Caldwell. Edwin Forrest appeared, in 1824, with Mr. Caldwell's company
at the Camp Street Theater, which he built on leaving the Orleans
Theater. The former was, when opened, out in the swamp, and people had
to walk to it from Canal Street on a narrow path of planks. It was the
first building in the city to be lighted by gas.
The annals of the old St. Charles theater, called "old Drury," are rich
with history. Practically all our great players from 1835 until long
after the Civil War, appeared in this theater, and an old prompter's
book which, I believe, is still in existence, records, among many other
things, certain details of the appearance there, in 1852, of Junius
Brutus Booth, father of Edwin Booth, and mentions also that Joseph
Jefferson (Sr.) then a young man, was reprimanded for being noisy in his
dressing-room.
New Orleans was, I believe, the first American city regularly to support
grand opera and to give it a home. For a great many years before 1859
(in which year the present French Opera House on Bourbon Street was
built) there was a regular annual season of opera at the Orleans
Theater, long since destroyed.
In the days of the city's operatic grandeur great singers used to visit
New Orleans before visiting New York, as witness, for example, the debut
at the French Opera House of Adelina Patti.
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