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| Bertha Galland as Esmeralda in Notre Dame. A rising star in 1902, by 1910 her luster had dimmed, and her career was ending. |
By
Samuel L. Leiter
For comprehensive background on Brooklyn’s pre-20th-century 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 20th 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:
The summer of 1902 had been a fun one at the beach resorts
of Bergen, Manhattan, and Brighton, with a full complement of musical shows and
vaudeville cooled by what breezes managed to blow from the Atlantic Ocean. But,
as every late August, a hopefully exciting new season began to warm up at the
principal theatrical resorts of the borough’s Western and Easter districts.
Mrs. Isabel Hecht-Sinn, capable manageress of her late father’s Montauk Theatre
on Fulton near Flatbush, had been busy overseeing the use of good old elbow
grease by an army of cleaning women to scour the place with soapsuds and
scrubbing, rather than the more masculine preference of painting over all the
defects. Only when her house was in what New Englanders are said to have called
“pizen neat” would she apply fresh decorations and furnishings to the results.
As the Eagle reminded its readers, the Montauk was
then the sole high-priced house in its area, where its bookings were provided
by the Theatrical Syndicate, and where it was known to bring in weekly receipts
of $10 or $11,000 for a show that went over well, making it desirous for all
the best attractions. Stars on its upcoming agenda for 1902-1903 included Joseph
Jefferson, Maude Adams, John Drew, Mary Mannering, William Gillette, Francis
Wilson, Amelia Bingham, Charles Hawtrey, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Richard Mansfield,
Lulu Glaser, Kyrle Bellew, E.S. Willard, James K. Hackett, Julia Marlowe, Ethel
Barrymore, the Rogers Brothers, Virginia Harned, Robert Edeson, Annie Russell, William
Faversham, and Lily Langtry, among other. It was a lineup comparable in 1902
terms to any list of Hollywood superstars decades later.
Over at one the borough’s two leading stock companies (of
five), Mrs. Spooner could not have been busier, because not only was she preparing
for her company’s opening at the Bijou, to which they moved just before the previous
season closed, she was also responsible for a company in Cincinnatti, for which
she was imminently leaving to play a role in Blue Jeans. Writing in the Eagle
on August 31, a reporter declared.
She secured her lease of the
Cincinnatti house Saturday, the 23rd, and engaged a play by telephone.
On Sunday she sent out telegrams to actors whom she wanted, and on Monday a
caller found her consulting with her new stage manager, after having played a
small part in one act of Barbara Frietchie, and keeping waiting in the
anteroom a number of actors who were eagerly pursuing chances of a job.
Considering the enormity of what she was undertaking, she cheerfully
blew it off as part of the job. “Oh, it will go all right. . . . If an actor
cannot take a part on Tuesday and play it properly on Monday, I have no use for
him in any company of mine.” Hearing her confidently assert her show would
succeed, her adoring stage manager chimed in, “You bte we’ll give a good show”
as he bounded off down the stairs. When the reporter asked for the man’s name
and Mrs. Spooner couldn’t remember, she sent someone after him; when he returned
he had a card saying “Priestley Morrison.” There was no way for anyone there to
know, but in years to come, Priestley Morrison (1872-1938) would go on to have
a sterling career as a stage and screen actor, as well as a prolific Broadway
director of over two dozen plays.
To give an idea of just how much responsibility Mrs. Spooner
had undertaken, she was not only hiring actors and rehearsing her Cincinnatti
company in Blue Jeans, she and daughters Cecil and Edna May were acting
daily at matinee and evening shows, while also rehearsing for the following
week’s show, getting its world premiere. Luckily, she’d staged Blue Jeans
twice before so she knew it well.
Stock companies, as noted in an earlier entry, were making a
notable comeback at the moment, Boston and Chicago also having five each, and other
cities with at least 50,000 people containing one to three. Wrote the Eagle,
The plays that these companies
offer are for the most part not new, but their dramatic quality averages higher
than that of the combination houses, which give new plays, because the poor
plays never live to get to the stock houses and the large proportion of musical
trash in the combination theaters is not reproduced in stock.
