1905: APRIL

Minnie Maddern Fiske

by

Samuel L. Leiter

For comprehensive background on Brooklyn’s pre-20^th-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 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 

Links to all of 1902’s posts can be found here.

Links to all of 1903’s posts can be found here.

Links to all of 1904's posts can be found here.

1905: JANUARY

1905: FEBRUARY

1905: MARCH

As we’ve seen, April was the last full month of theatre in pre-airconditioned Brooklyn before the theatres began shutting down for the summer, when the shorefront theatrical attractions would take over. But it was rarely the least, as April 1905 demonstrated, with starring engagements by, for example, Louis Mann, George Sidney, Dave Montgomery and Fred Stone, Maude Adams, George M. Cohan, George Walker and Bert Williams, and Charles Hawtrey, names that have largely faded from household status except for nostalgia-driven buffs.

The Wizard of Oz, still packing them in across the river, stopped by once more, but novelties (as shows not seen in Brooklyn before were dubbed) arrived as well, like the elaborate musical Woodland, in which the characters were birds, and Victor Herbert’s still-performed Babes in Toyland. As for dramas, little new and/or memorable was shown, revivals taking the lead, most of disposable quality. There is, though, a certain piquancy in seeing unrelated plays presented in the course of a single month with titles such as—if not in this order chronologically—No Wedding Bells for Her, All For a Woman, How He Won Her, Her First False Step, Deserted at the Altar, Wedded and Parted, Wedded, but No Wife, Why He Divorced Her, and Alone in the World. There might even be room in the group for A Working Girl’s Wrongs.

As for the theatres themselves at this moment of constant construction, renovation, and both name and policy shifts, the major news was the name change of the relatively new Watson’s Cozy Corner at Willoughby and Pearl, near Borough Hall, to the Nassau Theatre, as mentioned in the previous entry. Its new manager, son of the redoubtable producer Oscar Hammerstein I, advertised its aims as “High-Class Vaudeville.” Such terms were occasionally contrived to promote the more fashionable vaudeville bills of the day; soon the borough would be sold on "Advanced Vaudeville," but the shows were never that much different from one another, only the popularity of their acts helping to distinguish one offering from another.

Brooklyn now maintained nine vaudeville and/or burlesque houses (some doing both), and 12 legitimate theatres with varying but mostly popular or mid-range prices (and never as expensive as the prime Manhattan houses). This added up to 21 theatres—more than ever before in the Borough of Churches.

Business was good enough to make some think even more theatres could survive amid the growing population. One getting closer to completion was the so-called New Montauk, to which we’ve already been introduced. The “old” Montauk was still in business at Flatbush and Fulton, and would avoid demolition, as we’ll see, thanks to a remarkable engineering feat that moved its location. But the new structure’s looming presence at Hanover and Livingston, intended to replace the old one, was closely described in the Standard Union of April 2. It was noted that the “pure Venetian style” of its frontage was “novel” for “Long Island,” and that its aura would be that of a “jewel box,” with a smaller seating capacity than its predecessor, the intention being to emphasize the intimacy of the relation between stage and audience.  

Another issue running through these entries remains the insidious influence wielded over plays and performers by the Theatrical Syndicate, with its vise-like grip on what the many theatres under its control across the nation could present, and how much its artists could be paid. A substantial piece by Hamilton Ormsbee in the Eagle of April 1 covered much of the ground. Ormsbee says that the general view of the issue was that it was all about money, not art. He wants his readers to realize that artists need nurturing so they can try out their work until such time as it bears fruit when, “after years of nurture and struggle,” they can make a living at it. This was a point made in a recent magazine interview with great actress Minnie Maddern Fiske, from which he quotes substantially. She, with David Belasco, was one of the two remaining anti-syndicate holdouts, both in it for the long haul, with Mrs. Fiske determined that a free theatre exist in “which the actor shall be free to shape his own career.” That was something she insisted was impossible under the syndicate system with its determined reliance on type casting in opposition to versatility. The bottom line, not creative development, was all that counted.

