1907: JANUARY

 

Maude Adamas as Peter Pan.

1907: JANUARY

January 6, 1907, was a particularly rich one in these annals, its notable events including the appearance of Maude Adams in Peter Pan following her remarkable Broadway success in it; David Warfield doing the same with his own huge hit, The Music Master; visits from other leading stars in memorable productions, including E.H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe in a Shakespeare-dominated repertory, to which Gerhart Hauptmann’s symbolic German drama, The Sunken Bell was appended; a number of theatre-related legal issues and other things of historical and social interest.

Let’s begin with some of the lawbreaking issues that were in the news. One concerned the crackdown by the authorities from the Children’s Society on theatres that were allowing children—invariably, boys—under the age of 16 from attending Brooklyn theatres unaccompanied by their parents or a guardian. The law was so well-established theatres employed workers specially trained to observe the ticket-buying lines and pull out anyone suspected of being underage. Even then, nine out of ten of those rascals would be found seated in the theatre when the curtain rose; when asked how they got in anyway, the lads would usually reply, “My father bought the ticket.” Asked about the father’s whereabouts, the lad would say, “He’s gone out for a drink,” Thus would the kid get to see the show, unimpeded. Or, they might use the timeless excuse that they got an older person to buy the ticket for them, the adult thereby being considered, for the moment, a guardian. Thus, the manager managed to escape sanctions for such infractions. Such age-related theatergoing laws now prevail only with relation to movies rated R and are just as likely to be flouted.

A closely related development catches one's eye in the Eagle of January 26, 1907. It concerns the sprouting up of cheap “variety” theatres on Pitkin Avenue, the main shopping thoroughfare in the Brownsville section, which was beginning to look like “a miniature Bowery.” Charging only a nickel, these were, in fact, moving picture shows presented in what were called nickelodeons, first used for such venues in 1905 Pittsburg, but already in use for coin-operated musical devices. The earliest use of the word I can find in the Brooklyn press, however, is in the Weekly Chat on November 30, 1907, with reference to one on Fulton Street near Utica Avenue. They preceded the imminent rise of the lavish movie palaces that would, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, accelerate the death of live professional theatre in countless localities.

In 1907, Brownsville citizens, like those everywhere else, were mainly worried that the increasing presence of such places would have a deleterious effect on the morals of young children, who were spending their time there rather than at home or in the library. Again, the children referred to were any below the age of 16. The Eagle asserted that some Brownsville citizens were mobilizing to force the Board of Trade to investigate the character of these cheap resorts.

The rise of these popup, storefront emporiums in Brooklyn was startling, the Eagle reporting that over 20 had appeared in the past two months alone, with 20 more likely soon, raising the ire of Brownsville merchants who wanted them stamped out. Brownsville was home to a large population of Jewish immigrants; the rabbi of its largest synagogue, Abraham Silverstein, denounced the theatres as “a menace to public morals,” and lawyers were consulting about seeking an injunction against one such place. Evidence was accumulating about the decrease in student use of the libraries and attendance at manual training classes because the kids were at the moving pictures shows.

Meanwhile, real estate owners on Pitkin Avenue were being offered large rental sums for double stores where prospective showmen could install benches, set up a screen, place a phonograph with a large horn outside the entrance playing the day’s hit songs, and go into business as, for example, “The Hippodrome Vaudeville Theatre, Greatest Show on Earth.” To boost ticket sales, each ticket was accompanied by a trading stamp, the accumulation of which could lead to getting a prize.

Barkers stood outside to attract passersby. Thus, “the noise of the phonographs, the yelling of the barkers, all tend to produce such a deafening uproar that things on Pitkin Avenue look like or sound like the mob in front of Trinity on New Year’s Eve.” (Trinity Church in the Wall Street area had been the main gathering place on New Year’ Eve through much of the 19^th century, but the crowds moved uptown to Times Square in 1904, and the first ball drop was in 1907, the year we’re now looking at.)

