to patrons at their theater seats upon request. The Casino also offers a 1950s-style malt shoppe and restaurant, featuring more than 70 flavors of Hershey's ice.
The Casino Theatre was a Broadway theatre located at 1404 Broadway and West 39th Street in New York City. Built in 1882, it was a leading presenter of mostly musicals and operettas until it closed in 1930.[1]
The theatre was the first in New York to be lit entirely by electricity, popularized the chorus line and later introduced white audiences to African-American shows. It originally seated approximately 875 people, however the theatre was enlarged in 1894 and again in 1905, after a fire, when its capacity was enlarged to 1,300 seats. It hosted a number of long-running comic operas, operettas and musical comedies, including Erminie, Florodora, The Vagabond King and The Desert Song. It closed in 1930 and was demolished the same year.[2]
History[edit]
The Casino Theatre, designed in Moorish Revival style by architects Francis Hatch Kimball and Thomas Wisedell, was the first theatre in New York to be lit entirely by electricity.[3] It was built more than 15 blocks north of where the theatre district was then centered, 23rd Street.[2] In 1890, New York's first roof garden was added to the theatre.[4] It originally seated approximately 875 people, however the theatre was enlarged in 1894 and again when it was rebuilt in 1905 after a fire in 1903. The redesigned Casino seated 1,300.[3]
The theatre opened with productions by the McCaull Comic Opera Company. It was first managed by producer and composer Rudolph Aronson, and later by Canary & Lederer from 1894 to 1903, and from 1903 by the Shuberts. As the center of the Broadway theatre district moved uptown, north of 42nd Street, the Casino closed in 1930. It was demolished the same year, along with the nearby Knickerbocker Theatre, to make way for the expanding Garment District.[3]
The Casino hosted a series of successful operettas and other musical theatre pieces in the 1880s and 1890s, including the extraordinarily successful Erminie.[5] In 1891, it premiered Cavalleria Rusticana in America, and in 1894 it presented the first Broadway revue, The Passing Show. In 1898, it was host to the premiere of Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, the first African-American musical to be presented before a white audience.[2]
The theatre is perhaps best remembered, however, as having been the home of the 1900 production of the Edwardian musical comedy, Florodora. In that show, it became the first theatre in New York to feature a chorus line, the 'Florodora Sextet'. The sextet's original lineup included a number of ladies who would later achieve fame and fortune. The production 'elevated the chorus girl into ... an attraction in its own right.'[4]Evelyn Nesbit was a chorus girl in the show in 1901.[3] Over the decades, the theatre also became known for its free Christmas presentations for New York children.[2]
Over the next decade, the theatre continued to present musicals and operettas, some of the most successful being A Chinese Honeymoon (1902), The Earl and the Girl (1905) and The Chocolate Soldier (1909). During World War I, it hosted transfers of several of the Princess Theatre musicals, among other musicals, such as The Blue Paradise (1915) and Sometime (1918). In the 1920s, the theatre was the home of several hit operettas, particularly The Vagabond King and The Desert Song.[1] Although the Casino had led the move uptown by the Broadway theatre district, by 1930, most of the theatres had moved even further north, to the West 40s. The last performance was the opera Faust, in January 1930.[2]
Notable productions[edit]
- 1882: The Queen's Lace Handkerchief
- 1883: The Beggar Student
- 1884: Nell Gwynne
- 1885: Die Fledermaus
- 1886: Erminie
- 1888: The Yeomen of the Guard
- 1890: The Grand Duchess[6][7]
- 1891: Cavalleria Rusticana
- 1894: The Passing Show
- 1895: The Wizard of the Nile
- 1896: The Lady Slavey
- 1896: In Gay New York
- 1897: The Belle of New York
- 1898: Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk
- 1900: Florodora
- 1900: The Casino Girl
- 1900: The Belle of Bohemia[8]
- 1901: The Little Duchess
- 1902: A Chinese Honeymoon
- 1903: The Runaways
- 1904: Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!
