Photostory #318: Palace Grand -- Canada's Klondike Showplace: Top Musical Comedy Plays Under Midnight Sun

Photographers
Ted Grant , unattributed
Maker
National Film Board of Canada
Release Date
August 17, 1962
Collection
CMCP fonds
Credit Line
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives
Main Text
There's one business like show business -- goldmining! Both have personality greats, those who strike it rich, who take the heartbreaks, hit top-of-the-bill, go under. Both are steeped in legendary romance, gaiety and hardship, deep disappointment, shilling success. Perhaps that is why Dawson City in Canada's Yukon -- scene of the great goldrush -- has its fabulous Palace Grand Theatre. Sixty-three years after it mushroomed amidst the rip-roaring hodge-podge of saloons, dental parlors, eating rooms and flop houses that held the Klondike spotlight in 1899, the old Palace Grand has made a comeback to link again the bright world of the footlights and the magic poke of gold in a miner's hand. From New York's Broadway -- famed for shows and music long before the first cry of gold echoed down from the Yukon -- has come world-famous Beatrice Lillie to open Dawson's Palace Grand and the premiere of Foxy -- a musical with celebrated comedian Bert Lahr and other top U. S. artists who will later take their hit comedy to New York.