| 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:
Links to all of 1902’s posts can be found here.
Links to all of 1903’s posts can be found here.
The big news marking the launching of the 1904-1905 Brooklyn season was the opening on August 29 of its newest legitimate theatre, the Majestic, on Fulton Street and Ashland Place. After a century of artistic highs and lows, it still stands there in its deliberately distressed décor under the name the BAM Harvey Theatre, named for Harvey Lichtenstein, the late artistic director of its affiliated theatre, the nearby Brooklyn Academy of Music. Owned and managed by a successful booking and producing company best known by its leaders’ last names, Stair and Havlin, its first bill was The Wizard of Oz.
This
hugely successful musical comedy had played at Brooklyn’s Montauk for a week a
year earlier, and was now able to stay for two weeks. The top ticket
price was $1.00, placing the theatre between the “popular-price” venues and the
“high-price” ones. There was a dispute about the wisdom of calling it the Majestic,
since a theatre of that name existed in Manhattan, which might create confusion,
but Stair and Havlin persisted because they were opening Majestics in other cities
and wanted them identified as part of a circuit. Besides, a goodly number of Brooklyn theatres shared names with theatres across the river.
The Brooklyn Eagle of August 21, 1904, wrote: “It is not tremendously large, but of good size, modern and up to date in every particular, attractive and inviting in appearance. . . . Precautions against accidents and means to meet most any kind of emergency are the winning cards in the Majestic’s hand. . . .” It had 2,300 seats, said the Eagle, and there were, on each floor, men’s smoking rooms, women’s “retiring” rooms, and toilets, Even the boys occupying the gallery had “a smoking room of their own.”
As today, entering from Fulton Street led to “a spacious lobby and box
office,” but the “foyer room” that followed differed somewhat from now because
of subsequent renovations. “The ceilings are studded with hundreds of electric
lights. . . . There is a huge painting, ‘The Inspiration,’ on the ceiling over
the auditorium.” The builders went above and beyond the law in providing fire
safety methods, among them, things we now take for granted, like exit signs
over each exit, in big, red letters, controlled by a separate switch so they
would stay on even if all the others went out.
On August 21, the Brooklyn Citizen provided an even
more extensive description, although it put the capacity at 1,900, 400 less
than the Eagle. It also said:
Brooklyn is a community which takes
kindly to theaters. Without any transient population of spenders to fill its
playhouses, it maintains a surprisingly large number of theaters, and gives
them loyal support. Even in disastrous theatrical years the business prospers
here, and every local playhouse that is well placed and wisely managed is
thriving, As a result the number is constantly increasing.
Yet, for all the multiplication of theatres, playwriting was
not keeping up with the need for material to feed the stages. Not only was the
number of writers stagnant, those who remained active, whether American or
English, were running on empty with barely a new idea of any value. Everywhere
was heard the lament about the dearth of good new plays. All that producers
(managers, as they were known) could do to fill the gaps was to offer new
musical comedies, most of dubious quality, and many only a step away from vaudeville
shows. Thus the shows listed below reveal a preponderance of such hack work.
Hamilton Ormsbee wrote in the Eagle on September 11 that writing comic operas like
those of Gilbert and Sullivan and Offenbach required special gifts.
But musical “shows” can be put
together by a good stage producer [i.e., director] with the supplementary aid
of a librettist and composer. Writers and musicians whose work is not strong
enough to hold an audience standing alone, can yet supply tolerable
entertainment when bolstered up by big companies of girls, glittering raiment,
spectacular scenery, comedians who depend upon their own sense of humor and
popular songs for which the shelves of a dozen publishers are searched
diligently.
This sort of “show” has a good deal
of the quality of vaudeville and precious little of the coherence of
development required of a play.
The largest portion of the day’s audiences, he noted,
were new to the theatre, and unfamiliar with its possibilities, wanting little
more than to be “amused.” They wouldn’t know how to appreciate a serious play unless
it reduced them to tears or was acted by a genius. Presented with musical
glitter and farcical business, the audience's “primitive sense of fun” would be
satisfied, allowing “the great bulk of theatrical entertainment . . . to be
frivolous and primitive to supply that taste.” Only one-tenth to one-fourth of
the theatergoing public, he speculated, was cultivated enough to appreciate an
artistic theatre. And thus, the willingness of bottom-line managers to ignore
them.
Unlike in Europe, where anything— business, politics, religion, race, sex—went for “unpleasant” dramatic subject matter, Ormsbee believed Americans would condemn such “unwholesome” material; for instance, we approve no romantic plays in which "sexual relations [go] beyond the conventional love story of the young man and young woman who marry and live happily ever after.” America had no dramatists as Ibsen, Bjornson, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck, Mirabeau, D’Annunzio, etc., and even these rarely were produced here.
On the
other hand, Ormsbee admitted, some of their subject matter was deemed “unspeakable”
and worthy of being ignored. Regardless, our playwrights were strongly urged to
expand “our theatrical taste” so that new plays “may deal cleanly, but
elementally, with elemental themes.”
