1906: MARCH

Bertha Kalich

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 post can be found here: 

Regular readers of this blog will possibly recall that in 1903 Watson’s Cozy Corner, a vaudeville house, opened at Willoughby and Pearl, close to Fulton Street and Borough Hall, and that it became the Nassau Theatre in 1905, under the management of Harry Hammerstein (son of Oscar Hammerstein I). Not long after, another management was in charge, and it stayed in place even after the theatre was sold to the firm of Sullivan and Considine, in January 1906, in a foreclosure suit.

When it gave its last performance, on March 4, it was a burlesque house managed by George J. Brown. It reopened on March 12 as the New Family Theatre, part of the new management’s chain of “family theatres,” charging cheap prices (10 to 25 cents) for family audiences with a three-shows-a-day (2:30, 7:30, and 9 PM) “refined vaudeville” policy. W.G. Flournoy was the manager. The place underwent “extensive improvements” including repainting, “retiring rooms” for ladies and kids, and so forth. The management promised that “nothing, even by word, action or situation, will be allowed on the stage of the Family Theater that will offend the most particular.” However, news of its existence soon dropped from view, the only reference to it being in the fall when media tycoon William Randolph Hearst gave a rabble-rousing speech there.

March provided several theatrical bonbons for the borough’s faithful theatrergoers, among them another visit from English actor E.S. Willard, his familiar repertory supplemented by a play not seen here before, The Man Who Was, from a Rudyard Kipling short story. Then there was Maurice Maeterlinck’s widely respected period drama, Monna Vanna, starring 30-year-old, multilingual, Yiddish theatre star, Bertha Kalich, in her big crossover to the English-language stage; Corse Payton’s stock company production of David Belasco’s Du Barry, with permission to use Belasco’s original sets and costumes; the premiere of a new play, Margaret Pryor, by the Spooner Stock Company; The Fascinating Mr. Vanderveldt, an epigrammatic comedy of manners by well-regarded British playwright Alfred Sutro; a revival of Belasco’s popular Japan-based drama, The Darling of the Gods, with Percy Haswell replacing Blanche Bates; popular humorist George Ade’s comedy, Just Out of College; and, most significantly, George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell (a recent Broadway hit) and, for only two performances, Candida, previously seen locally for only a skimpily attended charity performance.

The Shaw plays were in the hands of Arnold Daly, the 30-year-old actor-director whose mission was to introduce and popularize Shaw’s plays for American audiences. Shaw’s reputation as the most important English-language dramatist of the day was secured but he was not yet a sure thing commercially, although that was now changing. Eagle theatre commentator Hamilton Ormsbee, noting (on March 25) the production of Sutro’s play a week before those of Shaw and Ade, took the occasion to compare the work of all three playwrights. He begins by noting that Sutro demonstrated his dramatic talent in his earlier The Walls of Jericho, but that his current play, about the marriage market in fashionable drawing rooms—a widow’s mother and sister seek to marry her off to anyone with deep pockets—was not only “cold blooded,” but lacking in several other ways. 

Much more to his taste was Ade, in whom he saw more promise than in Shaw. We know today how much that opinion came to be worth. Ade’s plays before Just Out of College included the book for The Sultan of Sulu (a comic opera), The College Widow, and The County Chairman, all hits that gave him “a tremendous reputation,” and all completely forgotten. The new one was about business conditions and demonstrated the writer’s “quick eye for character and . . . that peculiarly American humor in which none of our dramatists is his equal.”

Moving on to Shaw, Ormsbee celebrates his spirited wit, especially in Man and Superman, which recently sold out the Montauk for a week. Then came his brilliant, sparkling You Never Can Tell, with its memorable character of the old waiter, Balmy Waters, “with his insinuating, seductive charm.” Ormsbee goes on to call Candida “the most dramatic of all Shaw’s plays” (this, of course, was still fairly early in Shaw’s career, with some of his greatest work years away). “It is more than a conflict of social ideals—it is a conflict of men, and for a few moments breathes the red blood that enforces its rights with a fist.”

Given the encomiums it drew, I should provide some background to Monna Vanna, now forgotten but considered by contemporaries to be one of the finest poetic dramas since Shakespeare, and both Kalich’s life and her performance of the title role. She was born in 1876 in Lemberg, Galicia, which would be Lviv, Ukraine, today. Her family had no theatrical connections but she demonstrated thespian talents from early youth, being strongly influenced by a Lemberg opera singer who lived across the street and whose daily practice the child observed by watching through her windows. The prima donna befriended the curious girl who was eventually admitted to the Lemberg conservatory to study voice. She was so advanced at 14 that she was offered a position singing small roles in a local opera company, although her parents were uneasy. She advanced to leading roles and moved on to join the Bucharest National Theatre after a couple of seasons, allowing her to star in both dramatic and musical works. From here she became a visiting star at many theatres in Eastern Europe, playing in the local languages.

