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| Brooklyn-born Walter Hampden (born Dougherty), future star, at 25. |
| 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.
This month’s overview will, of necessity, be longer than
most of its predecessors because of the abundance of theatre reportage available,
mostly from the Sunday columns of Hamilton Ormsbee in the Eagle. But
first, some sentences about October’s visiting stars. Most of the names
of those who headlined plays and musicals at Brooklyn’s theatres in October
1904 have been forgotten. The greatest A-lister playing here was William
Gillette, who brought one of the more admired comedies of the day with him in Scottish
playwright J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, still sometimes produced.
Lower down the alphabet was Robert “Bob” Fitzsimmons, today remembered chiefly
as a late 19th-century boxing champion; as we’ve seen, like several
of his kind, including James J. Corbett, he made something of a post-pugilist
career in melodramas, an example being this month’s A Fight for Life, which
allowed his fists to fly heroically.
A young actor named Dustin Farnum was on his way up but,
before long, would leave the stage for a career as a Hollywood luminary known
as one of the first great Western stars, a career foreshadowed by his great
success as the lead in the hit play, The Virginian, based on Owen Wister’s
still read best seller of 1902, and cited below. Farnum repeated the role to
acclaim in the 1914 silent movie version, remade several times, including its
first talkie, in 1929, with the even more iconic Gary Cooper, followed in 1946 by
a remake with Joel McCrea. The only other star of note visiting the borough this
month was Raymond Hitchcock in his hit The Yankee Consul.
As noted, I have lots of other stuff to squeeze in as per the
concerns of Ormsbee, whose October 2 column was pleased to see some recent
advances in American plays. The “thrills and the stagey exaggerations” by melodrama
hacks like the prolific Theodore Kremer at the cheap theatres were still drawing
audiences but the dollar houses were increasingly avoiding them. “Even when melodrama
gets into the high priced theaters it ceases to be theatrical in its manner, at
least, whatever it may be in substance,” the play he specifically had in mind
being The Virginian in whose third act the captured cattle thieves are
sent off to be killed. “The quietude and absolute naturalness of the acting
match perfectly with the long description in the book,” which author Wister, who
directed, must have witnessed in person so lifelike was its performance.
What Ormsbee was chronicling was a noteworthy shift in acting
methods from artificial to naturalistic, which would still probably seem less than
convincing today. He cites William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes of recent memory
as the play in which the new parted from the old in Gillette’s “modern natural method,”
but was so limited by it that when a climax called for the old melodramatic style,
he failed to carry it off.
The “extreme endeavor after naturalness” visible in The
Virginian now marked “most of the modern American plays.” The master at
evoking such stage reality, he said, was David Belasco, especially in his production
of The Music Master, starring David Warfield, seen in Brooklyn several
times, and the result of careful preparation over nearly a year when most shows
were rehearsed for only a few weeks.
On October 16, Ormsbee was preoccupied with Shakespeare, a
subject sparked by the imminent arrival of Julia Marlowe and E.H. Sothern on
Broadway with their newly launched partnership as Shakespearean costars, which
would grace American stages for years until these popular stars began to fade
and their work grew musty. But in 1904 their enterprise was full of promise, leading Ormsbee to ponder Shakespeare’s place in Brooklyn hearts. He noted the brilliance
of the recent opera company visit in which Verdi’s Othello proved even
more powerful than the original before turning to the sold-out production earlier
in the month of Romeo and Juliet at the Bijou by the Spooner Stock Company,
starring Edna May Spooner and Augustus Phillips at popular prices. He was
impressed at how effective this stock company performance had pulled off so
difficult a project, lamenting that even more attention was not given it by the
town’s busy reviewers while it lasted. For the historical record, I will quote
him at length:
The performance was really
excellent, but the most interesting thing about the revival was not the work of
the actors, but its reception by the audience. There were nine regular
performances with an extra matinee to allow [Edna May’s sister] Cecil Spooner
and her company at the Amphion to see Miss Spooner’s Juliet. . . . That [Bijou] company have become prime
favorites. But even with the obvious star worship it was clear enough that the
people cared more for Shakespeare than the acting. The tragedy reached out and took
hold of them as an intense modern play does. . . . When Olive Grove as the
nurse spoke the defense of Juliet to her father the line got more spontaneous
and hearth applause than almost any other in the play. That was not a tribute
to the acting. The auditors[’s] . . . hearts with poor Juliet, beset by a cruel
father. . . .
That is precisely the effect which
classic plays should produce and which it is usually difficult to get from sophisticated
audiences [who go more to see the stars than to see Shakespeare.] The Sothern
and Marlowe performance . . . this week [in Manhattan] . . . arouse no end of
enthusiasm, but it is doubtful if it will provoke any such spontaneous,
unconscious tribute to Shakespeare as was the applause following that
commonplace line of the Nurse at the Bijou.
