Benjamin Franklin Keith

Benjamin Franklin Keith was an American vaudeville theater owner, highly influential in the evolution of variety theater into vaudeville.

Keith was born in Hillsboro Bridge, New Hampshire. He joined the circus after attending Van Amburgs Circus and then worked at Bunnells Museum in New York City in the early 1860s. He later joined P.T. Barnum and then joined the Forepaugh Circus, before he opened a curio museum in Boston, in 1883, with Colonel William Austin. In 1885 he joined Edward Franklin Albee II, who was selling circus tickets, in operating the Boston Bijou Theatre. Their opening show was on July 6, 1885. The theatre was one of the early adopters of the continuous variety show which ran from 1000 in the morning until 1100 at night, every day. Previously, shows ran at fixed intervals with several hours of downtime between shows. With the continuous show, you could enter the theatre at any time, and stay until you reached the point in the show where you arrived.

Source: Wikipedia