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14 GUIDE TO YELLOW SPR INGS | 2021– 2022 A TIMELINE OF THEATER IN THE VILLAGE By LAUREN “CHUCK” SHOWS ‘T his is a town that has never been bothered with shows — it looks rather dull.” So wrote an “advance man” who came into the village in 1873 to drum up inter- est in “Magner & Co’s Great Moral Sensation Show of the Season,” according to a docu- ment shared with the News by villager and Yellow Springs Historical Society President Dave Neuhardt. History tells a different story about Yellow Springs — one about a town that’s had a long, sometimes fraught, but always loving relationship with the theater. The YS Opera House Yellow Springs’ theater timeline begins in earnest in 1891, when construction of the Yellow Springs Opera House was completed at the corner of Winter and Dayton streets. It was one of many such buildings that sprang up in small towns around Ohio in the late 19th century due to Ohio legislation that allowed villages and townships to issue levies to fund town hall buildings. The building featured town hall offices downstairs and an auditorium upstairs. Just months after opening, the Opera House staged its first production in November of 1891: “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” penned in 1870 by Ohio native Samuel Muscroft, which follows a young boy who runs away to join the army during the Civil War and dies in A postcard showing the Antioch Amphitheater just after it had been built, with a wooden stage and multi-colored, plastic seats, which were factory seconds. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DAVE NEUHARDT YS THEATER