During this phase of her career, the manager of a New York Yiddish theatre company asked her to join it with a long-term contract, which offer she took advantage of, arriving at the Thalia Theatre on the Bowery in 1896, quickly becoming a fan idol of the Lower East Side Jewish community. She was held in the highest esteem, worshiped for her charismatic talent, even more passionately than were the leading American players by their followers. She opened the doors to the great works of European dramatic literature for the masses, performing in both German and Yiddish in Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hauptmann, Sardou, not to mention the leading Yiddish dramatist, Jacob Gordin, a Brooklyn resident. Seeking the even wider reach of the American public she spent six years mastering English, finally acting Sardou's Fedora in English a year earlier at an uptown Manhattan playhouse. Harrison Grey Fiske saw her and recognized her readiness to be an English-speaking star, signed her to a contract, and soon had her starring in Monna Vanna under his direction.

Belgian playwright Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna, an acknowledged literary masterpiece, but so rarely produced these days that its 2007 staging at the Stella Adler Theatre in Los Angeles was said to be its first noteworthy mounting in the century since its introduction. Its 1909 opera version, however, has had better luck, with multiple revivals. A painful tragedy without any hints of humor, it is set in medieval Pisa during a siege; the city can be saved from starvation only if the commander’s wife, Monna Vanna, enters the tent of the enemy, Prinzivalle, wearing only her mantle. Her husband, Guido, fights the idea, but she makes the sacrifice to save her people. Prinzivalle (Henry B. Stanford), however, has long loved her and is merciful, but the jealous Guido (Henry Kolker) refuses to believe nothing happened and seeks revenge. This so incenses Monna that she turns against her husband, giving her heart to her now former enemy, devising a plan to make it seem as if she is setting him up to die, while preparing to save him. The play explores themes of honor, sacrifice, marital loyalty, and the clash between personal virtue and public necessity.

Here is how the Eagle’s critic described Kalich’s “thrilling” performance of her very difficult role:

No voice with such a clarion ring as hers has been heard in poetic tragedy for many a day, and that great scene in the third act is electrifying. In the first act she has but a few brief lines, but contrives to indicate the sacrificial nature of Vanna’s pilgrimage. In the tent scene the alternation from fear to relief and her trust in Prinzivalle’s boyish love are vividly given, and never does one forget that he is in the presence of one of those personalities which sway audiences by the divine right of power.

The diction of Miss Kalich has improved greatly during her five months in this play, and she now speaks English for the most part as if she were born to it 

March 5-10, 1906

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The New Magdalen

Broadway:  Wonderland, with Lotta Faust

Folly: The Grafter, with Hap Ward

Grand Opera House: No Mother to Guide Her

Majestic: ‘Way Down East

New Montauk: David Garrick, The Man Who Was, A Pair of Spectacles, The Middleman, The Professor’s Love Story, Tom Pinch, with E.S. Willard

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Lost River

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) After Midnight

Shubert: Monna Vanna, with Bertha Kalich

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Unique, Gotham, Gayety, Keeney’s, Star, Nassau, Alcazar, Amphion, Imperial, Novelty

March 12-17, 1906

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Midnight Alarm

Broadway:  The Sho-Gun, with Genevieve Day

Folly: More to Be Pitied Than Scorned

Grand Opera House: The Street Singer, Florence Bindley

Majestic: ‘Way Down East

New Montauk: Mrs. Black Is Back, with May Irwin

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

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Du Barry

Shubert: The Earl and the Girl, with Eddie Foy

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Unique, Gotham, Gayety, Keeney’s, Star, Nassau, Alcazar, Amphion, Imperial, Novelty

March 19-24, 1906

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Margaret Pryor (premiere)

Broadway:  Sergeant Brue, with Frank Daniels

Folly: Queen of the White Slaves

Grand Opera House: The Millionaire Detective, with Howard Hall

Majestic: In Old Kentucky

New Montauk: The Fascinating Mr. Vanderveldt, with Ellis Jeffreys

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with Etta Reed Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Power of the Cross

Shubert: The Darling of the Gods, with Percy Haswell, Robert T. Haines

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Unique, Gotham, Gayety, Keeney’s, Star, Nassau, Alcazar, Amphion, Imperial, Novelty

March 26-31, 1906

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Only a Shop Girl

Broadway: The Prince of Pilsen, with Jess Dandy

Folly: The Millionaire Detective, with Howard Hall

Grand Opera House: Fast Life in New York, with Julian Rose

Majestic:  Bedford’s Hope

New Montauk: Just Out of College, with Joseph Wheelock, Jr.

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Du Barry, with Etta Reed Payton, Corse Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Unwritten Law

Shubert: You Never Can Tell, Candida, with Arnold Daly

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Unique, Gotham, Gayety, Keeney’s, Star, Alcazar, Amphion, Imperial, Novelty, Family