What the “trust” or syndicate wanted above all, insisted the star, known not only for her intellect but for her adventurous artistic spirit in those conservative times, was “sensational newness, with superficiality.” Money ruled and an actor’s worth was measured by how much a moneymaker he or she was. But you can’t be a moneymaker without years of hardship as your art develops. Actors like Edwin Booth and Richard Mansfield would never have survived if they began under the hands of the trust. And, she declared, only the audience can change these conditions by demanding what and whom they want to see rather than simply accepting what the trust decides to feed them.

Ormsbee makes an analogy between the theatre’s growth—with its thousands of new theatres and the domination of touring combinations—during the past few decades and the shift from handmade to mass-produced furniture, with its attendant drop-off in quality and increase in profitability. Trusts arose in the business world as well as in the theatre, where workers had to create products to fill those theatres and a well-oiled system like the syndicate was needed to move those products along with ultimate efficiency. This was in opposition, of course, to the booking chaos of the past, when actors in mismanaged shows were commonly left stranded far from home. The old ways led to efficiencies in all aspects of production, including casting.

But lately, Ormsbee avers, people are seeking handmade furniture (it was the era of art nouveau), which was providing quality craftsmen with outlets for their work. Such a tendency seemed to be happening in theatre over the past few seasons as well, Ormsbee wrote, as theatre artists like Arnold Daly and Mrs. Fiske had taken risks by producing plays by writers such as Shaw and Ibsen, among a small number of others challenging the status quo. Realizing its probable impossibility in America, Ormsbee yearns for theatres that serve as fulltime stock companies led by eminent actors where considerations of money and fame are second to artistic quality and joy.

Such, in fact, was essentially what Mrs. Fiske herself reigned over at the Manhattan Theatre, owned by her husband, Harrison Gray Fiske, where her more or less permanent company had the freedom to put on limited runs of more “artistic plays” at special matinees. Barred as she was from so many other cities, said Ormsbee, she had it within her to gift New York with such a company, whose success would then be echoed across the nation, “showing what an art theater may be and thus paving the way to similar establishments elsewhere.”

If you’re wondering what other theatre developments might have been on people’s minds, here are some things gleaned from the period’s reporting. First, we can mention the growing status in New York of the Yiddish theatre, not yet of note in Brooklyn despite a growing population of Jewish immigrants (Brownsville, for one, was being extensively developed for them). This was pointed out on April 7 by the Eagle, when an actor named Abramovitch—first name not given and difficult to uncover—had a funeral procession in Manhattan’s Bowery, drawing 5,000 people, although he was “entirely unknown outside the ghetto.”

“The English-speaking city knows almost nothing of it, yet the ghetto [Lower East Side] maintains three Yiddish theaters but supports not only a colony of actors but dramatists whose plays are written and produced solely for this public which speaks the Yiddish dialect.” And this leads to why the Yiddish theatre is mentioned here, which is that “the leader of these dramatists is Jacob Gordin, who lives in Brooklyn, and writes tragedies which are played to his compatriots.” His famous plays include a translation of his The Kreutzer Sonata, a somber work in which Blanche Walsh toured out West, but had not yet been seen locally.

The article discusses Gordin’s work approvingly, mentioning stars Jacob Adler and Bertha Kalich. It’s an early example of the interest soon to be taken by the outside world in the art and artists of New York’s Yiddish stage, concentrated as it would be for many years on Second Avenue. “The Yiddish theaters,” concluded the anonymous writer, “afford a vivid illustration of the cosmopolitanism of New York, and of the high standard of intellect and intelligence in the Jewish colony.”

