In the film, Cotton Clouds, an Easter Egg of sorts is hidden throughout the film: posters that advertise Film and Stage Star, Ethel Grandin, coming to the Roanoke Academy of Music!
The year was 1911 and theatre and the performing arts were alive and well in Roanoke, VA, the Magic City! Roanoke housed several theatres in and around downtown, at least one even bigger than the Academy...The Roanoke Theatre. But, the beautiful Academy of Music was built "lavishly and acoustically perfect" according to Carolyn Bruce Hale in Roanoke Past and Present.
Built in 1892 as an ornate opera house and patterned after La Scala in Italy, this theatre played host to many amazing, world-famous performers throughout its lifetime including, as rumor has it, Frankenstein himself, Boris Karloff, who played in Arsenic and Old Lace here in the 40s, as well as Ethel Barrymore and many more! It housed a company of organizations under its umbrella including the Gilbert and Sullivan Light Orchestra Company, The Academy Players, a Children's Theatre, the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra and more! The Thursday Morning Music Club, which still survives today in Roanoke, supported the Academy from the 1920s onward.
It has been said that there was a buzzer backstage that could be pushed between acts to alert the bartender across the street at the Kimball Hotel that actors were coming for drinks at intermission. He would start mixing and have them ready when they arrived! (Can you imagine the actors at Mill Mountain buzzing over to Jack Brown's to have their intermission concessions ready so they can grab a quick pick me up during the 15 minute intermission today?)
By 1953, despite efforts by the arts community, Roanoke could not support the Academy in the way it needed to succeed and thrive. In addition to low membership numbers and low patron support, the building was in need of renovations to get it up to fire code and the funds were not there, so it met a wrecking ball to make way for a parking lot that you can still visit today.
The esteemed Roanoke Academy of Music was located at 410-414 Salem Avenue in Downtown Roanoke. If you drive by today you'll see the parking lot that became its footprint in 1953, right across from The Big Lick Brewing Company.
To see what the Roanoke Academy may have looked like back in its heyday, you need just travel up the road a bit to Lynchburg to visit the Historic Academy of Music Theatre in downtown. Built in 1905, this piece of history still stands, remodeled and modernized for today's artistic performances and gives us a glimpse into what a treasure we may have had in Roanoke, if it had been able to have been preserved.
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