A small number of the new wave of European plays was
promised in the upcoming season in “special performances,” including Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s
Profession, but whether any would reach conservative Brooklyn was still up
in the air. “Our society is not rotten,” Ormsbee wishfully proposed, “so truthful
portrayals of it cannot be indecent.”
On another subject, he Citizen of August 21 published
an article, “Woman Manager Runs Brooklyn Theater Now” to celebrate an exceptional
woman, Mrs. Mary Gibbs "Molly" Spooner, who had morphed from heading the Spooner Stock
Company at the Bijou as a manager “in the general sense of the term” to full-fledged
manager: “Now she handles the entire staff, directs the running of the theater and
attends to the thousand and one duties . . . of a business manager.” The writer
chronicled her long working day from her 7:00 a.m. awakening to her late night
retirement.
While Mrs. Spooner oversaw every detail of the theatre’s
business, her daughter Edna May Spooner, who shared the title of female leading
lady with her sister Cecil Spooner, was responsible for directing the plays, Cecil
handling whatever choreographic work needed to be done, in addition to designing
many of the gowns. Theatre management was primarily a male occupation, so Mrs.
Spooner was nearly sui generis, even being ranked one of the most effective
managers in the nation. Always “the courteous gentlewoman,” she was beloved by
her company and staff, ruling with kindness and good humor. Her benevolence was
proved by the many times her company gave benefits for charity.
The Spooners entered Brooklyn at the Park Theatre in 1901,
so they’d been there for three years, their historic occupancy of the Bijou
cementing their place in Brooklyn’s theatre annals. However, they would take a
big risk this season when they doubled their size and decided to split their
energies between the Bijou in the Western District and the recently dormant
Amphion in the Eastern. The plan was cooked up
when the new fire prevention policies required extensive renovations to the old Amphion. Klaw and Erlanger, not having it as an
outlet for their high-priced bookings, moved them to the new Broadway Theatre. The
Amphion’s lessees therefore needed something else to occupy the place, vaudeville being
mentioned as an option, as if Brooklyn didn’t already have vaudeville up the
kazoo. That’s when Mrs. Spooner had her brainstorm.
The actors would move from one venue to another as needed, but
Cecil and Edna May would alternate weekly between the two playhouses. The plays
would run two weeks, one at each theatre. So weekly stock became biweekly. The project
resembled the one that the Paytons had tried the previous season—before it
proved too arduous—where one half the company played at the Lee Avenue and the
other at Payton’s Fulton Street Theatre, starring Mrs. Etta Reed Payton,
although the actors didn’t alternate between venues.
As the weeks went by this was modified somewhat so that one
or two others, especially the leading men, Augustus Phillips or Louis Leon Hall,
became associated with one or the other actress. Thus, there’d be two Spooner
companies playing every week, an ambitious plan that ran out of fuel before the
season ended. In addition to shows from Monday through Saturday nights, there
were matinees on Tuesday, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Actors needed unusual stamina
in 1904. As the Eagle’s Ormsbee put it, “The stock company is the real
training ground for actors and our stage would be almost destitute of skill if
it were not for just such organizations. . . .”
Their competition this season for fans of stock productions
would be the fine new stock company at the Columbia (which would not last the season),
with Richard Buhler and Jessaline Rodgers as leading man and woman; the company
at Phillips’ Lyceum, specializing in cheap melodramas; and the redoubtable troupe
run by Corse Payton at the Lee Avenue Theatre. Like Phillips’, it was in the
Eastern District.
1.
August 16-20, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) A Night Off
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star, Watson’s
2.
August 22-27, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) When Knighthood Was in
Flower
Broadway: The Sultan of Sulu,
with Flo Irwin; opens Saturday, August 27
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Soldiers of Fortune,
with Richard Buhler, Jessaline Rogers leading man and lady; opens Saturday,
August 27
Grand Opera House: Under Southern Skies; opens
Saturday, August 27
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star, Watson’s, Unique
3. August
29-September 3, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Little
Miss Fortune
Broadway: The
Sultan of Sulu, with Frank Moulan
Columbia: (Columbia
Stock Company) Soldiers of Fortune (continues)
Folly: Rachel
Goldstein, with Louise Beaton
Gotham: Deserted
at the Altar; opens Saturday, September 3
Grand Opera House: Under
Southern Skies (continues)
Majestic: The
Wizard of Oz, with Montgomery and Stone
Montauk: Peggy
from Paris, with Beatriz Bronte
Park: A Fight
for Love, with Bob Fitzsimmons
Payton’s Lee
Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Henrietta, with Corse
Payton, Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’s Lyceum:
(Lyceum Stock Company) A Dau1ghter of the South
Vaudeville and
burlesque: Star, Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety
4.
September 5-10, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Village Postmaster
Broadway: The Eternal City, with Edward Morgan
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Audrey
Folly: Under Southern Skies
Gotham: Deserted at the Altar (continues)
Grand Opera House: The Awakening of Mr. Pipp, with
Charley Grapewin
Majestic: The Wizard of Oz, with Montgomery and Stone
Montauk: The Prince of Pilsen, with Trixie Friganza
Novelty: From Rags to Riches
Park: Human Hearts
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Shenandoah,
with Corse Payton, Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Price of
Honor
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
5.
