THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 25, 1996 TAG: 9609250001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 40 lines
Arts institutions in Hampton Roads don't come much older than the Norfolk Little Theater, which is celebrating its 70th season this year. Seventy is a venerable age, so it would be impolite - and probably in error - to question the Little Theater's claim to being the oldest continuously performing community production company in the United States.
Well, continuing health and prosperity to the all-volunteer Norfolk Little Theater, and thanks for delighting and enriching the region for seven decades.
There are little theaters all around Hampton Roads now, and a professional repertory theater, the Virginia Stage Company, ensconced at the charming historic Wells Theater in downtown Norfolk. In truth, the arts and cultural offerings within the region have never been livelier, more varied or more colorful than they are this season.
Arts and cultural events were sometime things when the Norfolk Little Theater mounted its first production in 1927 on the stage of Blair Junior High School. Traveling shows came to the Wells and Colonial theaters. And the Norfolk Civic Symphony (now the Virginia Symphony) had been established in 1921. But the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences (now the Chrysler Museum of Art) was not to open its doors until 1933.
When the Little Theater came into being, Norfolk was essentially, as journalist and critic H. L. Mencken later said of the South, a ``sahara of the bozarts.'' But when Mencken hurled his scorn at the South's paucity of arts and cultural activities, a band of women - inspired by the example of Irene Leache and Anna Cogswell Wood, who had opened a school for girls at Norfolk's College Place - had been striving since before World War I to install the arts in the port city.
Established in 1917, the Norfolk Society of Arts was the instrument for accomplishing their mission. The Little Theater was the spawn of the drama committee of the Norfolk Society Arts, just as the symphony and the museum were children of the society's music and art committees, respectively.
The Little Theater's season opener is an Agatha Christie mystery, ``A Murder is Announced.'' The fun goes on. by CNB