- 1905: The Earl and the Girl
- 1909: Havana
- 1909: The Chocolate Soldier
- 1912: The Firefly
- 1912–13: Seasons of Gilbert and Sullivan
- 1914: High Jinks (musical)
- 1915: The Blue Paradise
- 1916: Very Good Eddie
- 1917: Oh, Boy!
- 1918: Oh, Lady! Lady!!
- 1918: Sometime
- 1921: Tangerine
- 1922: Sally, Irene and Mary
- 1923: Wildflower
- 1924: I'll Say She Is – Marx Brothers
- 1925: The Vagabond King
- 1926: The Desert Song
- 1928: My Maryland
- 1929: The New Moon
- 1930: American Opera Company's Madama Butterfly and Faust
References[edit]
- ^ ab'Casino Theatre (Built: 1882 Demolished: 1930 Closed: 1930)'Internet Broadway Database (Retrieved on December 31, 2007)
- ^ abcdeMiller, Tom. 'The Lost 1882 Casino Theatre – 39th Street and Broadway', Daytonian in Manhattan, June 3, 2013, accessed October 21, 2014
- ^ abcdCasino Theatre. World Theatres – Broadway and Off Broadway Theatres, accessed May 24, 2011
- ^ abBloom, Ken. Routledge Guide to Broadway, Routledge (2013), pp. 44–45 ISBN1135871175
- ^IBDB entry for the original New York run, accessed October 21, 2014. See also Stone, David. Violet Melnotte (1855–1935)Archived 2014-10-21 at the Wayback Machine, Who Was Who in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, Boise State University, accessed October 21, 2014
- ^Digital Collections, The New York Public Library. '(still image) Lillian Russell in 'The grand duchess', (1894)'. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Retrieved June 28, 2020.
- ^Aronson, Rudolph (1913). Theatrical and Musical Memoirs. New York: McBride, Nast and Company. p. 95. OCLC608173307.
- ^Franceschina, John. Harry B. Smith: Dean of American Librettists, Routledge (2003), p. 169 via Google Books
External links[edit]
| Wikimedia Commons has media related to Casino Theatre (New York City). |
- Casino Theatre at the Internet Broadway Database
Coordinates: 40°45′13″N73°59′14″W / 40.75362°N 73.9871°W
The Casino Theatre Entertainment Center is a two-screen movie house and ice cream shop in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. This year-round family-owned and operated business, founded in 1975, was built on the site of the Casino dance hall and night club, which was itself established in 1922.
Casino Theatre Nyc
In addition to first-run movies, the Casino houses the Village Malt Shoppe, which features an old-fashioned soda fountain offering ice cream soda, malted milk, milkshake, egg cream and phosphates, as well as a large selection of ice cream flavors.
There is also a redemption game room geared toward younger children, and an 18-hole miniature golf course.
History[edit]
The 'Casino' name predates the existing Casino Theatre building and business, and goes back to a landmark dance hall built on the same spot in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. Several decades later the building was transformed into a movie house, with seats placed on the flat dance floor and the screen on the stage. The 'Casino Theatre,' complete with British spelling of 'theater,' was born.
The original one-story 1922 Casino building, originally used as a dance hall and night club, was converted to a movie theater after being purchased by Mrs. H.C. Smith of Stroudsburg.
The theater building was purchased in 1974 by three local couples: George & Sheila Litz of Cresco, and two couples from Pocono Farms, Victor & Diane Genco and John & Ruth Hildebrand. The three families formed a business entity called LIGEND, Inc., from the letters of their last names, and incorporated it with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on March 12, 1975.
The families renovated and modernized the vintage structure, opening for business on April 4, 1975, with the addition of an old-fashioned ice cream parlor called the Village Malt Shoppe, with 20 flavors of ice cream. The new decor featured paneling with an old-fashioned newspaper design, along with crisp white curtains and Tiffany-style lamps. The building was also home to two other LIGEND businesses: the Needles N' Things sewing and craft shop and the Early American Gift Shop.