Also in the legal news was the comical situation of Lee Avenue Theatre stock company actor-manager Corse Payton when he attended the arraignment at the Lee Avenue court, Magistrate O’Reilly presiding, of his theatre’s “colored” janitor, Matthew Henderson, accused of threatening to kill his wife. According to the Daily Times of January 5, Magistrate O’Reilly was noted for his fashionable, expensive hats, eight dollars each, and for his casual habit of tossing them onto a chair when got to court. Payton, however, not noticing the chapeau thus disposed of, sat directly on it, hard. “The look that spread over Payton’s face was funnier than any he ever made on a stage,” laughed the Daily Times. After trying to fix the damage, he fled.

Learning of this, the judge was displeased enough to hold Henderson in $300 bail for examination. Payton, however, mustered up the guts to return, apologize, and bail the man out. He offered to buy O’Reilly a new hat, and asked for his size. “Never mind the size,” answered O’Reilly. “The only thing that need interest you is the size of the bill you will get.”

Then there were the blue laws. On several occasions, we have noted the casual way Brooklyn theatres ignored the Sunday blue laws by offering variety shows on Sunday nights under the guise of "concerts," or even “sacred concerts,” which were tolerated, with rare crackdowns. Blue law supporters were constantly trying to close down these shows, as was true in 1907. According to the Standard Union of January 27, for example, a large gathering was planned at the YMCA where there would be an open discussion of how to shut down the playhouses, the goal being to increase attendance at the borough’s churches, whose attendance was slackening. One “liberal-minded” pastor even suggested that spiritually uplifting or morally instructive movies, accompanied by informative sermons, might lure congregants back from cushioned seats to pious pews. Similar ideas were also welcomed.

One last item with legal implications deserves mention, as per the Eagle of January 17. I’ll keep it as brief as I can, although the original is worth reading in its entirety. It has to do with a young man using a fake badge to gain entrance backstage to the Imperial Theatre where, for a week, he lorded about, making passes at the showgirls, and passing himself off as a member of the Fire Department’s “secret service” and the son of Fire Department Chief Lally. It turned out he was an imposter, and there was no such secret service. But before this was revealed, the theatre manager was warned over the phone by someone pretending to be Chief Lally to lay off his son. The truth finally came out and the imposter, calling himself Phil Lally, was identified as Feliipo Di Stefano of 68 McDougall Street, Manhattan. It turned out that he had played the same scam at other vaudeville houses, and he was arrested for his troubles.

As has often been pointed out in these essays, Brooklyn was especially fond of melodramatic plays, those requiring special effects being particularly popular. These plays, by prolific hacks like Theodore Kremer, Hal Reid, Lincoln J. Carter, and Owen Davis, who ground them out like sausages, sometimes at the rate of one a week, were the forerunners of melodramatic movie spectacles, which continue to dominate at today's box office. Instead of relying on CGI for their illusions, they employed technicians to create mechanical effects to suggest not only natural disasters but thrilling events like horse and vehicle racing. We already have seen many plays employing treadmills for racetrack scenes, the most famous, but not the first, being for the chariot race in Ben-Hur, which opened on Broadway in 1899 and later came to Brooklyn.

For example, this month saw Bedford’s Hope at the Montauk, with its race between a train and an automobile. Quoth the Eagle on December 29, 1906, “The perspective of a train running in the middle distance while down on the stage a large red automobile in motion, occupied by two characters holding the heart interest of the audience, flies with jolt and bump over the uneven sandy road and wins a race for wealth.” It required “the attendance of a score of mechanics and the introduction of machinery totaling 188 horsepower. The clouds of dust, the odor of gasoline and combination of soft coal, hissing steam, the vibrations of the driving wheels on the locomotive are not omitted.”

Of course, explosions were a given in many action-filled melodramas, just as they are in today’s movies. One, in a play whose title is a classic of the genre, Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model, showed an automobile being dynamited while crossing the newly erected Williamsburg Bridge, with the occupants sent flying through the air into the East River below. Also drawing audiences like moths to a flame were scenes showing an automobile being blown up by dynamite during a blinding snowstorm. Among other memorable examples was a masked roller-skating carnival in Madison Square Garden.

And in yet another spectacular melodrama of the month, The Four Corners of the Earth, at the Columbia, there was a scene showing a full-rigged ship in mid-ocean wrecked when it collided with a giant iceberg in the fog; this was five years before the Titanic met the same fate. “The vessel is apparently demolished,” wrote the Daily Times. “All on board, however, are saved by being picked up by the small boats. The hero is later seen on a raft of ice and rescued by a passing vessel.”

