14. 1902: FEBRUARY

 

Edna May Spooner, one of the two sisters who were leading ladies with the Spooner Stock Company.

                            By

Samuel L. Leiter

For further background on Brooklyn’s theatre history please see my book, Brooklyn Takes the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Theater in the City of Churches (McFarland: 2024) and my blog, “Annals of the Brooklyn Stage.” The latter is a week by week description of theatre activity in Brooklyn; obviously, it will expand rather slowly because so much must be described and the present blog will be occupying my attention until live theatre in Brooklyn begins to fade over the early decades of the 20^th century, dying out by the 1930s.

The entries in this blog began as annual ones, for 1898 and 1899. Because of the large amount of memory used, which made editing them problematic, subsequent entries were shortened so they covered only several months at a time, but these too needed to be shortened. Thus, beginning with 1901: September, all entries cover a single month. The quickest way to find any of these entries is probably to click on the following link, where links to everything prior to its date are provided: 1901: DECEMBER 

For 1902: JANUARY

When I began writing these summaries, I tried keeping them as short as possible. But as I dug ever deeper into each month’s activities as reported in Brooklyn’s newspapers, I couldn’t help but realize I was witnessing a history it was almost my duty to report, as, given my age, I’d never have another chance. So these opening entries will, as this month, sometimes be longer than I intended. On the other hand, I see no evidence that anyone else will pick up the thread. I hope the theatre buffs among you—if you’re interested in American theatre history—find this material informative and useful.

Readers of the last entry (1901: JANUARY) will recall the lawsuit boxing champion-actor Bob Fitzsimmons threatened to file against Percy G. Williams when the former, Williams’s friend, fell down the stairs at Williams’s Orpheum Theatre. Williams said Fitzsimmons had to have been joking, since the press carried news this month of negotiations being held between Fitzsimmons and James J. Jeffries for how to divide the spoils of a new bout, the talks being held at the Orpheum with Williams sitting in as an advisor.

February 1902 offers several interesting subjects that had the theatre press talking. They included the issue of Sunday concerts, the fire laws regarding standing room audiences, and managerial policies and finances, including the perpetual one of pricing. Let’s begin with the practice, alluded to previously, of several theatres skirting the Sunday blue laws by offering “sacred concerts” that were actually vaudeville shows. Corse Payton bowed, as we’ve seen, to pressure from his patrons, and stopped doing them, but others, like the Columbia, wanted the income they brought in too much to stop. Much of the press was opposed to the concerts, arguing that the Sabbath should be respected, and that theatre workers, even more than average workers, should have one day of rest a week. A Brooklyn Life reporter noted “How nearly last Sunday’s ‘grand sacred concert’ [at the Columbia] deserved its name may be judged from the fact that the program announced included two short plays, as well as club-swingers, a comedian, and ‘the original Bowery girl.’ If this is sacred, what, pray, is profane?”

Brooklyn was particularly sensitive to issues of theatre fire safety, having been home 25 years earlier to the Brooklyn Theatre fire of December 1876, which took nearly 300 lives. Many still recalled the catastrophe so much of the public supported Fire Commissioner Sturgis’s strict crackdown on abuses of the standee law. Some theatres not only flagrantly sold more such spots at the rear of their orchestras than could safely be accommodated, but also allowed patrons to stand in the aisles, or put movable seats in the passageways. Sturgis ardently pressed his case for abolishing the violations, and many managers followed through in both letter and spirit. Sturgis now had to keep a sharp eye out for infractions among the less responsible, both in Brooklyn theatres and in Manhattan, although it was argued that the commissioner should be reasonable where existing safety conditions made standing room more feasible than elsewhere.

A story that gained much attention when the crackdown began declared that, on February 1, 2,000 people were turned away from Brooklyn theatres when standing room, which was cheaper than regular seating, was officially banned. Sturgis said that the law had not previously been enforced because so many officials in his department had received free tickets. Still, a small number of standees were accommodated at most theatres, around 50 instead of the usual 260. The Orpheum was the worst offender, with about 100, but because its layout allowed for more spacious areas in which to stand the commissioner looked the other way.

The official orders cost the managements hundreds of dollars that night, which would become thousands a week as the situation continued. Managers were deliberating ways to resolve things, perhaps by continuing the standee policy and paying the fines incurred, although there also was the fear of losing their leases. Although most agreed that extreme overcrowding should be ended, some thought enforcement would gradually weaken and then be ignored until the next crackdown. There was also the argument that the law was more appropriate for the oldest theatres, and that the modern ones were suitably equipped with enough exits for rapid exits in case of fire.

Hardest hit were the Eastern District venues, where the managers were pulling their hair out over having to turn away so many customers. In such theatres, enforcement “meant all the difference between good business and perhaps not bad business, but certainly much less business than should have been done.” And there was much confusion as to just what standees—only those in the aisles?—should be prohibited, as different theatre firemen divulged different explanations to their managers.

