Pittsburgh Area Theatre Organ Society launches new season after three-year hiatus
The Wurlitzer pipe organ that is housed at Keystone Oaks High School in Dormont has weathered the vagaries of time and decades of shifts in fashions and tastes.
But it wasn’t entirely certain it would be able to ride out COVID-19.
As the pandemic dragged on month after month, the organ that was used as an accompaniment for vaudeville performances at the Prospect Theatre in Brooklyn, N.Y., and might very well have provided a soundtrack for classic silent films like “The Gold Rush,” “Sunrise” or “Metropolis” almost a century ago, languished in storage. Dale Abraham, the president of the Pittsburgh Area Theatre Organ Society, explained that “there are all kinds of things that can go wrong, and the worst thing you can do with a theater pipe organ is not play it.”
When the organ was finally wheeled out and dusted off earlier this year, Abraham and the other members of the society were happy to find that it still played well. It was out of tune as a result of the time it went unused, but otherwise, it played “amazingly beautifully,” Abraham said.
“We expected mechanical problems, and amazingly that didn’t happen,” he said. “We got lucky.”
The society, which goes by the shorthand PATOS, last hosted an event in November 2019. Owing to strict coronavirus restrictions that were in place at the high school, events by outside groups were prohibited through 2020 and 2021. Now, with life mostly returning to some sense of normalcy, PATOS is launching a new season Aug. 20 with a screening of the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy “Sherlock Jr.” Clark Wilson, a resident of East Liverpool, Ohio, and the resident organist at the Ohio Theatre in Columbus will be at the Wurlitzer’s keyboard.
In an email message, Wilson explained, “The Keystone Oaks organ is a great example of an instrument saved and propelled into the future by a group of volunteers who cared enough to give up years of their lives for its restoration, installation and ongoing care.”
He continued, “The fact that they did this in an educational institution is all the more noble, and the school is also to be congratulated on its foresight for allowing the organ to reside there.”
The 1910s and 1920s were the heyday of the theater organ. At the moviehouses where customers would crowd in to take in everything from epics like “Intolerance” to Keystone Cops shorts and knockabout slapstick performers, the theater organ was a handy and flexible alternative to paying an orchestra or any other kind of an ensemble to do the job. Theater organs also had the virtue of providing a whole range of sound effects, from sleigh bells to train whistles. But the arrival of sound and “talking pictures” in the 1930s led money-minded theater owners to ditch their organs without so much as a second thought. Some were unceremoniously ushered to the scrap heap. Others were destroyed in calamities like the floods that devastated Pittsburgh in March 1936.
PATOS was on an upswing before the pandemic, drawing about 160 people to each of its events – not a massive turnout to be sure, but a sizable increase compared to what they were managing just a couple of years before. Abraham, a retired bus driver with Pittsburgh Regional Transit and co-host of the Saturday evening program, “Rhythm, Sweet & Hot” on WESA-FM, is hoping that audiences will come back after the three-year hiatus.
And despite nearly everyone turning to diversions within their own four walls during the pandemic, Abraham believes that seeing something like “Sherlock Jr.” in a theater, with a live accompaniment, offers an experience that is a quantum leap beyond watching it on DVD or whenever it turns up on Turner Classic Movies.
“You’re not going to be able to experience what we are trying to do unless you see it live,” he said. “There’s just no comparison to hearing a soundtrack on TCM and hearing it in person, where you can feel the walls rattle and the power of the organ.”
Tickets and additional information are available at www.pittsburghtheatreorgan.com or the website for Showclix, www.showclix.com/event/re-boot.