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Arts & Entertainment
Last updated on Friday, April 20, 2007
The Cultural Arts Series at Clovis Community College in Clovis, New Mexico begins its sixth year of “Bringing the World to You.” This year’s theme, “Connections” focuses on our desire to connect audiences with the arts through world class performances and important educational outreach.
Appearing: Sophie Milman, The Lovell Sisters, Davide Cabassi, Dervish, Pueblo Christmas with Robert Mirabal, Christmas from Dublin, George Winston, Viver Brasil Dance Company, Glenn Miller Orchestra, The Spencers - Theatre of Illusion, Santa Fe Opera Performers, and a Cinco de Mayo celebration.
At one time a vaudeville house, the Lyceum in Clovis was built in 1919 and 1920, and like the Luna and El Raton has space for commercial businesses on either side of its theater entrance. Its stage now extends forward from the proscenium, covering the former orchestra pit. A fly-tower holds the theater’s original stage curtain.
During its peak years of 1920-1940, the Lyceum provided the best show in town. Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Gene Autry, and John Philip Sousa and his band performed on its stage. Its owners, Eugene Hardwick and his sons Russell and Charles chose the Kansas City architectural firm of Boller Brothers, well-known theater designers in the Midwest. They appear to have taken their inspiration for the Lyceum from the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroads depots and Fred Harvey’s “Harvey House” hotels in their design. It featured an air-cooling system, 600 seats and its interior design largely is intact.
The Hardwicks contracted with Paramount Pictures to show films and maintained a tradition from an earlier Lyceum of using the theater for community events. The local MainStreet program and the city took ownership in 1982, remounting the restored marquee, and began holding community events.
Listing the theaters in the State and National registers will draw renewed attention to them, according to HPD. The attention, when coupled with active MainStreet programs and other downtown revitalization plans, could help spur new economic activity downtown and renew interest in these small-town movie palaces.
“Movie theaters were the heart and pride of small-town New Mexico,” said John Murphey, HPD Register coordinator. “Their slow demises as downtowns emptied only accentuated the ghost-town feel many communities took on, leaving few reasons for area residents to stroll their once-busy main streets at night.”
Down the street from the Lyceum, the Hardwicks opened the State in 1940. It is considered the most striking example of modernism found in any New Mexico theatre. A circular glass-block tower rises from above the marquee and reaches higher than the curved parapet that masks a barrel roof. Its modern air-conditioning system and fresh style inspired the Hardwicks to restyle the Lyceum’s exterior, giving it a molded stucco façade in the Moderne style. The Hardwicks kept up to date and retained a competitive edge over theater chains that started to move into Clovis at the time.
Tucked into an old stucco wall on Calle de Guadalupe just off the Plaza in Mesilla, NM, is the facade of the Fountain Theater, probably the oldest movie theater in New Mexico. Early records are hazy, but since about 1913 when vaudeville acts shared the stage, the Fountain has been showing movies. These days the Mesilla Valley Film Society rents the theater from the Fountain family of Las Cruces. In an old-fashioned setting that is so retro it's becoming fashionable again, cutting-edge cinema winds down the century.Hispanic currents flow through the history and culture of Las Cruces and Mesilla like the Rio Grande flows through the fields and arid pasturelands of these adjoining valley communities.
Spanish-speaking conquistadores and colonists left their tracks and bones along the sandy river bottoms more than four centuries ago. Northern New Mexico's Spanish-speaking settlers, uprooted by the Mexican/American conflict of the late 1840s, rebuilt their lives at Las Cruces and Mesilla, constructing community, churches and homes along the riverbanks. Their descendants, along with more recent Spanish-speaking settlers, now serve in local political offices; work in local businesses, industries and professions; study at the local university and colleges; and teach in the local schools.
It began about 60 years after the events that inspired it took place, and it has been going on for about another 60 years since. It is “The Last Escape of Billy the Kid” and it is held yearly at Lincoln, New Mexico, where it all happened. Started in 1940 as part of the Quatro Centennial, the pageant was, and is, staffed entirely by local folks, many of whom are descended from the actual participants being portrayed. The first local man to play Billy the Kid was renowned artist Peter Hurd of San Patricio.
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