This
blog trawls through Brooklyn’s contemporary newspapers to see, microcosmically,
what happened to its theatre life after consolidation on January 1, 1898. For
the background, see my book, Brooklyn Takes the Stage:
Nineteenth-Century Theater in the City of Churches (McFarland: 2024), which
ends on December 31, 1897. The road will be long and bumpy, and how far
we’ll get can’t be determined (it’s 2025 and I’m in my mid-80s). As they always
say, though, buckle up and come along for what, to theatre lovers, should be a
fascinating ride.
(Note: to
read these entries in chronological order see the archive list on
the right side of the page.)
Week 6: February 7, 1898-February 12, 1898
The rising classical star Julia Marlowe
graced Brooklyn’s Montauk Theatre stage for the second week of her two-week appearance,
following her performance in The Countess Valeska with a repertory
program. Meanwhile, another, even more well-established star, leading matinee
idol John Drew, was the big attraction at the Columbia Theatre, playing in Charles
Frohman’s sumptuously costumed production of a period comedy of manners called A
Marriage of Convenience, adapted by Sydney Grundy from the elder Alexandre
Dumas’s Un Marriage sous Louis XV, and just recently the occupant of
Frohman’s Empire Theatre, across the river. The same French play had been
adapted into English by several others over half a century, including by Dion
Boucicault who called it Love in a Maze.
As for Drew, “He is a polished actor,
whose fitness for the line of parts that he follows enables him to hold a
unique position on the American stage,” said Brooklyn Life. Isabelle
Irving, Drew’s new leading lady, was there to share the plaudits of this “comedy
soufflé,” as were important supporting players Elsie De Wolf, Arthur Byron,
Daniel Harkins, and Graham Henderson.
The picturesque, four-act, light
comedy was noted for its privileging of bright dialogue over stage action, and
for how nicely it captured the original’s “piquant Gallic flavor, . . .
quaintness, . . . daintiness and . . . exquisite good breeding” (Times Union).
The Eagle noted that this version has “repressed some of its French frankness
in deference to our American prejudices in favor of a woman’s acquiring lovers
before marriage rather than after.”
Drew (great-great-uncle of actress
Drew Barrymore) played the Comte de Candale. The comte has chosen to marry his heiress cousin
(Isabelle Irving), whom he has never seen, taking her from a convent through
the medium of her uncle. Bon vivant that he is, though, on the very day of his
wedding he has a dinner date with the Marquise D’Eparville (Elsie De Wolf), a thrice-divorced
aristocrat. Thinking it a trifle, he explains to the innocent bride the freedom
he enjoys as part of their marriage of convenience. Her surprising response is
to report on her own dalliance while at the convent with the Chevalier de Valclos,
brother of another girl.
The chevalier is crazy about her and
has arranged to be beneath her window on her wedding day, waiting for her
signal that her new husband has departed. The comte finds him there and,
instead of objecting, invites him in to make himself at home, hoping by such
behavior to escape looking ridiculous. Everything must be out in the open, with
no sneaking around. The comte and his wife gradually come to recognize
admirable qualities in each other, and fall in love, teaching us how these
compatible persons might otherwise have been kept apart by the corrupt spirit
of a vicious age, to whose dictates they had shallowly been adhering. But
first, many complications, including those at a grand ball, must be overcome
with the help of the comtesse’s uncle (Daniel Harkins), before the mariage
de convenance evolves into a mariage d’amour.
Julia Marlowe, having followed her
pattern of adding a strong new play each season to her growing repertory,
making it the finest of any American actress of the day, switched for the week
to her past successes, including last season’s Bonnie Prince Charlie,
for three performances (Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday), Romeo and Juliet (Alfred
Kendrick as Romeo, Bassett Rowe as Mercutio) on Monday evening and
Wednesday matinee, Rosalind in As You Like It on Wednesday evening, and Parthenia
in that old 19th-century warhorse Ingomar on Saturday
afternoon and night. Marlowe was then the nation’s foremost Juliet, but it was
her Rosalind that first began to move her into the upper echelons. Her beloved “girlish”
charm remained untouched in all her roles.
