BROOKLYN THEATRE from 1898: AN ILLUSTRATED CHRONOLOGY: 1907: AUGUST

This entry is for August 1907 but it begins in July because Corse Payton chose open his 1907-1908 season—his eighth consecutive one—in late July, much earlier than anyone ever had attempted. His Lee Avenue Theatre had undergone a thorough cleaning and redecoration for the occasion. Forty electric fans were installed to simulate the coolness of roof gardens. His longtime leading man was still Louis Leon Hall and his leading lady, Minna Phillips, who had replaced Etta Reed Payton when she suffered a stroke last season, was back as well. Payton himself performed only sporadically these days. Mrs. Payton attended the opening to greet her faithful fans. Other returning favorites in this successful stock company included Joseph W. Girard, William A. Mortimer, Albert O. Warburg, Lee Sterrett, Charlotte Wade Daniel, and Grace Fox.

The tendency to open the season earlier than usual was also happening in Manhattan, where theatres were already anticipating the fall season.

It was only a week later that the proprietor of Blaney’s Amphion, in Williamsburg, also chose to buck tradition, presenting an escape artist named Cunning starring in a prison break melodrama by Harry Clay Blaney called From Sing Sing to Liberty. In it, as the audience watched and the lights were full up, he escaped from a sturdily locked steel cage in which he’d been handcuffed, a straitjacket (a feat considered impossible by hospital personnel), and a dry goods box into which he’d been firmly nailed. Cunning challenged any “business house” to build a box from which he couldn’t escape, promising to get out without damaging it in any way.

The rest of the month was devoted to similarly innocuous dramaturgy, with one week witnessing productions of plays with penny dreadful titles like Lottie, the Poor Saleslady, or Death Before Dishonor and Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl. They came during the week of week of August 19-24, when four more theatres were operating, even though, as we've seen many times, the tradition was for the season to officially open on Labor Day.

In the July news were several announcements regarding upcoming changes to the local theatrical landscape. One was that the venerable Grand Opera House on Elm Place, long a bastion of legitimate theatre (although much of it pure melodrama), was now going to be the home of “advanced vaudeville,” under the aegis of Theatrical Syndicate moguls Abe Erlanger and Marc Klaw, who were building a vaudeville circuit to go with their legitimate properties. They leased the theatre from Hyde & Behman for “a number of years.” William T. Grover, who had managed theatres locally for 15 years, with particular success at the Brighton Beach Music Hall, was in charge.

Other theatres operating under the rubric of “advanced vaudeville” were Manhattan’s New York Theatre, Philadelphia’s new Forrest Theatre, Chicago’s huge Auditorium, said to be the world’s largest and most palatial, as well as theatres in multiple other important cities. Promising to revolutionize vaudeville, its goal was to abandon the time-worn “continuous” style of show, which indiscriminately mixed the good and the bad, presenting instead only the finest acts, doing two shows daily, one at two p.m. and one at eight, with bills containing just 10 acts, each unique and not resembling any other. The expenses would be even more than those of the usual musical comedy or better class extravaganza. American and English comedy would dominate but top European entertainers also would appear, all at moderate prices. Klaw and Erlanger were said to be contract holders for nearly all American headliners of note.

Another development was that Hyde & Behman’s vaudeville theatre on Adams Street would be changing its name to Hyde & Behman’s Olympic, which, of course, quickly was shortened to the Olympic, and a third was that the Bijou, now bereft of Mrs. Spooner’s stock company, which would be playing in Manhattan, would be devoted to touring melodramas. Hyde & Behman, Brooklyn’s longest-running vaudeville entrepreneurs, who were now being seriously challenged by Klaw and Erlanger, had Brooklyn roots going back to 1877, when they opened their Volks Garden as a variety showcase. It quickly became the former city’s chief variety resort, hosting nearly every American and foreign star. But it now was shifting from vaudeville to the kinds of musical spectacles called extravaganzas, the opening bill presenting the famous Rentz-Santley Company.

In August, the public learned that the Imperial (the old Montauk) was in the process of being physically moved, inch by inch, to a new location, a remarkable feat about which we will eventually report more, and finally, announcement was made of a new Brooklyn theatre, called the Fulton Theatre for the time being, was in the works for a spot on Fulton Street just west of Nostrand Avenue, in the Bedford section. We will keep an eye out for it.