Casino Theatre Entertainment Center Pa
The single 200-seat Casino movie theater reopened that May with a showing of the classic Gone With the Wind.
Less than a year after the grand reopening, disaster struck. On March 11, 1976, the renovated Casino Theatre and neighboring businesses burned to the ground. Operated as a summer business, the movie theater and malt shop were closed for the season at the time. The building had been broken into several times over the winter, fueling speculation about the cause of the fire.
The Casino had been scheduled to open on April 26 with the movie musical 1776 in honor of the United States Bicentennial, and the local bicentennial committee had been planning to sell tickets to the show to raise money for a Fourth of July parade.
Two hours after the first firefighters arrived at the scene, only the brick facade of the old wooden building remained.
The new building opened just four months later, in July 1976, with a new single-screen movie theater and new ice cream parlor. The silver lining of the fire was that the resulting destruction of the original building meant that the new building was built with a slanted floor, allowing a modern movie-going experience instead of the neck-craning involved when watching a film from the flat floor of the old dance hall.
Within just a few years, the Litzes bought out their partners and began expanding the operation. Today, after more than 30 years, the business is still owned and operated by the Litz family, and the Casino is in its second generation of family management. (With the third generation often employed there.)
Casino Theatre Pa
Over the years, the Litzes added a kitchen, miniature golf course and a game room targeted at pre-teens and younger, with prize redemptions. The 1950s theme of the decor dates to 2004, when a gift shop featuring nostalgia and retro items was added. Items featuring Betty Boop, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, I Love Lucy, and other icons of the 1950s.
For years, the Casino ran second-run movies or classics, permitting the theater to show a greater range of films by showing them for shorter periods of time, as makes sense for a business with a relatively small customer base. But as the population of The Poconos has grown, so has the Casino: The theater was twinned in 2003, when the Casino also started running first-run movies.
The business continues to grow. For years, the Casino was a seasonal business, open for weekends only from mid-March through Memorial Day, then running full-time through the end of September, when it would revert to weekends only through Thanksgiving.
In 2007, the Casino became a year-round operation. With a movie theater, malt shop, sandwich restaurant, children's arcade room, gift shop and miniature golf operation all under one roof, the owners are recasting the business as the Casino Theatre Entertainment Center.
References[edit]
- 'Malt Shop opens'. [Pocono Record]. 1975-04-19. p. 19.
In these days when nostalgia is all the rage, what better way to bring back memories than an old-fashioned ice cream parlor.
- Ruth Vince and Steve Blakely (1976-03-11). 'Raging fire destroys famed Casino Theatre'. [Pocono Record]. p. 1.
... From across the street and up the block, some 200 curious spectators watched as the old Casino Theatre gave its final performance.
- Geoff Dougherty (1994-08-21). 'About people: George Litz - Family fun'. [Pocono Record]. p. C-11.
People can feed their kids here, have ice cream, and don’t feel like they’ve left their paycheck.
- Joe Lyons. 'A family affair kind of place / Casino Theatre, ice cream parlor rise from ashes after a fire'. [Pocono Record].
Our idea is to make it a very family-oriented type of operation – where a person can come in here with his family and have a lot of things to do.
- 'Casino Theatre fun place for family'. Pocono Summer. [Pocono Record]. 1997-07-03. pp. 29, 45.
We're kind of unique in that all our sundaes are served in glass - we don't use paper products.
- Lauren Kurz (2003-06-20). 'Three generations keep Casino Theatre humming'. Pocono Weekend. [Pocono Record]. p. E2.
Affordability and a commitment to family entertainment seem to be a winning combination for the business.
External links[edit]
Coordinates: 41°07′16″N75°21′20″W / 41.1210°N 75.3555°W