1908: MAY-JUNE

When May 1908 began, Brooklyn’s theatre scene looked like that of any other normal month. Ten legitimate playhouses (three stock companies among them) were open as were six vaudeville/burlesque houses, making 16 in all. On May 9, Williamsburg’s Folly switched from legitimate to vaudeville and several other legits put up their shutters for the coming summer. By May 25, only seven theatres remained open, and by June 9 the 1907-1908 Brooklyn season was over. 

May witnessed separate visits of both Spooner sisters, first Cecil in The Girl and the Detective, then, more memorably, Edna May, starring in The Bishop’s Carriage, The Three of Us, The Governor and the Boss, and The Marriage of William Ashe, giving one week to each in an unusual four-week rum at the Majestic. She had become a popular, extremely versatile actress, playing a record number of roles during her family’s successful seven-year stretch in Brooklyn running a weekly stock company, mainly at the Bijou. She continued her success when the Spooners took over a Broadway venue, racking up 564 performances (far more than even the greatest stars); initiated a career as an independent star; and, as described in the press, reveled in her return as a star to the town and fans that put her on the map. 

Aside from Bert Williams and George Walker carrying over Bandanna Land from April, no other significant luminary brightened the borough’s stages during these waning weeks. 

Legit business, especially at the cheap melodrama establishments, had been slow lately because of the competition from vaudeville and the increasingly popular moving pictures. Regarding those amusements, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court declared on May 9 that the state lacked the power to enjoin the police from suppressing the Sunday concerts, thereby vacating the injunctions recently put in place. However, a leading attorney representing the theatrical interests announced to the Standard Union that this would not directly affect the Sunday entertainments:

It simply means that the injunction barring the police from entering our various places of amusements is dissolved and that hereafter they will have access to theatres. If they find that violations of the law are taking place their duty will be to arrest the managers where they find the law being violated. 

The Appellate Division has not gone into the question whether our performances are violations of the law, nor has it intimated whether the lower court was correct in its decision.’

 And thus, the Sunday blue law status quo—which also involved major league baseball and other sports—would continue, with regular disruptions, until April 19, 1919. On that day New York State Governor Al Smith signed a bill allowing Sunday baseball games and the showing of motion pictures, provided they began after 2:00 P.M. By the early 1920s, most traces of such restrictions on Sunday amusements were abandoned or ignored. Of course, similar developments were occurring throughout the nation. 

By now, at least three Brooklyn theatres, the Park, the Novelty, and the Royal, had transitioned to being fulltime movie houses, although, for unknown reasons, that led to the latter two falling off the radar of newspaper items or ads. Their programs were interlarded with vaudeville routines, each theatre having a different proportion of how much vaudeville to employ, the Royal having more than the others.

Some observers noticed this rapid progression of the young medium with wary eyes, as seen in an Eagle article on May 18, describing how increasingly large were the crowds navigating away from live to filmed entertainment, and how “perturbing” this was to theatre managers. The shift to continuous performances of movies, open from noon to midnight, represented by the Park (reversed in the fall when the Spooners assumed the management) and Novelty “indicates,” wrote the Eagle, “how strongly a performance in which moving pictures are the principal feature appears to a large part of the general public when the cost of admission is made sufficiently attractive.” 

This, combined with the explosion of nickelodeons scattered throughout the borough, not to mention the many penny arcades providing devices for viewing moving images, allows this conclusion: by 1908, movies had become the most widely accessible form of entertainment in Brooklyn, even as vaudeville and live theatre remained culturally central. 

Some argued that watching movies served the theatre well by begetting a taste for live action and a higher quality of dramatization. Others took a dimmer view of the impact movies would have on living theatre. The recent requirement that movies needed copyright permission before they could put plays on film was not taken seriously as a threat to their growing cultural dominance. The true test would come, it was believed, once movies mastered the ability to speak and sing, or, as an Eagle reporter put it on May 10, when “the dramatic element will be enhanced through the use of talking devices, which supplement the pictorial effect of the pictures.” 

