Bernard Ries Theater Scrapbook

One 1902-1929 personal scrapbook containing editorial cartoons, playbills, and clippings from publications including The Theatre/Theatre Magazine, Harper’s Weekly, New York Star, New York Tribune, Liberty Magazine, and The Virginian-Pilot. Subject matter includes American and European theatrical performers such as Joseph Jefferson, Henry Irving, David Belasco, Richard Mansfield, Maude Adams, and Sarah Bernhardt, as well as notable performances like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and artwork by Charles Dana Gibson. The scrapbook contains dozens of articles on theater culture, including proper etiquette for attendees, theater superstitions, theatrical costumes, makeup, and stagecraft. The Bernard Ries Theater Scrapbook also includes hundreds of personal inscriptions, drawings, caricatures, photographs, and signatures by Ries or theatrical performers from 1904 to 1929, most of whom performed in Norfolk, Virginia at either the Granby Theater or the Colonial Theater from 1904 to 1911. Some of the more notable pages feature performers Frank Byron, Irene Franklin, W. C. Fields, and Virginia Shaw, and the performance of Pocahontas at the premier opening of the Colonial Theater on June 6, 1907 in downtown Norfolk. Also included are editorial cartoons of performances held at the Colonial Theater in 1909. The scrapbook also contains a clipping on the 1908 E. M. Robinson court case which described a suggestion by State’s Attorney John G. Tilton that the Ten Commandments had been “revised” in Norfolk, along with Ries’s own inscribed revision of the commandments. Finally, the scrapbook contains an unsigned lithograph print featuring “Doc Ries” and his scrapbook, an undated photograph of the exterior of Ries’s pharmacy on 168 Granby Street, and two undated copies of a photograph of the pharmacy’s interior with Ries’s scrapbook on display.