September 12-17, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Winchester
Broadway: The Southerners
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) A Gentleman of France
Folly: The Awakening of Mr. Pipp, with Charley
Grapewin
Gotham: Only a Shop Girl
Grand Opera House: The Fatal Wedding
Majestic: When Johnny Comes Marching Home
Montauk: The Virginian, with Dustin Farnum
Novelty: M’liss, with Nellie McHenry
Park: Lights of Home
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Lend
Me Your Home
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Nobody’s Claim
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
6.
September 19-24, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Taming of Helen
Broadway: A Little of Everything, with Fay Templeton,
Peter F. Dailey
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Alice of Old Vincennes
Folly: The Fatal Wedding
Gotham: The Span of Life
Grand Opera House: The Ninety and Nine
Majestic: The Runaways
Montauk: The Dictator, with William Collier, John
Barrymore
Novelty: The Charity Nurse
Park: After Midnight, with Jack Webster
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) No
Cross, No Crown, with Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Lost River
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star, Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum,
Gayety
7.
September 26-October 1, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Deacon’s Daughter
Broadway: The Prince of Pilsen, with Trixie Friganza
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Rupert of Hentzau
Folly: The Female Detectives, the Russell Brothers
Gotham: After Midnight
Grand Opera House: A Prisoner of War
Majestic: The Crisis, with Nanette Comstock
Montauk: The Earl of Pawtucket, with Lawrence D’Orsay
Novelty: The Little Church Around the Corner
Park: Rachel Goldstein, with Louise Beaton
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) In
Illinois
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) A Nutmeg Match
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
1. August 16-20, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) A Night Off
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star, Watson’s
2.
August 22-27, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) When Knighthood Was in
Flower
Broadway: The Sultan of Sulu,
with Flo Irwin; opens Saturday, August 27
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Soldiers of Fortune,
with Richard Buhler, Jessaline Rogers leading man and lady; opens Saturday,
August 27
Grand Opera House: Under Southern Skies; opens
Saturday, August 27
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star, Watson’s, Unique
3. August
29-September 3, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Little
Miss Fortune
Broadway: The
Sultan of Sulu, with Frank Moulan
Columbia: (Columbia
Stock Company) Soldiers of Fortune (continues)
Folly: Rachel
Goldstein, with Louise Beaton
Gotham: Deserted
at the Altar; opens Saturday, September 3
Grand Opera House: Under
Southern Skies (continues)
Majestic: The
Wizard of Oz, with Montgomery and Stone
Montauk: Peggy
from Paris, with Beatriz Bronte
Park: A Fight
for Love, with Bob Fitzsimmons
Payton’s Lee
Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Henrietta, with Corse
Payton, Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’s Lyceum:
(Lyceum Stock Company) A Dau1ghter of the South
Vaudeville and
burlesque: Star, Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety
4.
September 5-10, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Village Postmaster
Broadway: The Eternal City, with Edward Morgan
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Audrey
Folly: Under Southern Skies
Gotham: Deserted at the Altar (continues)
Grand Opera House: The Awakening of Mr. Pipp, with
Charley Grapewin
Majestic: The Wizard of Oz, with Montgomery and Stone
Montauk: The Prince of Pilsen, with Trixie Friganza
Novelty: From Rags to Riches
Park: Human Hearts
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Shenandoah,
with Corse Payton, Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Price of
Honor
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
5.
September 12-17, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Winchester
Broadway: The Southerners
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) A Gentleman of France
Folly: The Awakening of Mr. Pipp, with Charley Grapewin
Gotham: Only a Shop Girl
Grand Opera House: The Fatal Wedding
Majestic: When Johnny Comes Marching Home
Montauk: The Virginian, with Dustin Farnum
Novelty: M’liss, with Nellie McHenry
Park: Lights of Home
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Lend
Me Your Home
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Nobody’s Claim
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
6.
September 19-24, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Taming of Helen
Broadway: A Little of Everything, with Fay Templeton,
Peter F. Dailey
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Alice of Old Vincennes
Folly: The Fatal Wedding
Gotham: The Span of Life
Grand Opera House: The Ninety and Nine
Majestic: The Runaways
Montauk: The Dictator, with William Collier, John
Barrymore
Novelty: The Charity Nurse
Park: After Midnight, with Jack Webster
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) No
Cross, No Crown, with Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Lost River
Vaudeville and burlesque: Star, Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum,
Gayety
7.
September 26-October 1, 1904
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Deacon’s Daughter
Broadway: The Prince of Pilsen, with Trixie Friganza
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Rupert of Hentzau
Folly: The Female Detectives, the Russell Brothers
Gotham: After Midnight
Grand Opera House: A Prisoner of War
Majestic: The Crisis, with Nanette Comstock
Montauk: The Earl of Pawtucket, with Lawrence D’Orsay
Novelty: The Little Church Around the Corner
Park: Rachel Goldstein, with Louise Beaton
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) In
Illinois
Phillips’s Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) A Nutmeg Match
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
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