In December 1881, Tombstone, Arizona, was a rich and riotous mining camp when former opera house manager Billy Hutchinson opened the Bird Cage Theatre. From the onset it was patronized twenty-four hours a day by the town’s miners, cowboys, and drifters, who drank and caroused with the theatre’s chorus girl barmaids. The Bird Cage gained a reputation as the Southwest’s most famous vaudeville playhouse and featured popular acts of the day, including Eddie Foy, Lotta Crabtree, and Lola Montez. It was also a rough, rowdy bar, dance hall, and gambling house, with Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Diamond Jim Brady among its legendary clientele. The Bird Cage operated off and on for eleven years, but its heyday came in its first two years, when the area’s mines were extremely prosperous and Tombstone’s population was about 7,000. A decline in silver production began an economic downturn that led to continual changes in ownership, entertainment, and name. The Bird Cage closed in 1892 and remained closed for more than thirty years before reopening as a movie house, then a coffee shop, and later a souvenir stand. As one of the few original buildings still standing from Tombstone’s glory days, it remains one of the West’s most famous landmarks. Knott’s Berry Farm’s Bird Cage Theatre is a replica of the Arizona original and had been on the drawing board for nearly a decade before Walter Knott had this façade constructed of adobe bricks in 1954. From its inception, Knott used the ghost town venue to showcase melodramas. These presentations ran more than forty years and made that Bird Cage Theatre the oldest, continuously operating melodrama theatre in the United States. It also became a training ground for many young talented performers who trod its boards and learned the craft of entertainment.
