Wyatt Earp takes to the Apollo stage

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Peoria is a long way from Tombstone, Arizona and the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp became famous for the shootout in which he, his brothers Virgil (the city Marshal) and Morgan and buddy Doc Holliday took down a gang of outlaws in 1881.

Relatively few people know that just nine years earlier Wyatt Earp was arrested four times, right here in or around Peoria, for hanging out in houses of prostitution.

Does that mean the legendary Earp was a hardened criminal before he helped the law take out the Clanton-McLaury gang?

“Not at all,” says James Wilhelm, the Peoria actor who will portray Earp in a one-man show called “Wyatt Earp: The Other Side,” this weekend at the Apollo Theatre. “He’ll tell the real story behind those arrests. He wasn’t really a pimp, as some called him. He does, though, admit he sometimes did protection services for some of the gals in those houses.”

Wilhelm, a long-time history buff and host of Illinois Adventure, the award-winning television program on WTVP-TV, knows as much about Earp as anyone. He has studied the man for the past year in preparation for the show and will tell about his life from his side of the story.

“Interestingly, Wyatt Earp got a lot of bad press through the years and he was never real happy with the kind of publicity he got. It seemed he was always having to refute the bad things that were being said about him. So, he now gets to tell the other side of the story. He’s pretty anxious to set the record straight on a few things,” Wilhelm said.

Wilhelm, who wrote the script for the 70-minute show, said he will portray Earp as a 66-year-old man who makes a fictitious stop at the Apollo Theatre in 1914, the year the theatre opened.

 Wilhelm is a veteran of local stages and has starred in numerous plays through the years, including “Death of a Salesman,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Few Good Men,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Picnic.”

But those kind of dramatic roles have dried up the past few years as community theatres in the area do more and more musicals. What few non-musicals are performed now usually call for younger actors.

“I needed a project,” Wilhelm said in explaining why he researched and wrote the one-man show.

“I decided on Wyatt Earp because not that many people realize he had a relationship with Peoria. More people know that he was born in Monmouth but not many know he was arrested in Henry and Beardstown and twice in Peoria during his 24^th year. In modern terminology he was arrested for being a john in a house of prostitution. He had an interesting life outside of the OK Corral,” Wilhelm said.

The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $10 and can be reserved by calling (309) 673-4343 or by emailing apollofinearts13@gmail.com. Tickets also will be sold at the door, but seating at the Apollo is limited.

About the Author

Paul Gordon is the editor of The Peorian after spending 29 years of indentured servitude at the Peoria Journal Star. He’s an award-winning writer, raconteur and song-and-dance man. He also went to a high school whose team name is the Alices (that’s Vincennes Lincoln High School in Indiana; you can look it up).