Cleopatra Arrives in Seattle
With two carloads of scenery and an army of supernumeraries, Fanny Davenport brings the glitz and drama of Ancient Egypt to the stage at the Broadway Theater.
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Fanny Davenport and her company arrived in Seattle on Saturday night to open their production of 'Cleopatra' at the Broadway Theater. The production is a massive undertaking, requiring 150 people and two carloads of scenery and costumes costing $40,000. It took nearly thirty hours to install the complex stage settings, which include columns, sphinx heads, and a patented wind machine designed by stage manager Frank Willard. The production even hired local amateur actors as supernumeraries, training them to serve as Roman soldiers and Abyssinian servants. Davenport, known for her elaborate and historically informed costumes, describes the production as being less about dresses and more about jewels and design, noting her consultation with the French playwright Victorien Sardou to ensure historical accuracy.
“It is not so much a matter of dress as of jewels. These are only a few yards of material in the six garments—they can hardly be called dresses—that I wear in the piece.”
Theater history in Seattle has always been an exercise in ambition and importation; the logistics described here show that Seattle was already a necessary stop for major touring companies by the 1890s, demanding the same professional rigor in production design as larger cities on the East Coast.
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