And, of course, although it was only indirectly what might be called a melodrama, we mustn’t forget the flying of Peter and others in James M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which continues to be part of that play’s undying appeal. But before I get to Brooklyn’s reaction to that newborn classic from its Scottish playwright, I should note Hamilton Ormsbee of the Eagle's summation of the state of American playwriting at this juncture, a state he finds was on the upswing. A year earlier, he believed the best and most promising American playwrights, all with serious reservations, were Clyde Fitch, Augustus Thomas, George Ade, and David Belasco.

The preceding year, however, had introduced several others to their ranks, the best example being veteran Charles Klein, who had improved greatly with his The Lion and the Mouse, a play of topical political relevance to American life (the relation of trusts to government), if not of artistic excellence, although multiple companies were touring with it while it ran on Broadway into its second year at the Lyceum. Like the other plays Ormsbee cites, Brooklyn was still waiting to see it.

Of even greater import was The Great Divide, by Chicago poet and professor of literature William Vaughn Moody, also a financial success, at the intimate Princess Theatre. Its treatment of sexual violence and female purity (a woman marries a man who raped her). bordered on what many outside of New York found distasteful enough to threaten its success, but Moody’s poetic treatment lifted it to a level of respectability, some calling it America's greatest drama. Brooklyn, which usually had to wait before a long-running Broadway show closed, would not see it until November 1908. 

Women playwrights were not uncommon during this period, and several had commercial success, but few are known today. The best-known American example is Rachel Crothers, who made an impact in 1906 with The Three of Us. Other playwrights making their mark in 1906 were Channing Pollock, Edward Peple, Edward Milton Royle, Percy MacKaye, Rida Johnson Young, Charlotte Thompson, and Langdon Mitchell. Most of these names have long been forgotten, and their plays left to wither on library shelves, although Mitchell’s The New York Idea still sometimes musters a revival.

As for Peter Pan, it came directly from Broadway’s Empire Theatre, where Maude Adams had been acting it for a season and a half. In London, on the other hand, three actresses had played it thus far. To accommodate the crowds wanting to see it, Adams, unlike her usual practice, added Wednesday and Saturday matinees. Her not having been seen in the borough in two seasons only whetted local appetites to attend. To guarantee fairness in the distribution of tickets, no reservations were taken by phone. Mail orders in which check or money were sent were filled in the order received.

Critical descriptions of Adams and Peter Pan, which, despite having played in Brooklyn for only a week in preparation for her taking the show on the road, would bloat this already overlong essay, so only one review will be provided. The Music Master deserves similar treatment but something has to be sacrificed.

From the Eagle of January 29:

“Peter Pan” . . . a play such as Brooklyn has never seen before and in all probability will never see again, filled the Montauk Theater . . . with a large audience comprised to a greater degree than usual of children. [Even the adults present returned happily to childhood beliefs in fairies as they watched.] Peter Pan wanted never to grow up and he never did. . . . “I’m youth, eternal youth, I’m the sun rising, I’m poetic singing, I’m the new world. I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg. I’m joy, joy, joy.”

[After listing all the play’s chief incidents, the writer continues.] It will not be possible for any child, or anyone who has progressed so far as to have lost the lure of childhood to see Peter Pan without falling desperately under the charm of some of the characters. Every one, of course, will love Peter. With Maude Adams, the sweet and winsome spirit of spring her very finger tips, as Peter, of course she strikes a sympathetic chord. [The review then capsulizes Tinker Bell and Liza before getting to Capt. Hook. The mature male audience] would not admit it to their wives for the world, but James Hook is just exactly the sort of a pirate they tried to be when they were sole despot and knave of a raft on the mill pond more years ago than they care to remember.  He has a lovely crooked nose, and two steel hooks at the end of one of his arms. . . . And when he says, “Heave-ho, their do-o-o-m is s-s-sealed,” waving his hook, the men [in the audience] with the bald heads and their wives tried to think whether they had met him before in a dream or whether he was their friend of childhood.

