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Lucille Ball Little Theatre

theater in Jamestown, New York, United States

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 19, 2025
Entity authorityQ6697262 ↗
Source-derived summary

Lucille Ball Little Theatre of Jamestown is a community theatre company located in Jamestown, New York. It evolved from the Jamestown Players Club and was established as a non-profit corporation in 1936 with the name Little Theatre of Jamestown. The company has its own theatre on East Second St. in Jamestown which it purchased in 1968. Both the company and its theatre were renamed the Lucille Ball Little Theatre of Jamestown in 1991 to honor the actress Lucille Ball, Jamestown's most famous resident. Ball got her acting start with the company's precursor The Players Club and returned in 1945 to perform in a series of skits with the company in Chautauqua's Smith-Wilkes Hall. Throughout her life, she would send the company cash donations as well as costumes from her television and film career. One of her donations, a costume from the film Gone With the Wind is still used by the company.

Company theatre

Since 1969, the company's home has been located at 18 East Second St. in Jamestown.

Editorial summary

“Lucille Ball Little Theatre” enters the record as theater in Jamestown, New York, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lucille, Ball and Little can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful identification and reception guide that helps separate the work itself from editions, performances, ownership and later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1936, 1968, 1991, 1945—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Lucille, Ball and Little.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Lucille Ball Little Theatre” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Lucille, Ball and Little provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6697262. Authority coordinates are 42.096, -79.240. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1968, 1991 and 1945.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Lucille Ball Little Theatre”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Lucille Ball Little Theatre primary sources, Lucille Ball Little Theatre archive and Lucille research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Lucille Ball Little Theatre”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Lucille Ball Little Theatre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.