A small number of cities had stock companies that occasionally
did Shakespeare as well as premieres of new plays, now and then with notable
success. Brooklyn’s companies did a larger than number of plays requiring high
royalties than elsewhere, but this meant that the percentage of good plays
being done in Brooklyn stock was praiseworthy. Few combination houses could
boast as many respectable titles in a single season as, for example, last
season’s Spooner repertoire, with The Little Minister, Madame Sans
Gene, Trelawney of the Wells, Magda, Barbara Frietchie,
and Alabama, among others.
The Columbia’s stock company was fielding an entirely new company
of actors this season, and Corse Payton had been keeping busy during the summer
doing stock at Springfield, MA, as he prepared to keep stock houses running both
in Brooklyn and Boston. Producer and theatre owner Percy G. Williams, best
known for vaudeville, had an interesting card up his sleeve with his traveling
production of Tracy, the Outlaw, based on a notorious fugitive, Harry
Tracy (1875-1902), whose recent escape from prison and multiple killings before
being cornered and shot, had caught the nation’s imagination. Williams was
distributing posters offering a $6,000 reward for “Tracy, the outlaw, dead or
alive, declaring, “He is in four acts and nine scenes, and is managed by Percy
Williams.”
As the new season geared up for action, theatre journalists
continued to stress the dearth of new plays, the reliance on the same old types
of plays, the shallowness of so much contemporary American dramaturgy, and, in
a business driven more and more by the bottom line, the lack of classical revivals,
especially Shakespeare. The “frivolity and lightness of” New York audience
tastes was attacked for its nationwide influence.
“The theatre has been growing deadly monotonous. One musical
piece is just like another, one rustic play just like its predecessor, and any
polite comedy is sure to be a replica of the latest thing in that line which
made it a hit,” lamented the Eagle. Anything new that suggested a risk
was immediately discarded. Short of an unlikely rise in the average theatregoer’s
intelligence and taste, it was suggested that one solution might lie in
managerial competition privileging smaller but steadier profits over
blockbuster hits.
Wherever the solution lay, however, was obstructed by the stranglehold
of the syndicate, which controlled four-fifths of the best theatres and stifled
innovation. Hopefully, it was thought, the anti-syndicate forces, led by such independent
stars as Mrs. Fiske and Henrietta Crosman, would make a breach in this system.
Such an occurrence would, indeed, soon arrive, in the form of three producer brothers
named Shubert.
Theatres to the east of the Mississippi were especially
prone to the need for New York approval of a show before they booked it, and
such shows either cost a lot to produce or were of the vacuous—if not “nasty”—type
that Broadway enjoyed. It was more likely for one to see Shakespeare out West—with
actors regarded for their classical work (like Louis James and Frederick Warde)—than
in New York, it was claimed, “while New York would only accept him under unusual
circumstances or in mighty small doses.” Thus, New York was blamed for having
worse taste than “the country at large.” Too many good actors here give skilled
performances of second-rate plays, while other cities saw good plays done by “only
moderately good actors.” The point was that the standard should be set here.
Finally, on September 21, Clayton Meeker Hamilton (the Eagle’s
theatre editorialist in 1902, who used only Hamilton as a byline and who later
became a distinguished theatre writer) offered some fascinating information on
the difficulty of keeping a theatre in business. Asking how many topline actors
existed who, on their names alone (regardless of their vehicle), could fill the
borough’s two high-priced theatres, the Montauk and Amphion, during a 35-week
season, he came up with only 11. Two, Mrs. Fiske and Henrietta Crosman, were independent
of the syndicate so they were persona non grata at these venues. Remaining were
E.H. Sothern, William Gillette, Richard Mansfield, Nat C. Goodwin, Maude Adams,
Viola Allen, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Julia Marlowe, and Annie Russell. Mrs. Carter
was good in Brooklyn for two weeks, so, if these theatres could book all these
actors they were set for 10 weeks of solid houses.
Then came the actors whose names were strong but needed strong
plays to help draw crowds: Amelia Bingham, Blanche Bates, E.S. Willard, David
Warfield, William Faversham, James K. Hackett, Mary Mannering, and “the like.”
With good plays, those mentioned could raise the number of full-house weeks to
18.