. . . . It sounds preposterous that children flying on wires should create an imaginative illusion of fairies flying away through space, but that is precisely what happens every night, as the applause and excitement show. . . . [Of enormous importance is] the vividness and completeness of the stage settings. In a technical sense this is one of the heaviest’ productions put upon even the modern stage,

. . . . What the ladies who wear uncomfortable clothes and jewelry thought inside about Peter Pan and the Indians, no one will ever know unless they tell. But they wept a little at times, and they did not talk over much between the acts—which is always a sign that a lady is thinking. They did not like the pirates. But they leaned forward when Peter spoke. . . . Maybe they believe  in fairies. Those who do not can never cry.

And Maude Adams! She is Peter Pan and Peter Pan is Maude Adams. There is not one bit of use saying anything more. The bald-headed men thought she was splendid, and the dewy-eyed ladies didn’t say what they thought, but they watched very closely and saw every single thing that happened, except when they were wiping their eyes. . . .

It Is not nice to call Maude Adams’ Peter Pan the work of an actress. It is nicer to think of it as being simply Maude Adams. No other actress that the children know could have done it at all. . . . The children liked it all, and the bald-headed men and the uncomfortable ladies, they liked it even better than the children.

December 31-January 5, 1907

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) For Her Children’s Sake

Blaney’s Amphion: The Girl Raffles, with Cecil Spooner

Broadway: Man and Superman, with Robert Loraine, Drina De Wolfe

Columbia: The Cowboy Girl

Folly: Down the Pike, with Johnny and Emma Ray

Grand Opera House: Ruled Off the Turf

Majestic: Bedford’s Hope

New Montauk: The Free Lance, with Joseph Cawthorn

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) When Knighthood Was in Flower, with Etta Reed Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Shadow Behind the Throne

Shubert: The Belle of London Town, with Camille D’Arville

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

January 7-12, 1907

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) A Traitor to the Czar

Blaney’s Amphion: Happy Hooligan’s Trip Around the World

Broadway: Marrying Mary, with Marie Cahill

Columbia: A Wife’s Secret, with Grace Hopkins

Folly: Nelly, the Beautiful Cloak Model

Grand Opera House: Tom, Dick and Harry, with Bickel, Watson, and Wrothe

Majestic: A Message from Mars, with Herbert Barrington

New Montauk: Mrs. Wilson-Andrews, with Marie Cahill

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

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) The Cherry Pickers

Shubert: The Prince Chap, with Cyril Scott

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

January 14-19, 1907

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Home, Sweet Home

Blaney’s Amphion: The Cow Puncher

Broadway: Mrs. Hopkinson, with Dallas Welford

Columbia: How Baxter Butted In, with Sidney Toler

Folly: The Confessions of a Wife, with Evelyn Faber

Grand Opera House: Old Isaacs from the Bowery

Majestic: The Wizard of Oz, with George Stone, Fred Nice

New Montauk: The Squaw Man, with William Faversham, Julie Opp. W.S. Hart

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) For Old Times’ Sake

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) His Sister’s Shame

Shubert: The Sunken Bell, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, with E.H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe

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

January 21-26, 1907

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) The Charity Nurse

Blaney’s Amphion: How Baxter Butted In, with Sidney Toler

Broadway: ‘Way Down East, with Phoebe Davis

Columbia: Kidnapped for Revenge

Folly: Bedford’s Hope

Grand Opera House: Young Buffalo, King of the Wild West

Majestic: The Mayor of Tokio

New Montauk: Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, with George M. Cohan, Faye Templeton

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

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) A Southern Vendetta

Shubert: The Music Master, with David Warfield

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

January 28- February 2, 1907

Bijou: (Spooner Stock Company) Myles Aroon

Blaney’s Amphion: A Desperate Chance

Broadway: The Little Cherub, with Hattie Williams

Columbia: The Four Corners of the Earth,

Folly: Tom, Dick and Harry, with Bickel, Watson, and Wrothe

Grand Opera House: No Mother to Guide Her

Majestic: The County Chairman, with Maclyn Arbuckle

New Montauk: Peter Pan, with Maude Adams

Payton’s Lee Avenue: (Lee Avenue Stock Company) Driven from Home, with Etta Reed Payton

Phillips’ Lyceum: (Lyceum Stock Company) Fast Life in New York

Shubert: About Town (and a parody of The Music Master) with Lew Fields and company, including Blanche Ring, Louise Dressler

Vaudeville and burlesque: Hyde & Behman’s, Gotham, Gayety, Keeney’s, Star, Imperial