Corning Opera House

[Abby Brown] When you think of opera, you probably imagined something like. . .

(A woman wearing a puffy, short-sleeve, rounded collared white top under a red lace tied vest is singing.)

(A woman dressed in a white dress with brocade lace over the top of the dress and a crown of flowers is singing.)

Well, there's something very interesting about opera music and this opera house.

(Map marking Adams County in southwestern Iowa.)

The Corning Opera House has been in Corning, Iowa for over a hundred years, but an opera has never been performed here. So why do they call it an opera house? A long time ago, opera houses in Italy were viewed as respectable, classy places where people gathered to be entertained. When theaters were first being built in the United States, owners wanted to have that same high quality feel. So they decided to call their theaters opera houses. Some, like the Corning Opera House, might not have had a single opera performed on their stage. But they were definitely a place for community members to come together for all sorts of entertainment, like vaudeville acts with comical singing and dancing, as well as speeches and other presentations. There's some awesome history here at the Corning Opera House. It underwent some major renovations in the early 2000s, but some of the original parts of the theater are still here, like the horseshoe balcony. In the old days, people would watch from this balcony as boxing matches were taking place down below. Sometimes there were even greased pig contests.

The ceiling tiles are the same ones that were here when the building was constructed in 1902. They're curved so that the sound from the stage bounces off of them just right, helping everyone seated in the theater to hear what's happening on stage.

The stage at the Corning Opera House was modeled after the stages that the William Shakespeare would have worked on. It's called a raked stage. Raked means the stage slopes. So, it's lower in the front and higher in the back. Why do you think Shakespeare liked it that way?

Back then, there were no microphones or fancy electric spotlights, so making the stage slope higher allowed the audience to see and hear the action at the back part of the stage easier. In theater talk, upstage was the back of the stage, further away from the audience. And downstage is the front of the stage, really close to the audience. Those terms came from Shakespeare's time when raked stages were part of English theaters.

The Corning Opera House is a true Iowa treasure that gives us an insightful peek into the history of theater.

Every county in Iowa shines a spotlight on some important piece of history. Thanks for taking the stage with me at the Corning Opera House here in Adams County.

Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by The Coons Foundation, Pella and the Gilchrist Foundation.