Live at the Crest

When Ernest Rawley, Manager of the Royal Alexandra Theatre, wrote in Saturday Night Magazine in 1937 that there was a dire lack of professional theatre in Toronto, he was not referring to Canadian product. Since 1839, when its first theatre was built in a converted carpentry shop at the corner of King and York, Toronto had played host chiefly to touring American stock companies offering everything from Shakespeare to melodrama, and it was in one such stock company that Baby Gladys Smith, a.k.a. Mary Pickford, made her debut in 1898. Companies played in fulsomely named “opera houses” holding as many as 1,500 people, but after World War I these were superseded by smaller vaudeville houses. They also presented touring shows, a half dozen or so live acts intermingled with five-reel movies.

Eventually the five reelers became full-length movies, vaudeville itself withered away, and by the time of Rawley’s article there were plenty of movie houses but practically...