Batcher Block Opera House: "A place where dreams really do come true."

PLACES & SPACES | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA

In Cabana Magazine Issue 22, we explored how Minnesota's Batcher Block Opera House holds time differently: how its past doesn’t recede but moves alongside us, shaping the present in gestures both subtle and deeply felt. That story opened a door—wondrously inscribed with the phrase "A place where dreams really do come true"—and now we peer through to what waits on the other side. Liz Gardner follows Batcher Block's passage from preservation to possibility.

BY LIZ GARDNER | ROOMS & GARDENS | 17 SEPTEMBER 2026

The Batcher Block Opera House in Staples, Minnesota © Taylor Hall O'Brien.

Like many other rural American towns, opera houses in Staples, Minnesota – known as a Traveler's Rest, lauding 25,000 train passengers and 1,000 automobiles per day in the early 1900s – offered space for artistic performance and public assembly. 

These multi-level structures are typified by lower level offices or club rooms, and a second level stage with adjoining dressing rooms. Unlike single purpose opera houses or music halls, they operated as community chambers, a gathering place for any event requiring seating for a few hundred. 

Built in 1907 by Charles Batcher and originally situated on the historic Jefferson Highway, a north-south counterpart of the well-known Lincoln Memorial Highway that connected Winnipeg to New Orleans, is the Batcher Block Opera House. In Cabana Issue 22's A Living History, we explored how this Opera House holds time differently: how its past doesn't recede but moves alongside us, shaping the present in gestures both subtle and deeply felt. That story opened a door, and now we peer through to what waits on the other side.

Losing history, creating history, leaving a history; from the same terrain comes the Opera House's next iteration. Having served generations of performances, celebrations, and civic life, the building now enters a new chapter through the nuanced architectural translation being penned by Toby Rapson of Rapson Architects.

The eponymous firm was established by Toby's father, Ralph, in 1954 after Ralph studied at Cranbrook Academy and worked alongside Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero, Hans Knoll, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and other modernists of the era. While the firm speaks with a rich vocabulary of theater design, this project is more than a blueprint or construction schedule; it's an invitation to continue a narrative life in the making. The space remains a living organism, shaped by the hands and hopes of those who built it, and ready for the stewardship of those who will carry it forward.

For Colleen Frost, who purchased the near city-block-sized venue with her twin brother, Chris, and his wife, Tracy, in 2003 – after being given a terminal cancer diagnosis and one year to live – it's become her living legacy. Now, 21 years later, when asked about that moment and the impetus behind it, Colleen says: "I love poetry, and I love William James. His quote was, 'To spend my life working on something that will outlast my life'. I thought, 'That's what I need to do.'"

A screening of "They Don't See Ghosts" at Maison Bodega, 2026.

Her commitment grounds the story in a kind of generational care. For her, preserving this space isn't nostalgia; it's a promise to her son's generation; a way of ensuring the Opera House remains the heart of the rural town of Staples, not a relic.

"I think the future depends on our youth and making sure that when they walk into these magical places, they don't see ghosts. They see, 'What can we do to make sure that the history here goes forward?'" says Colleen.

The second floor ticket booth and adjacent double doors of the Opera House open to reveal the deep burgundy walls frescoed with floral decoration, coved robin's egg blue private boxes with elaborate cartouches and hand painted backdrops of ruched draperies tied back with bows and elaborate floral vases, layered upon one another on original ropes and rigging, flanking a grand piano on the sizable stage.

The Opera House first revealed itself to Colleen in much the same way it does in the film, They Don't See Ghosts (set at Batcher Block and directed by Sawyer Brice), not through explanation, but through experience. "I bought it site unseen," Colleen reveals. "I walked up the steps, lay on the opera house floor, looked up, saw the monkey faces, lion's head, dragons, angels, and a woman holding an American flag while [my brother] Chris was on the stage bawling, playing 'Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone'."

Baritone Charles Eaton helps the film find its emotional register through his interpretation of Korngold's Mein Sehnen, mein Wahnen [My longing, my dreaming]. His voice becomes the architecture's interior monologue, a metaphor for the conversation between the building and Colleen, Batcher and Rapson, the baritone and the ballerina.

What lingers in the film, and the physical space, is the sense that the past and future can belong in the same room. That others will feel the same gravitational pull and tend to a place where longing becomes legacy, just as the words written above the entrance to the Batcher Block Opera House: "A place where dreams really do come true."

Behind the scenes of "They Don't See Ghosts", 2026