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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: 1901: DECEMBER
For months in 1902 click here.
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1903
The date above says September, but, as usual, each new
Brooklyn theatre season started in dribs and drabs in late August, only getting
in (mostly) full gear on Labor Day. Typically, a few theatres didn’t join the
fray until late September, and the tardiest was usually the Amphion, which didn’t
open its doors until the beginning of October. Many of the theatres had been
busy during the summer investing in renovations and redecorating. The Eastern
District’s old Novelty Theatre, on Driggs Avenue, in fact, was practically a
new theatre after a facelift costing local impresario Percy G. Williams 10,000
well-advertised dollars, his intention to provide the borough’s burgeoning
audience with the best of the traveling combination shows available.
The theatrical situation for the 1903-1904 season was quite
different than it was a year earlier. A new vaudeville-burlesque house, Watson’s
Theatre (also called Watson’s Cozy Corner) at Pearl and Willoughby in downtown
Brooklyn was now available, with its own stock burlesque troupe, the only such
arrangement in town. It was run by J.B. Watson, “the prince of Jewish
comedians,” who would himself deign to appear on its stage when convenient.
With 24 double-door exits, it was said to have more than any
other theatre, allowing an audience of 1,100 to scram out of the place in a
minute, without crowding, a selling point to a citizenry many of whom could
still recall the disastrous Brooklyn Theatre fire of December 1876, when nearly
300 lost their lives, making it, till then, the worst such theatrical catastrophe
in American history. Prettily decorated, the prevailing color being green, it
had two balconies and three tiers of boxes, with electric fans generously
distributed through the house to make it “one of the coolest places in the city
on a hot day,” according to the Citizen of August 25.
Although Watson’s had a stock company (novel as one for
burlesque may have been), Brooklyn’s vaunted total of six legitimate stock
companies (at the Bijou, Columbia, Gotham, Payton’s Lee Avenue, Payton’s Fulton
Street, and Phillips’ Lyceum) took an unexpected hit over the summer. The Columbia,
under the new management of Albert Weis and Co., would now house the Wells-Dunne-Harlan
Musical Comedy Company, specializing in their title’s genre; after three reportedly
successful years touring the South, they now endeavored to entertain the citizens
of a single, big, Northern city. Their talented numbers included Otis Harlan
(who would both star and direct), Tony Hart, Dan Marble, Joe Hartley, Genevieve
Day (a Brooklyn girl, as they liked to say), Frank Johnson, and 40 charming
chorines. They intended to do a weekly repertoire of musical comedies and farces,
with three matinees a week and seats going at the popular prices of $.15, $.25,
$.35, $.50, $.75, with $1 for boxes.
The Gotham management abandoned stock in favor of low-priced,
touring combinations, leaving straight, legitimate stock in the hands only of
the Spooner family at the Bijou, and the Paytons, Corse and Etta Reed, at their
Lee Avenue and Fulton Street venues. The Spooners were returning from a summer
sojourn in Europe with thousands of dollars of new gowns and hats to decorate
the persons of sister costars Edna May and Cecil, who hoped to keep their Bijou
audience elated with both their acting talent and physical charm. As for the
Paytons, Etta Reed, who had been leading lady of the Fulton Street Stock Company
last season, would now focus on her work principally on the family’s Lee Avenue
stage in Williamsburg.
By the end of September, Brooklyn was fielding 11 legitimate
theatres and six theatres specializing in burlesque and vaudeville (or both), a
total of 17. Since this blog generally avoids opera, except when it’s booked at
a legitimate theatre, I am overlooking an 18th, the Brooklyn Academy
of Music, which I notice only when it engages something more in the legitimate,
vaudeville, or burlesque line. But it should be noted that the Academy had a
notable four-week booking in September when it hosted the Castle Square Opera
Company presenting an ambitious repertory of opera in English, the titles of
which can be gleaned from the accompanying advertisements. As we’ll see at the
end of November, the old Academy, hadn’t long for this world, and this opera
season would be one of the brighter moments during the years of its decline
before it vanished forever from its over 40-year residence on Montague Street
near Borough Hall.
