Donna, Sammy & Hal — Worcester, Massachusetts (July 1927)

In the News
by Don Taylor

Palace Theatre, Worcester, Massachusetts

During the second week of July 1927, Donna Darling brought her own touring company — the Donna Darling Revue, featuring Sammy Clark and Hal Dixon — to the Palace Theatre in Worcester, Massachusetts, for a three-day run on the second half of the week’s bill, sharing the program with C. B. Maddock’s headline act “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” and the Buffalo Bill, Jr. comedy “The Galloping Gobs.” Coverage in the Worcester Evening Gazette ran on three consecutive days, July 7 through 9, 1927.

Thursday’s opening-day notice described Donna Darling as “a recent recruit from screen and beauty contests,” naming Sammy Clark and Hal Dixon as members of her company alongside fellow bill members Harry Adler and Rose Dunbar, William Peel and Paul Corvin, and Marshall and LaRue; a same-day display ad billed the act simply as the “Donna Darling Revue with Sammy Clark and Hal Dixon.”¹²

Friday’s more detailed feature — published on the house’s traditional “Amateurs Tonight” evening — reported that “two men and a girl offer the Donna Darling revue,” praising the “lively exchange of comedy” and noting it was “liberally applauded by the audience”; that evening’s ad carried the same billing as Thursday’s.³⁴

Saturday’s closing-day piece — built around a photograph of visiting Monday headliner Franklyn Farnum and previewing Sunday’s screening of “Faust” and Monday’s all-new vaudeville bill — confirmed that among the outgoing week’s acts, “the Donna Darling Revue scores easily.”⁵

This Worcester stop slots neatly into a documented one-week New England swing: Donna, Sammy, and Hal had played Poli’s Palace in Springfield earlier that same week, and would move on to the Olympia Theatre in New Bedford immediately after. For me, seeing all three engagements line up back-to-back across a single week is the real payoff — it turns three separate archival finds into one continuous, dated itinerary of exactly where my grandmother’s company was standing, night by night, in July 1927.

Endnotes

1. “Palace,” Evening Gazette (Worcester, Massachusetts), 7 July 1927, p. 11.
2. Display advertisement, Evening Gazette (Worcester, Massachusetts), 7 July 1927, p. 19.
3. “Dance and Song Palace Features,” Evening Gazette (Worcester, Massachusetts), 8 July 1927, p. 4.
4. Display advertisement (“Amateurs Tonight”), Evening Gazette (Worcester, Massachusetts), 8 July 1927, p. 23.
5. “Franklyn Farnum on Palace Bill,” Evening Gazette (Worcester, Massachusetts), 9 July 1927, p. 5.

Disclaimer: This article was researched and written by the author. Claude (Anthropic) was used as a research and drafting aid, and Grammarly was used for editorial review and copy editing.