This prompted the commissioner to offer a clear description for the public of just what the regulations were. He said he was determined, without fear or favor, to make everyone comply strictly with the rules, and was open to arguments regarding individual modifications of them.  Interested readers can find the regulations on page 3 of the Eagle, February 2, 1902.

Artistically, the major events of the month were the performances of the great American character actor, David Warfield, in The Auctioneer, and the great British star, Mrs. Patrick Campbell—her first Brooklyn visit—in a repertoire of five serious plays from Germany, Great Britain, Spain, and Norway representative of the shifting ground in modern drama, a movement with which traditionalists were uncomfortable. “In short,” wrote Brooklyn Life, “the week will be a great one for the student of the drama, the littérateur and the thinker, especially as they would be acted by the gifted Mrs. Campbell,” who was coming to Brooklyn after a three-week engagement at New York’s Republic Theatre. “Mrs. Campbell possesses talent of an unusual order, the ability to act in what is sometimes called the natural manner, and, furthermore, is endowed with grace and beauty.” (She would one day be the actress for whom Shaw wrote Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion,)

Some were disappointed she was not bringing her famous performance as Melisande in Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande, a major symbolist drama, others were rudely dismissive of that play’s poetic pretensions and relieved it was not included. “The funniest thing outside of Weber and Fields,” wisecracked one disgusted critic. But those plays she did do—“not to the taste of healthy minded folk,” said the Eagle—were for the more intellectually and socially advanced and were far from anything like the popular fare Brooklyn audiences were used to. In consequence, Brooklyn audiences tended to avoid the more expensive $1.50 orchestra seats, and went instead to those in the dress circle and balcony.

David Warfield’s appearance was important because of the brilliance with which he played Solomon Levi, a wealthy Lower East Side auctioneer, authentic Yiddish accent included, in a play that exposed its ethnic environment in naturalistic terms. “David Warfield’s Solomon Levi is one of the finest character sketches of the times,” believed Brooklyn Life, “being, in fact, a perfect bit of genre work.” The play is about the vagaries of wealth, which is fitting since Warfield would one day be America’s richest actor.

Despite Mrs. Campbell’s engagement charging Brooklynites one dollar less for its orchestra seats than they cost across the river ($1.50 instead of $2.50), many ignored the bargain, choosing to sit in the cheaper, upstairs parts of the house. “The inference,” inferred the Eagle, “is that people who usually sit downstairs for a dollar and a half during the engagement went up where they could get seats for the same price or less.”

The Eagle expressed admiration for the managerial skills of Mrs. Mary Gibbs (“Mollie”) Spooner (ca. 1850-ca. 1920s), actress-manager of the Spooner Stock Company at the Park, for having made the effort “a profitable investment.” She acted only occasionally, using her time to run the place with intelligence and care, allowing her daughters, Edna May (1873-1953) and Cecil (1875-1953)—who died within a day of each other in Sherman Oaks, CA—to be the stars.

So successful was Mrs. Spooner’s management at gaining a significant following, that she leased the larger Bijou for the following season. The Eagle (February 9, 1902) observed that

Amelia Bingham has been advertising herself as the ‘only actress-manageress’ in America, but in fact Mrs. Spooner does more managing in a week than any of the other women connected with theatricals do in a season. She hires her actors, she selects her company, she hires and directs her scene painters, she rehearses her plays—and a point not to be forgotten—she pays her bills.

At the same time, Brooklyn had another outstanding theatre manageress, Mrs. Hecht-Sinn at the Montauk, daughter of Col. William E. Sinn who, from the 1870s to his death in 1901, had been Brooklyn’s longest continually successful manager, first at the Park and then at the Montauk. She wasn’t an actress, but as a businesswoman she was perhaps the leading theatrical manageress in the country, even though the Montauk had fallen under the control of the Theatrical Syndicate (or Trust) and she had to book only shows they provided. When the Eagle was asked by readers to list, as a convenience, the season’s remaining shows at the Montauk, it was unable to do so because the trust’s leaders, the notorious Klaw and Erlanger, were too erratic in arranging their bookings, using the nation’s theatres “as pawns upon a giant chess board. They switch bookings about from Boston to Omaha in twenty-four hours, to suit some exigency of syndicate affairs, and contracts are not drawn so that any legal manager can compel an actor whom he had booked to keep his engagement.”

Regarding the trust, it was reportedly upset that, with the Columbia having profitably gone over to low-priced stock, it now had only two first-class Brooklyn theatres—the Montauk and the Amphion—to house its wares. Blaming the low prices prevalent around the borough, it called Brooklyn the “theatrical bowwows.” The Columbia, which had to turn people away the previous Saturday night, had often played trust shows to houses half or a third full. In fact, the Eagle reported that all the borough’s theatres were turning people away, while admitting that the income garnered couldn’t be compared to the $2 houses on Broadway.