For all the apparent prosperity being enjoyed, what with so
many new theatres throwing their hats in the ring, ominous signs were evident. The
eruption of theatre building was only exacerbating the lack of quality scripts
to put in the new venues, or playwrights to write them. “The theatrical
appetite of the United States,” wrote Clay Meeker Hamilton of the Eagle,
on September 6, “has grown in the past ten years beyond all previous conception.
. . .”
The growth of the theatrical audience had inspired the rise
of vaudeville as one way to absorb attention, especially among men. Then the
idea of catering to women came into play, first the “fashionable” element, and
next, in the hands of impresario B.F. Keith, the unfashionable but still
respectable one, with low prices charged for shows careful to maintain the
proprieties in what was dubbed “the Sunday School circuit.” “Variety” being associated
with less respectable theatricals, “vaudeville,” or, better yet, “polite
vaudeville,” came into vogue, denoting decency instead of coarseness, and
thereby lifting vaudeville to universal success.
Building on the desire for popular priced entertainment were
the new stock companies, which created their own craze, as witness Brooklyn’s
recent history, with its six companies the previous season, charging from 30
cents to a dollar. But, as noted above, stock was now waning, in Manhattan as
well as Brooklyn. The stocks had run out of viable plays for revival, and were
forced to rely on plays that recently had flopped in mainstream, high-priced
productions. Hamilton reveals that Mrs. Spooner was asked to pay $500 for a week’s
run of something that lasted only a month on Broadway. She haggled it down to $300,
but more successful plays wanted from $600 to $1,000 a week to rent, which the
stocks simply couldn’t afford. This forced Mrs. Spooner to buy material at
bargain prices while in London, while some theatres actually were keeping hacks
on staff, like scene painters, to write “imitations” of works with doubtful
copyright status.
Still, Hamilton pointed out, while the stocks had freebies
like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, East Lynne, and Camille to fall
back on, the mainstream producers could turn in an emergency only to
Shakespeare, which might mean huge expenses in production as per the scenic and
costume conventions of the day, raising costs even higher than royalties. Whereas
foreign plays—often pirated—once supplied the bulk of new work, that source was
no longer sufficient to fill the empty stages. Spanish plays, the only source so
far insufficiently explored, were currently attracting producers’ eyes, and
Russia was drawing some attention, while here, there, and everywhere, voices
were demanding to see new American plays.
With barely any consistently successful, homebred, commercial
playwrights to call on, aside, say, from Augustus Thomas and Clyde Fitch, both
more talented workmen than geniuses, the producers were getting desperate. Some
were even advocating the establishment of playwriting factories under the authority
of a Fitch or Thomas! (Don’t laugh. Hollywood would do just that for movies.) Instead,
the producers (or managers, as they were called) were depending on hacks to
hack plays out of popular novels, a growing practice despite the great number
of artistic and financial failures it incurred.
Hamilton then proceeds to list nearly 20 examples of the
trend set for the new season, for which I have no space but which you can look
up in the Eagle of September 6. The number of new plays for the season
by Americans is limited to a handful, two by the prolific Fitch. Contemplating the
coming season on Brooklyn’s stages, he reminds us of the depressing news that
three borough theatres are devoted to popular-priced melodramas of the machine-made
kind; that two “in-between” houses, the Grand and the Folly, do last season’s high-priced
plays; and that the prospects for “novelties” (plays previously not seen in
Brooklyn) are “not attractive.” Still, he agrees that hope springs eternal,
pinning his on some as yet undiscovered new American dramatist.
Summertime theatricals would continue going strong all month
at Brooklyn’s three major beach resorts, as well as the increasingly active
(what with the new Luna Park) Coney Island, and even Rockaway Beach in neighboring
Queens recently had joined the warm weather entertainment business. Other
summer entertainments, for none of which we have room to explore, were available
locally, including shows on boats and brilliant fireworks displays, some of
which you can notice on the ads reproduced below.