There remains to the syndicate,
which has scores of houses to keep going, the problem of finding attractions
strong enough to do business for eighteen or twenty weeks. A certain proportion
of these are filled with plays which are strong enough to draw when they have
special casts or nominal stars, like Faversham, Hackett or Bertha Galland [who
would appear locally in Notre Dame this month]. But if the seventeen actors
in the first two lists all have good plays . . . [a goal rarely reached], that
reduces the number which can be sent out on their own merits or allotted to the
would-be stars.
Again, there simply weren’t enough good plays to go around. Despite
theatregoers rising like mushrooms around the country, and playhouses being
built for them, plays could not simply be manufactured to demand. Aware of this,
countless Americans were writing plays but few had the art and skill to create
anything worthwhile. Few were trained in the difficult demands of playwriting,
or were willing to be trained, as they would in other arts.
Thus, when the supply of conventional melodramas and rustic
plays is sparse, the reliance of producers on foreign (especially English) imports
or the increasing adaptations of popular novels, “or they can boil over other
people’s ideas themselves, like Mr. [David] Belasco.” But keeping up with the
public’s insatiable demand for product was getting more and more difficult, one
reason for the dominance of musical comedies and big spectacles.
Not the works of genius associated with Gilbert and Sullivan,
of course, but hackwork
that can be turned out with the
same assurance of acceptance as the second class melodrama can. Even . . . Victor
Herbert has been known to compose three or four scores in one season; while as
for librettos, the delivery wagons never cease running from the factory of
Harry B. Smith.
Hamilton insists that shows capitalizing on costumes and set,
with multiple chorus girls changing their outfits every quarter hour, were audience
magnets, regardless of their quality. “Such display is always possible with the
musical comedy and the spectacular treatment enables such shows to keep the
theaters going.”
And now to the Brooklyn theatre season of 1902-1903. May it
be an improvement over that of the previous season, and something on which to
look back proudly a century and a quarter hence.
1.
August 25-31, 1902
Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) The Man Who
Dared
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Barbara Frietchie
Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company; all new actors) The
Christian (opened Saturday, August 30)
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star
2.
September 1-6, 1902
Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) The Cherry
Pickers
Bijou: The District Fair
Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company; all new actors) The
Christian (opened Saturday, August 30)
Folly: When Reuben Comes to Town (opened Saturday,
August 30)
Gotham: The Galley Slave
Grand Opera House: My Partner (opened Saturday,
August 30)
Montauk: The Show Girl
Payton’s: (Payton’s Theatre Company) The Dancing Girl
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Victorian
Cross (opened Saturday, August 30)
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Orpheum, Star,
Gayety, Unique
3.
September 15-20, 1902
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Mistress Nell
Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) The Voice of Nature
Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company) A Social Highwayman
Folly: The Heart of Maryland
Gotham: Under Two Flags
Grand Opera House: The Fatal Wedding
Montauk: The Henrietta, with Stuart Robson
Payton’s: (Payton Theatre Company) All the Comforts of
Home
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Fogg’s Ferry
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Orpheum, Star,
Gayety, Unique
4.
September 22-27, 1902
Amphion: The Climbers, with Amelia Bingham and company
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Silver Dagger
Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) Wicked London
Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company) The Little Minister
Folly: The Fatal Wedding
Gotham: East Lynne
Grand Opera House: Arizona
Montauk: Notre Dame, with Bertha Galland
Payton’s: (Payton Theatre Company) Catherine
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Captain Herne,
U.S.A.
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Orpheum, Star,
Gayety, Unique
5.
September 29-October 4, 1902
Amphion: Der New Yorker Brauer, Der Corner Grocery,
New York in Word und Bild (all in German, with Adolf Phillips and company
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) A Nutmeg Match
Blaney’s: (Blaney’s All-Star Stock Company) Humanity
Columbia: (Greenwall Stock Company) In Mizzoura
Folly: Arizona
Gotham: Lady Nell
Grand Opera House: The Doings of Mrs. Dooley, with
George H. Monroe
Montauk: The Auctioneer, with David Warfield
Payton’s: (Payton Theatre Company) My Kentucky Home
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The War of
Wealth
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Orpheum, Star,
Gayety, Unique
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