Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2008 - 30

a rodeo arena. The Frontier Palace, billed as the world's largest dance hall, would entertain thirsty patrons with music and
featured acts. The Sunset Trail, a midway, featuring Sally Rand's
Nude Ranch was designed to part patrons from their pocket
change with peep shows and carnival games of chance. The
crown jewel and primary attraction of the festival was to be a
4,500 seat outdoor night club presenting extravagantly staged
shows nightly. Originally named Casa Diavolo, the name was
soon changed to Casa Mañana (ﬁg. 4).
Within a week of Rose's visit to Fort Worth, the Frontier
Centennial's PR machine was set into motion. A signed press release to be published in the 14 March edition of The Billboard
by Fort Worth Mayor Van Zandt Jarvis and other city ofﬁcials
boasted: "Billy Rose has wrapped his voluminous cloak of P. T.
Barnum around his shoulders, and with his co-operation Fort
Worth will offer to America not a pale, carbon copy of the Chicago World's Fair but a living, breathing, highly exciting version
of the Last Frontier."
Soon thousands of billboards across nine states were
erected with various versions of the slogan "For Education
Come to Dallas - For Entertainment, Come to Fort Worth."
Needless to say, the Dallas city fathers prickled at the maverick celebration twenty-six miles to the west horning in on their
market. The ﬁnal straw was when a large neon sign, second in
size only to the Wrigley's sign on Broadway, was erected on top
of a building directly opposite the main entrance to Dallas's Fair
Park encouraging visitors to take the forty-ﬁve minute drive to
Fort Worth to experience the "Wild and Whoo-pee" at Rose's
Fort Worth celebration.
Led by Jumbo's director, John Murray Anderson, a seasoned Broadway veteran who had staged musical reviews in
New York since 1919, Rose brought the circus's entire production team to mount the Fort Worth Centennial Fiesta. Anderson,
with a penchant for assigning nicknames to all of his associates,
noted: "The usual retinue of cohorts followed: Raoul ("One
More Spring") du Bois, Albert ("Sandwich") Johnson, Robert
("Fleming") Alton and the composer Dana Suesse, plus my old
assistant Carlton Winckler, without whom practically nothing
ever happened at these big events" (Anderson 1954, 160).
He referred to Rose as "The Mad Emperor" or "The Mad
Hatter." Rose and Anderson soon held auditions for singers,
dancers and showgirls for all of the Frontier Centennial's venues. Casa Mañana alone was to have a cast of over two hundred
performers. Talent from across Texas descended on Fort Worth
to audition for the twenty-ﬁve dollars per week jobs. Although
this creative team supervised the design, construction, and
staging of all venues at the Frontier Centennial, this account can
focus only on Casa Mañana.
Casa Mañana was designed to seat 2,500 patrons for dinner (soup, salad, sirloin steak, baked potato, string beans, and
a beverage of choice for two dollars) at linen topped tables (ﬁg.
5). Another 2,000 customers paid the one dollar admission for
a seat to the show and the opportunity to belly up to what was
billed as "the longest bar in the world" for a thirty-cent beer.

Contracted at a cost of $205,000, the 130-foot. diameter
revolving stage and could complete a revolution in one minute,
forty-ﬁve seconds (ﬁg. 6). The entire stage rode on tracks, and
revealed a nine-foot deep water ﬁlled lagoon as it traveled up
stage. A series of forty-three water jets created a forty-foot water
curtain lit by hundreds of colored lights. Over sixty members
of I.A.T.S.E. Local 126 were employed to construct and shift
the scenery and proudly posed for a group photo on the
giant stage proclaiming it as "The Largest Outdoor Theater
in the World" (fig. 7). The New York engineering firm
of Bruckner-Mitchell, Inc. designed and installed all of the

Billy Rose has wrapped his voluminous cloak
of P. T. Barnum around his shoulders, and
with his co-operation Fort Worth will offer to
America not a pale, carbon copy of the Chicago
World's Fair but a living, breathing, highly
exciting version of the Last Frontier.
mechanical effects and fountains for the entire Centennial Fiesta. Company president, Richard R. Bruckner, a veteran of over
1,500 stage installations in Europe and the United States personally supervised the design and construction of the 17,000ton stage. Although most of the stage was decked with tongue
and groove wood ﬂooring, a large portion of the ﬂoor was exposed riveted boiler plate steel. Not only was the surface hard
on dance shoes, not to mention the dancer's legs, but the steel
had to be sprayed with water to cool it down before the ﬁrst of
two daily performances.
"Every stick of wood, every strand of wire, every lamp and
light, every fence paling, every building from the Stupendous
Casa Mañana to a frankfurter stand was designed by Albert
Johnson..." (Rosenﬁeld, Jr. 1936, 1) (ﬁg. 8). His fee for designing all of the venues and scenery for the Centennial Fiesta
attractions was $5,000. (Architect Joseph R. Pellch's fee was ﬁve
times this amount to translate Johnson's designs to construction
blueprints for the buildings.) Johnson earned his nickname
"Sandwich" from Anderson who never saw him eating anything
other than roast chicken sandwiches. At 26, the talented young
designer from LaCrosse, Wisconsin was already a seasoned veteran. He began his study with Norman Bel Geddes at seventeen.
By the age of twenty, he began his Broadway career with the
set design for the musical review Three's a Crowd. The Oxford
Companion to the American Theatre (2004) notes that his
1931 set for The Bandwagon as "...one of the ﬁrst to successfully abandon the often heavy-handed opulence of the Ziegfeld
era...made effective use of revolving stages to speed the action,
and it was the ﬁrst show to discard footlights in favor of lighting
from the balcony." Before his death in 1967 at age ﬁfty-seven,
he had designed more than forty Broadway openings, as well

W I N T E R

2008

THEATRE

DESIGN

TECHNOLOGY

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2008