Performance-wise, the most notable events of the month were
the visits of Mrs. Leslie Carter, returning with her production of Du Barry,
considered to reside on the scandalous side of the morality spectrum; comic
actor Henry E. Dixey in a musical and curtain raiser; Brooklyn girl (there it
is again) Grace George, continually improving as an artist, in her new hit
about old-time actress Peg Woffington, Pretty Peggy, by Frances Aymar Mathews,
who also penned Lady Peggy Town—about a different Peggy—for the Bijou’s Cecil
Spooner, discussed in an earlier entry; and, most memorably, L. Frank Baum’s
adaptation of his hugely popular novel The Wizard of Oz, starring David
C. Montgomery and Fred Stone as, respectively, the Tin Woodsman and Scarecrow.
The Wizard of Oz had opened on Broadway at the new Majestic
Theatre on January 21, 1903 (after its premiere in June 1902 at Chicago’s Grand
Opera House), and was still running there when it opened for a week at Brooklyn’s
Montauk Theatre. (Its first New York run stacked up 300 performances.)
Fortunately for Brooklyn, Mrs. Isabel Hecht-Sinn, the Montauk’s manager, had
contracted for the original cast to appear at her theatre. Thus, while a second
company would ordinarily have been sent to Brooklyn, she was able to insist on
getting the great team of Montgomery and Stone, with substitutions only in supporting
roles.
Brooklyn Life said that this spectacular extravaganza
was the best production of its sort ever seen in this country. “It has humor,
much of it highly original, in abundance; the music is catchy and pleasing,
while the scenic effects are so cleverly devised to have long since become town
talk.” Here’s a description of a widely admired “transformation scene,” called the
“Poppy Scene,” in the first act, from the Eagle of September 6,
1903.
The stage is dark at first and
then rain gently falls, through which a field of gorgeous poppies of gigantic
size is seen. The rain ceases, the sun rises, a golden glow fills the
atmosphere and emphasizes the scarlet of the blooms. These, raising their heads
toward the sun, are discovered to be young and graceful women. Shadows fall and
snow comes down; winter is discovered and the flowers are wilted and withered.
Among other scenes, there’s this.
The play opens on a Kansas prairie,
showing laborers at work in the hay fields adjoining the old homestead. A
cyclone is disclosed in its fury and potency, as it whirls the old house over
villages and prairies, over steeples, roof tops and towering trees until the
storm subsides and the house descends in a mysterious region, known as the “Land
of the Munchkins,” . . .
If time and space weren’t knocking, there’d be lots more to talk
about regarding what was on Brooklyn theatre writers’ minds in September 1903. Interesting
subjects might include the advocacy of theatrical producer Charles Frohman for
reducing or eliminating entirely the orchestras then considered permanent fixtures
at legitimate theatres, playing not only incidental stage music but also playing
before the show and during intermissions. Removing the orchestra, he believed
would save a theatre $300 a week. (See the Eagle of August 30, 1903, for
more.) Or how about the shortage of chorus girls for all the big musicals and
extravaganzas, as discussed in the Citizen of September 6? “They have
always been expensive luxuries, but now the demand for them is so great that the
price for their professional services has been increased.” As everybody knows, “a
well selected, thoroughly drilled, artistically costumed and properly handled
chorus will carry any old thing styled a musical comedy into popular favor.” If
you’re curious about how much a well-paid, well-trained chorus girl could earn
in a first-class show, would you believe $20? In 2025 terms, that would be a
whopping $730.60 in purchasing power.
Finally, while I can’t go into detail, I also can’t complete
this entry without mentioning the increasingly heated warfare between the
independent managers and those belonging to the Theatrical Syndicate or “trust,”
whose greatest power—through control of hundreds of theatres—lay in the ruthless
New York hands of Klaw and Erlanger. The
new prospective syndicate busters on the block weren’t the members of the Independent
Booking Agency, but those pesky Shubert brothers from Syracuse to whom I’ve previously
alluded. Their rise was actually abetted by the syndicate’s Nixon and Zimmerman
of Philadelphia.