The reporter goes on to say that the films he has been watching avoided using phonograph records to provide vocal accompaniment, hoping to make the effect more realistic: 

behind the sheet upon which the pictures are thrown several men and women carry on the dialogue supposed to be enacted by the characters in the picture and other sounds, such as cheering crowds, applause, and the noise of running horses, or tramping soldiers. . . .

 Since even the wide variety of subjects shown was considered insufficient, these picture shows offered live vaudeville acts between the films, providing singing and dancing specialties and even comedy sketches. When needed, the “sheet” served as a background for the lyrics to popular songs in audience sing-alongs, in which a live orchestra took part. Many today can still remember mid-20^th-century moviegoing experiences where they watched  “follow the bouncing ball” film shorts.

A program generally ran for an hour, but at the Sunday “concerts,” this was usually reduced to half an hour. To keep the cash register ringing, the audience was reminded gently to please leave when the first movie they’d seen was repeated. Even then, wrote the Eagle, much of the audience stood throughout when seats were filled, and many had to wait outside until space became available. Business was thriving, to say the least.

Movie reviews were so rare as to be practically nonexistent in 1908, but this reporter, avoiding critical commentary, describes in considerable detail the plots of three movies he saw during his visit. Such being peripheral to our concerns, they won’t be repeated, but interested readers can find the article, “Moving and Talking Pictures Attract Many,” in the Eagle of Mauy 10. 

As ever, crime was not simply enacted on the stage but also involved theatre folk in real life. A good example happened in the Eastern District on May 2, as per the Eagle, when some sleeping residents were awakened shortly after five A.M. by the noises of a burglar chase involving the night watchman of Blaney’s (Amphion)Theatre on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. He had discovered a pair of intruders in the star’s dressing room, chased them down South Tenth Street, and even fired a shot when he reached Kent Avenue. After retrieving his hat and coat from the theatre, he came across the pair on South Ninth, where he and a dozen other pursuers gave chase, the watchman firing yet another shot at Roebling Street. It was too bad, but the crooks, who failed to steal anything, vanished on the far side of the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza before the bold watchman gave up and returned to Blaney’s.

May 4-9, 1908

Bijou: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Campbell Stratton

Blaney’s: The Girl and the Detective, with Cecil Spooner

Broadway: The Parisian Model, with Anna Held

Columbia: Dora Thorne, with Corinne Snell

Folly: The County Fair, with Neil Burgess

Gotham: (Fuller Stock Company) The Plunger

Majestic: Buster Brown

Montauk: The Top o’ the World, with George W. Monroe

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Road to Yesterday

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Strange Adventures of Mrs. Brown

Vaudeville and burlesque: Keeney’s, Olympic, Orpheum, Star, Gayety, Park

May 11-16, 1908

Bijou: Human Hearts

Broadway: Sapho, Carmen, with Olga Nethersole 

Folly: (shifts to vaudeville)

Gotham: (Fuller Stock Company) Shore Acres

Majestic: The Bishop’s Carriage, with Edna May Spooner

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Old Heidelberg

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Princess of Patches 

Vaudeville and burlesque: Keeney’s, Olympic, Orpheum, Star, Gayety, Folly

May 18-23, 1908

Broadway: The Clansman

Folly: Bandanna Land, with Williams and Walker

Gotham: (Fuller Stock Company) Anna Karenina

Majestic: The Three of Us, Edna May Spooner

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Zira

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Slaves of Russia

Vaudeville and burlesque: Olympic, Orpheum, Star, Gayety

May 25-31, 1908

Broadway: The Man of the Hour

Majestic: The Governor and the Boss, with Edna May Spooner

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Girl from Williamsburg

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Parish Priest

Vaudeville and burlesque: Orpheum, Star, Gayety

June 2-7, 1908

Majestic: The Marriage of William Ashe, with Edna May Spooner

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Pearl of Savoy, with Corse Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Nobody’s Darling, with Madeleine Clark

Vaudeville and burlesque: Orpheum, Star, Gayety

June 9-14, 1908

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Brown of Harvard

Vaudeville and burlesque: Orpheum, Star, Gayety

A few additional summertime beach resort amusement photos for 1908.