By Diane Wright
Herald Writer
EVERETT — Like the old melodrama "The Perils of Pauline," the Historic Everett Theatre has survived yet another set of perils. Somehow, 100 years later, it’s still here.
And Lee Haines, the 63-year-old projectionist at the Everett Theatre, has a message for folks in this town: "If you’ve got a memory here, share it."
Today, the Historic Everett Theatre is just a day shy of its 100th birthday. And it’s holding a birthday party tonight featuring a performance by one of America’s most gifted actor-funnymen: Bill Irwin. The man the Los Angeles Times compares to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton performs a stunt-filled theater piece called "The Clown Lecture" at 8 tonight (doors open at 7).
Irwin stood on the stage Friday and appreciated the irony of doing the kind of act whose bits and pieces might have graced the stage 100 years ago.
"It’s the old story where we’re trying to spoof and lampoon something we love," he said of the clowning tradition. "It’s an anthology of everything you do in clowning."
When he and his accompanist/accomplice Doug Skinner learned that the Everett Theatre was actually the Historic Everett Theatre, "we got excited."
And the memories he creates at this 100-year crossroads will be braided into the town’s identity, just as all the other performers did before.
"The Everett Theatre is the true character of the old downtown," says historian David Dilgard. "The malls don’t have a 100-year-old theater with Helen Hayes and Al Jolson. The Everett Theatre makes the downtown an unusual place. This is what Everett was and continues to be. It’s valuable and has its feet rooted in the past and in right now."
"It’s alive again with Irwin, a man of national reputation doing something exciting onstage. That’s part of the tradition."
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