That’s because each syndicate trustee—other than Al Hayman—was
himself a manager vying against the others for the best theatres and most
efficient routes to accommodate their touring shows, or to serve the theatres
they themselves controlled. Sharp conflict was often the outcome of their dealings
with A.L. Erlanger in particular. They were known to express their opinions of Abe
Erlanger “way of doing business in language too forcible to print and which
flies up and down Broadway for that reason,” wrote Hamilton in the Eagle (September
13). For such cause did the great comic duo Weber and Fields, who also were important
managers, dissolve their connection to the syndicate and join the independents,
refusing “to bow down to an czar.”
To be sure, we will continue to chronicle this important aspect
of American theatre history as it affected Brooklyn in the months and years to
come.
1.
August 24-29, 1903
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Nancy and Co.
Columbia: (Wells-Dunne-Harlan Musical
Comedy Company) By the Sad Sea Waves
Gotham: The Little Church Around the Corner (opens Saturday,
August 29)
Grand Opera House: Under Two Flags, with Jane Kenmark
(opens Saturday, August 29)
Novelty: The Minister’s Daughter (opens Saturday,
August 29)
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star, Gayety, Unique, Watson’s
2.
August 24-31, 1903
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Fatal Card
Columbia: (Wells-Dunne-Harlan Musical
Comedy Company) By the Sad Sea Waves
Folly: For Her Children’s Sake
Gotham: The Little Church Around the Corner
Grand Opera House: Under Two Flags, with Jane Kenmark
Novelty: The Minister’s
Daughter
Park: The Winning Hand (Noah Beery, future movie star
and brother of Wallace, was in the cast)
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Captain
Jinks of the Horse Marines, with Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Hearts of the
Blue Ridge
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Gayety,
Unique, Orpheum, Watson’s
3.
September 7-13, 1903
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Masked Ball
Columbia: (Wells-Dunne-Harlan Musical Comedy Company) Lost,
Strayed or Stolen
Folly: Under Two Flags
Gotham: The Night Before Christmas
Grand Opera House: David Harum
Montauk: The Wizard of Oz, with David C. Montgomery
and Fred Stone
Novelty: Why Women Sin
Park: A Working Girl’s Wrongs
Payton’s Lee Avenue: The Sporting Duchess, with Etta Payton
Reed
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The
Counterfeiters
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Gayety,
Unique, Orpheum, Watson’s
4.
September 14-19, 1903
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Dancer and the King
Columbia: (Wells-Dunne-Harlan Musical Comedy Company) A
Trip to Chinatown
Folly: David Harum
Gotham: The Limited Mail
Grand Opera House: A Son of Rest, with Nat Wills
Montauk: “Over a Welsh Rarebit,” Facing the Music, with
Henry E. Dixey
Novelty: The Little Church Around the Corner
Park: The King of Detectives
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton’s Lee Avenue Stock Company) More
Than Queen
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Gypsy Jack
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Gayety,
Unique, Orpheum, Watson’s
5.
September 21-26, 1903
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Led Astray
Columbia: (Wells-Dunne-Harlan Musical Comedy Company) The
Man from Mexico
Folly: A Son of Rest, with Nat Wills
Gotham: The King of Detectives
Grand Opera House: The Fatal Wedding
Montauk: Pretty Peggy, with Grace George
Novelty: M’liss, with Nellie McHenry
Park: No Wedding Bells for Her
Payton’s Lee Avenue: A Celebrated Case, with Etta
Reed Payton
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Black Eagle; or,
The Firm of Girdlestone and Co.
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Gayety,
Unique, Orpheum, Watson’s
6.
September 28-October 3, 1903
Amphion: “Over a Welsh Rarebit,” Facing the Music,
with Henry E. Dixey
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) D’Arcy of the Guards
Columbia: (Wells-Dunne-Harlan Musical Comedy Company) A
Black Sheep
Folly: The Fatal Wedding
Gotham: Only a Shop Girl
Grand Opera House: The Heart of Maryland
Montauk: Du Barry, with Mrs. Leslie Carter
Novelty: The Great White Diamond
Park: A Ragged Hero
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) A
Poor Relation, “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” with Corse Payton
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Just Before Dawn
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Gayety,
Unique, Orpheum, Watson’s
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