Ormsbee, wanting to stress the “usefulness of a stock
company,” noted how the company once did a farce that travestied Romeo and
Juliet with Edna May Spooner speaking some lines of Juliet with such
passion that the audience got so emotionally caught up it forgot to
laugh. This incited many theatregoers to beg Mrs. Spooner, the manageress, to
do the full play, which she agreed to if she received 500 letters asking for
it. So many came in that she went ahead with the production, and local English
teachers, who got many of their students to attend, requested other Shakespeare
plays, the company’s popular prices making it possible to draw young audiences.
This led Ormsbee to ponder what such other plays, which would star the Spooner
sisters, might be, Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew among
them. This blog will wait to see if any such revivals ever were realized by the
troupe.
Coincidentally, October also was when Brooklyn was made aware
that one of its own residents, 25-year-old Walter Hampden, who had never acted
professionally in Brooklyn, was making a striking mark for himself on the
London stage, being hailed as the “Hamlet for whom we wait.” According to an Eagle
article of October 16, “Brooklynite May Be the Hamlet for Whom We Wait,” Hampden,
a graduate of Polytechnic Institute, had joined the renowned F.H. Benson’s
Theatrical Company in London, and proved so talented that he was being compared
to Johnston Forbes Robertson as “the coming great romantic actor.”
The son of a distinguished Brooklyn corporation attorney and
author named J. Hampden Dougherty, of 258 Clinton Avenue, he was currently
gaining accolades for his performance at London’s Adelphi Theatre as the young
monk, Andrea, in Oscar Asche’s Prayer of the Sword, and the article
quotes at length from the overwhelmingly
positive reviews. Hampden would eventually become one of America’s leading
classical actors, leading his own company.
This entry has gone on longer than I’d prefer, so I’ll continue other interesting material from the month—from articles about the borough’s after-dark theatergoing and dining “Rialto,” and about melodrama at the cheap theatres—when (and if) slower periods arrive.
1.
October 3-8, 1904
Amphion: (Spooner Stock Company #2) That Girl from Texas,
with Cecil Spooner
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company #1) Romeo and Juliet,
with Edna May Spooner
Broadway: The Road to Kenmare, with Andrew Mack
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Mrs. Jack
Folly: A Prisoner of War
Gotham: Shadows of a Great City
Grand Opera House: Wedded and Parted
Majestic: Girls Will Be Girls, with Al Leech, the
Three Rosebuds
Montauk: The Maid and the Mummy
Novelty: Why Women Sin
Park: Why Girls Leave Home
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) The
Christian, with Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) A Flag of Truce
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
2.
October 10-15, 1904
Amphion: (Spooner
Stock Company #2) When Knighthood Was in Flower, with Edna May Spooner
Bijou: (Spooner
Stock Company #1) A Night at the Circus, with Cecil Spooner
Broadway: The
Secret of Polichinelle
Columbia: (Columbia
Stock Company) Thelma
Folly: Two
Little Sailor Boys
Gotham: The
Charity Nurse
Grand Opera House: The
Street Singer
Majestic: King Dodo
Montauk: Othello,
Carmen, Il Trovatore, Lohengrin, La Boheme, Tannhauser,
I Pagliacci, with Savage Grand Opera Company
Novelty: Deserted
at the Altar
Park: Child
Slaves of New York
Payton’s Lee
Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Galley Slave
Phillips’ Lyceum:
(Lyceum Stock Company) The Forbidden Marriage
Vaudeville and
burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star, Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety,
Keeney’s Fulton Street
3.
October 17-22, 1904
Amphion: (Spooner Stock Company #2) A Night at the Circus,
with Cecil Spooner
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company #1) In the Palace of the
King, with Edna May Spooner
Broadway: The Earl of Pawtucket, with Lawrence
D’Orsay
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) The Three Musketeers
Folly: King Dodo
Gotham: From Rags to Riches, with Joseph Santley
Grand Opera House: David Harum
Majestic: Shore Acres, Mrs. James A. Herne
Montauk: The Admirable Crichton, with William
Gillette
Novelty: A Fight for Love, with “Bob” Fitzsimmons
Park: Lighthouse by the Sea
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Cumberland,
’61, with Corse Payton, Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Captain
Impudence
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
4.
October 24-29, 190
Amphion: (Spooner Stock Company #2) In the Palace of the
King, with Edna May Spooner
Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company #1) The Charity Waif,
with Cecil Spooner
Broadway: The Virginian, with Dustin Farnum
Columbia: (Columbia Stock Company) Jim Bludso
Folly: More to Be Pitied Than Scorned, with Lydia
Powell
Gotham: Kidnapped in New York, with Barney Gilmore
Grand Opera House: The Female Detectives, with the
Russell Brothers
Majestic: Down the Pike, Johnny and Emma Ray
Montauk: The Yankee Consul, Raymond Hitchcock
Novelty: Why Girls Leave Home
Park: Her Mad Marriage
Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton Lee Avenue Stock Company) Children
of the Ghetto, with Corse Payton, Etta Reed Payton
Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Fallen Among
Thieves
Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Star,
Watson’s, Unique, Orpheum, Gayety, Keeney’s Fulton Street
For October 31-November entry, see November 1904
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