Brooklyn’s possession of five stock companies on which the trust couldn’t earn a dime in “booking” fees was particularly irksome. And the generally high quality of Brooklyn’s shows meant the trust couldn’t fill its own houses with anything shabby, so the Amphion and Montauk productions were consistently better than before. “The problem used to be to get people into a Brooklyn theater. Now it is to find room for all who wish to go.” Thus Brooklyn’s theatres were content to make a steady, if not spectacular, income, opting for security over bankruptcy.

For all the encomiums heaped on Brooklyn’s stock companies of late, things did not always go smoothly for them. For example, Valerie Bergere, admired leading lady of the company at the Columbia, announced she’d be leaving at the end the second week in February. The demands of a system that required theatres to change their bills every week, and play twice a day (a problem raised in this blog by an earlier stock company at the Park, which threatened to strike), had  gotten to her. “The number of leading women who have broken down under that strain is great,” said the Eagle. Isabel Evesson was hired to replace her, she being a veteran of other stock companies.

This entry has been longer than I intended, but there is still more to report regarding the influence of the stock theatres. Brooklyn had long been famous for the number and quality of its amateur theatre groups, with names like the Amaranth, the Booth, and so on. More actresses were said to have moved into the professional ranks from Brooklyn’s amateur troupes than from anywhere else. Recent examples included Edith Kingdon, Nellie Yale, Libbie Healey, and Helene Wintner, all from the Amaranth. When the best Brooklyn theatres were charging high prices, it served the interests of the much cheaper amateurs. However, the low prices charged by the stocks were forcing the amateurs to lower their own cheap prices, which long had helped them attract large audiences. The improved quality of the stocks were also drawing away the amateurs’ patrons.

For $4 a month you could have an eight-seat subscription to the Amaranth, a big savings when leading theatres were charging up to $1.50 for the best seats. With the stocks now offering much better quality at greatly reduced prices, the amateur subscriptions were dwindling seriously. For $1.20 a week, a family of four could visit a stock house, seeing three plays a month for less than if they saw one play at the amateurs. And, with the pros quickly consuming the best nonpro Brooklyn actresses, the future looked dismal for the amateurs. In fact, by February, the Amaranth had not given a single performance.           

1.      February 3-8, 1902

Amphion: Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, with Ethel Barrymore

Bijou: Dangers of Paris

Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) The Fatal Flower, with Sydney Toler

Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company) Carmen

Folly: M’liss, with Nellie McHenry

Gotham: (Elite Stock Company) Camille

Grand Opera House: The Man Who Dared, with Howard Hall

Montauk: Magda, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, Marianna, Beyond Human Power, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Park: (Spooner’s Stock Company) A Scrap of Paper

Payton’s: (Payton’s Theatre Company) The Masked Ball

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Sporting Duchess

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Orpheum, Gayety, Unique

2.      February 10-15, 1902

Amphion: ‘Way Down East

Bijou: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with Al. W. Martin’s company

Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) The Daughter of the Diamond King

Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company) A Trip to Chinatown

Folly: In Old Kentucky

Gotham: (Elite Stock Company) The Fugitive

Grand Opera House: McFadden’s Row of Flats

Montauk: The Widow Jones, with May Irwin

Park: (Spooner’s Stock Company) Blue Jeans

Payton’s: (Payton’s Theatre Company) The Lady of Lyons

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Home, Sweet Home

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Orpheum, Gayety, Unique

3.      February 17-22, 1902

Amphion: The Liberty Belles

Bijou: The Outpost

Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) Blue Jeans

Brooklyn Academy of Music: Protecto, or Fun in Fairyland

Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company) Sapho

Folly: McFadden’s Row of Flats

Gotham: (Elite Stock Company) Sins of the Night

Grand Opera House: In Old Kentucky

Montauk: The Auctioneer, with David Warfield

Park: (Spooner’s Stock Company) Lord and Lady Algy

Payton’s: (Payton’s Theatre Company) A Temperance Town

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) A Guilty Mother

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Orpheum, Gayety, Unique

4.      February 24-March 1, 1902

Amphion: The Bonnie Brier Bush, with J.H. Stoddart

Bijou: On the Suwannee River, J.K. Emmett, Lottie Gilson

Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) The Red Cross Nurse

Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company) A Bachelor’s Honeymoon

Folly: The Outpost

Gotham: (Gotham Stock Company) Eagle’s Nest

Grand Opera House: Up York State, with David Higgins, Gloria Waldron

Montauk: The New Yorkers, with Dan Daly

Park: (Spooner’s Stock Company) Pawn Ticket 210

Payton’s: (Payton’s Theatre Company) Camille

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Burglar

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Orpheum, Gayety, Unique