1905: OCTOBER

As far as its stage productions go, October 1905 was not particularly memorable for Brooklyn, what with the borough’s increasing imbalance between the number of venues devoted to the legitimate and vaudeville and/or burlesque. There now were ten Brooklyn non-legits and more being considered. The already shaky foundations of local legit became even more worrisome when the legits occasionally offered a week of minstrelsy or vaudeville in place of even a commonplace melodrama or a musical comedy.

And, with no Academy of Music for opera, one week at the spanking New Montauk was given over to Henry W. Savage’s Grand Opera Company doing a remarkable repertory of popular titles in English. It was a commercial success, bringing in $12,000 with the top seats going at $1.50. That converts to roughly $440,500 in 2025 terms.

Dramatically speaking, October’s limited highlights included Brooklyn boy-made-good Robert Edeson starring in Strongheart at the Broadway, and Hall Caine’s much discussed but not particularly well-liked The Prodigal Son. Edeson, wearing dark makeup, played a Native American college football player in love with a white girl. The “knife of prejudice” is sharpened and conflicts arise both with other whites and with those of his own race.

The Prodigal Son, a massive production costing $35,000, was loosely based on Caine’s own best-selling novel of that name. Its opening night at the Montauk drew a pitifully small house and its scene shifts were so slow the play lumbered on till past midnight. The play itself tells the story of the prodigal son of an important politician in Iceland. After a life of romantic deception, theft, and other nasty deeds, he climbs out of degradation to become a famous composer before returning home to save his now destitute family from the poverty his own actions brought about.

George Bernard Shaw was on every critic’s tongue at the time, and news of his plays filled reams of Sunday columns as Broadway was increasingly being introduced to his wit and intellect. Brooklyn theatres, however, were too timid to tackle a writer more advanced in his thinking and dramaturgy than they believed their audiences were ready for.

Otherwise, it was stock company revivals, a straight comedy called Easy Dawson starring top-rated Raymond Hitchcock, farces mingled with vaudeville specialties (like those starring the Rogers Brothers, the Four Mortons, or Joe Weber), standard melodramas, and musical comedies, like The Duchess of Dantzik (adapted from France’s Madame Sans-Gene)—one of many contemporary works featuring Napoleon.

Perhaps the biggest news was the re-opening of the Park, now the possession of the Shuberts’ growing empire, and renamed the Shubert-Park. It had undergone a thorough, expensive renovation that some said practically made it into a new theatre. It actually opened on Saturday, November 4, at the end of a week that began in October, so technically it belongs to the next month in this chronicle. It starred Bertha Galland in David Belasco’s Sweet Kitty Bellairs, a play that had helped rocket Henrietta Crosman to stardom, and was the first effort of Galland as one of the Shuberts’ growing gallery of stars. The Shubert-Park, as a theatre free of the syndicate’s control, and given a spit and polish makeover, was viewed as a potential savior for Brooklynites hungry for the kind of premiere independent plays and stars—like Mrs. Fiske—they’d been deprived of in recent years. Would its promise be fulfilled?

Somewhat apart from these concerns was the most recent visit of Britain’s Ben Greet, an actor-manager whose prestige stemmed from his advocacy for doing Elizabethan plays in the sceneryless manner of their day, out of doors and in conditions that replicated or suggested their original performances, although he also performed indoors, but without a curtain. Severa; years earlier his company made its Brooklyn debut, playing in different venues, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where they did his renowned Everyman in stripped-down medieval style. It was one of the closest things in that time to what might be called experimental theatre.

Greet was also the leader of the non-starring system, as per the German stock system, whereby an actor could play Hamlet one night and a bit part the next. He directed the plays and played all sorts of roles, both leads and minor ones. On October 24 and 31, he and his company were booked for two performances at the Y.M.C.A's Association Hall, with another two on November 14 and 21. His repertoire was The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Much Ado About Nothing.

The Merchant of Venice, with Greet a red-bearded Shylock, and Portia a red-gowned lawyer, was a resounding commercial success, with 25 people paying to stand in what was not a conventional theatre but a large meeting hall. The audience, used to the scenically elaborate revivals of the period, struggled to imagine the invisible locales, and the critics did their best to be polite. However, Greet’s well-enunciated acting aside, the cast was deemed unremarkable and the general reaction was disappointment. The program didn’t identify the actors with their roles, but the actors’ names reveal a few who would go on to great acclaim, like Sybil Thorndike and Sidney Greenstreet.

Of considerable interest was the publication in Brooklyn Life on October 21 of the plans for the new Brooklyn Academy of Music, two years after the loss by fire of the original; the new site on Lafayette Avenue between St. Felix and Ashland Place finally had been decided on. The images, reproduced above, closely resemble the pile that eventually went up there three years later and that still proudly stands as a symbol of the best in Brooklyn performing arts culture.