Stock companies had boomed at the turn of the century and Brooklyn, which had only recently had as many as seven such groups, presently had four, the Spooner Stock Company at the Bijou, the American Stock Company at the Columbia, the Lee Avenue Stock Company at the Lee Avenue Theatre, and the troupe at Phillips’ Lyceum, thus giving two such companies to each of the borough’s main districts. In the Eagle of April 9, a little-known poet and essayist named Lionel Josephare wrote a delightful but lengthy description of what life in such a company was like, with lots of Brooklyn examples. 

Finally, I am primarily focused on Brooklyn’s legitimate theatre history, even as vaudeville and burlesque continued to metastasize at the legit’s expense; remember, all you need do is look at who was headlining one vaudeville show after the other in the ads posted here and you’ll see at once how common it was for even Broadway’s leading actors to be doing one-act plays on bills with acrobats and dog acts, often making far more money for less work than if they were in a full-scale play or musical. 

One of Brooklyn’s leading vaudeville entrepreneurs, with his own theatres and circuit, was Percy G. Williams, whose career and position are described in an Eagle article on April 9 (“Vaudeville World Hails Williams as Its Leader”). However, to repeat those contents here would make this already long entry far longer than intended.

1. April 3-8, 1905

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Girl I Left Behind Me

Broadway: The Second Fiddle, with Louis Mann

Columbia: (American Stock Company) The Octoroon

Folly: Busy Izzy, with George Sidney

Gotham: Her First False Step

Grand Opera House: Terence

Majestic: The Wizard of Oz, with Montgomery and Stone

Montauk: Woodland

Novelty: The Village Parson

Park: On the Suwanee River

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton’s Lee Avenue Stock Company) Faust

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Why He Divorced Her

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde and Behman’s, Gayety, Unique, Orpheum, Nassau [changed from Watson’s Cozy Corner], Star, Keeney’s Fulton Street, Amphion, Garden

2.      April 10-15, 1905

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Aristocracy

Broadway: Babes in Toyland

Columbia: (American Stock Company) Faust

Folly: Siberia

Gotham: Queen of the Highway

Grand Opera House: How He Won Her

Majestic: Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels

Montauk: The Little Minister

Novelty: Wedded and Parted

Park: No Wedding Bells for Her

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Payton’s Lee Avenue Stock Company) A Texas Steer

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Alone in the World

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde and Behman’s, Gayety, Unique, Orpheum, Nassau, Star, Keeney’s Fulton Street, Amphion, Garden

3.      April 17-22, 1905

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Wages of Sin

Broadway: Little Johnny Jones, with George M. Cohan

Columbia: (American Stock Company) All for a Woman

Folly: Desperate Chance

Gotham: The Gypsy Girl, with Dolly Kemper

Grand Opera House: The New Eight Bells

Majestic: In Dahomey, with Williams and Walker

Montauk: Higgledy Piggledy, The College Widow, with Weber Star Stock Company, Marie Dressler, Trixie Friganza

Novelty: The Span of Life

Park: A Little Outcast

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) A Royal Slave, with Corse Payton 

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Deserted at the Altar

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde and Behman’s, Gayety, Unique, Orpheum, Watson’s, Star, Keeney’s Fulton Street, Amphion, Garden

4.      April 24-29, 1905

 

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Jack and the Beanstalk

Broadway: A Message from Mars, with Charles Hawtrey

Columbia: (American Stock Company) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Folly: Wedded, but No Wife, with Selma Herman

Gotham: The Village Parson

Grand Opera House: Sis Hopkins, with Rose Melville

Majestic: In Dahomey, with Williams and Walker

Montauk: King Richard III, The Misanthrope, Ivan the Terrible, Beau Brummel, A Parisian Romance, The Merchant of Venice, Dr. Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde, with Richard Mansfield

Novelty: Human Hearts

Park: The Curse of Drink

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Pearl of Savoy

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) A Working Girl’s Wrongs

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde and Behman’s, Gayety, Unique, Orpheum, Watson’s, Star, Keeney’s Fulton Street, Amphion, Garden