James Adams Floating Theatre

The James Adams Floating Theatre was a floating theatre founded in 1914 by James Adams and his wife Gertrude, that toured Chesapeake Bay staging theatre in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. It was visited in 1925 by Edna Ferber while writing the 1926 novel which inspired Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway show Show Boat.[1] After the James and Beulah retired in 1917, the management of the theatre was turned over to Charles Hunter and his wife Beulah Adams Hunter (sister of James Adams).

In early decades of the 20th century, the showboat, a huge, scow-like wooden craft plying the Chesapeake Bay, called at waterfront towns from the top of the Chesapeake down to the coast of North Carolina. The arrival of the Adams Floating Theatre was an exciting time for residents in these isolated communities as the performances got underway. Then as summer gave way to fall, the floating theatre drifted south toward Elizabeth City, NC, where it normally spent the winter[2] The showboat would perform for six nights at each town, using Sunday as a travel day between venues. Over 200 different plays were performed in the years the James Adams Floating Theatre was active (1914-1941).

By the 1930s the business was falling off, though the shows continuedthrough much of the decade. In 1941 the theatre was destroyed by fire while being towed to Savannah, Georgia to be refitted. A group of volunteers is working to build a reproduction.[3]

References
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-12-21. Retrieved 2011-06-18.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. "Adams Floating Theatre Visited Cecil County -". Window on Cecil County's Past. 2019-08-17. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  3. http://www.floatingtheatre.org/ with video
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