But the founders were desperate for subscriptions to pay for the place, as the citizenry, to its “shame,” said Brooklyn Life, was taking its time about expressing the necessary interest. Before progress could be made, $120,000 (around $4,400,000 in 2025) still needed to be raised, but only half was currently in hand. After describing its best features, the magazine quotes the prospectus’s promise that the institution was “fitly designed to be the chief center of the public, artistic, benevolent, educational and social activities of Brooklyn.”

Irish singing comedian Andrew Mack, whose An Irish Gentleman, by Ramsay Morris, was  listed in these annals the week before last at the Grand Opera House, was now ensconced across town at the Gayety. “Mack has a sweet tenor voice, a graceful carriage and his manner is quite devoid of that egotism so harmful to the average portrayer of Celtic heroes,” praised the Dail Times..

The four vaudeville and burlesque houses were active with the usual round of performers of every description. Most notably, May Howard and her extravaganza occupied the Star, with a company of 30 offering “new music, songs, dances, jokes, scenery, and costumes.” On Sunday, May 13, the house offered John Isham’s Octoroons in a “concert,” which appears to have been a ruse to get around the Sunday blue laws. The company contained “some of the best colored singers before the public.” The Gayety had been doing something similar with “concerts” for months, and repeated it this same Sunday night.

Most impressive of the vaudeville stars was matinee idol Maurice Barrymore, once again in Augustus Thomas’s one-act, “A Man of the World,” at the Brooklyn Music Hall. He’d performed it with Palmer’s Company in New York in the days before first-class actors ventured into vaudeville. Too soon, this important actor--the father of Lionel, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore--would see take his final curtain call. The rest of his company offered traditional acts. Meanwhile, the Empire Theatre presented Ed F. Rush’s White Crook Extravaganza. The company’s burlesques were called “A Royal Reception” and “The Klondike Millionaires” (another sign of Klondike mania). And headlining at Hyde & Behman’s were William Clifford and Maud Huth, she being among the best singers of “coon” songs in the business. The usual assortment of acrobats, comics, blackface, and musical artists was also there. A survey of the ads below reflects the dozens of performers--escape artist and genius magician Harry Houdini among them--playing on Brooklyn stages.

October 2-7, 1905

Street Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Zaza

Broadway: Strongheart, with Robert Edeson

Folly: Simple Simon Simple

Grand Opera House: Nancy Brown, with Mary Marble

Majestic: Primrose Big Minstrels

New Montauk: Tannhaeuser, Lohengrin, Aida, La Boheme, Rigoletto, Faust, with Henry W. Savage English Grand Opera Company

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Why He Divorced Her, with Etta Reed Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The White Tigress of Japanz

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

 October 9-14, 1905

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) A Midnight Bell

Broadway: The Duchess of Dantzik, with Evie Green, Holbrook Blinn

Folly: The Great Jewel Mystery, with the Russell Brothers

Grand Opera House: More To Be Pitied Than Scorned

Majestic: Breaking into Society, with the Four Mortons

New Montauk: Higgledy Piggledy, The College Widower, with Joe Weber’s All-Star Company, with Joe Weber, Trixie Friganza, Marie Dressler

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Lovers' Lane, with Corse Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) For His Sister’s Honor

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

 October 16-21, 1905

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Charity Ball

Broadway: Checkers, with Hana Robert

Folly: The Errand Boy, with Billy B. Van

Grand Opera House: The Ninety and Nine

Majestic: Girls Will Be Girls

New Montauk: The Prodigal Son, with Ben Webster, Marie Wainwright, Edward Morgan, Edward Mackay

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) The Christian, with Etta Reed Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Hearts Adrift

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

October 23-28, 1905

October 23-28, 1905

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Mam’zelle

Broadway: His Grace de Grammont, with Otis Skinner, Laura Hope Crews

Folly: Breaking Into Society, with the Four Mortons

Grand Opera House: Tom, Dick and Harry

Majestic: The Duke of Duluth, with Nat M. Wills

New Montauk: The Rollicking Girl, with Sam Bernard

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Why Women Sin, with Etta Reed Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The White Caps

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

\October 30-November 4, 1905

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Bells of Haslemere

Broadway: Easy Dawson, with Raymond Hitchcock

Folly: Primrose Minstrels

Grand Opera House: Edmund Burke

Majestic: John Henry, with Charles E. Grapewin

New Montauk: Rogers Brothers in Ireland, with the Rogers Brothers

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Through the Breakers, with Corse Payton, Etta Reed Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) My Partner

Shubert-Park: Sweet Kitty Bellaire, with Bertha Galland (from Saturday, November 4)

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