The Bijou offered this week an
up-to-date English melodrama replete with exquisite sets that moved the play, Fallen
Among Thieves, by Frank Harvey, between Virginia and New York for a story contrasting
country and city life. A young girl is lured away from her country home and
lover by a sneaky con man who wishes to make her an accomplice in his deviltry.
Numerous complications ensue. Comedy and pathos mingled in a work whose dramatic
highlight came during a moonlit scene when the heroine, played by high diver Mlle. Trabond, leaped off Manhattan’s High
Bridge—still connecting the Bronx and Manhattan near the entrance to the George
Washington Bridge—into the Harlem River to rescue the victim of the villainous
con man.
Here’s how the Daily Times described
the scene: “The audience is supposed to be looking from a wharf at the foot of one
of the piers of High Bridge. The scene is not badly painted and the bridge
towers up well toward the skies. The villain chokes the heroine into insensibility
and throws her into the water, real water in a tank, as the people in the
orchestra can see, when it splashes up. Then a woman diver, in a red bathing
suit, jumps, not from the bridge, bur from some lesser height at one side of
the stage out of sight of the audience. She makes a bigger splash in the real
water than the heroine did and the curtain comes down as the girl in the red bathing
suit stands on the bottom of the tank and raises one hand toward the flies, while
she wraps the other about the rescued heroine. To convince the audience that
the heroine and the girl with the red bathing suit really do go into the water,
they come before the curtain to the ‘tumultuous’ applause and bow their
dripping acknowledgments.”
At the Park Theatre Stock Company was
a revival of John A. Stevens’s old-style melodrama, The Unknown, now retitled
The New Unknown, which he introduced in 1880, starring in it for
years. He revised the play considerably for this production. According to the
skimpy Eagle plot summary, Howell Hansell played the “unknown,” “Harold
Merribright, by name, who looses [sic] his mind and wanders about. He is
taken in charge by his sister, Bessie Merribright [Henrietta Crosman], who has
not seen him in years, and fails to recognize him. In the last act, he regains
his reason, and all ends happily.” Actually, much more is involved in a plot
filled with skullduggery, romantic deception in the interests of financial
gain, a villainous lawyer, true love, murder (both attempted and actual), and
assorted mayhem. A new actor, Butler Davenport, was involved, but it was
too late to save the company, which, according to the Eagle of February 8,
was on the verge of folding.
The Park Theatre Stock Company had
been losing money all winter, and was forced to abandon its stock system in
favor of touring shows (combinations), although it was reported that the
situation for the actors was not as dire as it might have been, as most had secured new engagements. Proprietors Hyde and Behman offered the actors salaries
reduced by 25%, so they could continue for several more weeks while they looked
for jobs elsewhere, but the actors declined to accept.
According to Hyde, “We have given the
stock a good trial, but Brooklyn has no floating population, and it didn’t go.
If this stock company had been located in any other city, it could have been a
big success. In the matter of plays it is very much like music, People want
only the new. They are tired of the old plays that have had the life squeezed
out of them. The people of Brooklyn want the latest productions, or, at least, plays
that are new here or have not been seen played here very often. . . .”
Another factor pointed to by observers
was that the popular prices charged made earning a profit impossible. “It has been
practically impossible to convince most theater goers that a good performance
could be given for 50 cents. If the price had been a dollar many people would
have gone who have never seen the present company.” Some claim that Hyde and
Behman lost $25,000 on the venture, but those who knew the truth “say nothing
and saw wood.”
The company was scheduled to close on
February 19, after which it was to present Frank Chanfrau in Kit, the Arkansas Traveler.
This, ironically, was itself an overly familiar piece that Chanfrau, like his
father, had played on the road for years, including multiple visits to
Brooklyn. As for the leading actors, Henrietta Crosman, for example, was
already planning to begin touring as a star in the fall, said her only complaint was that she'd taken a lease on an expensive flat for a year and the lack
of income meanwhile would be a burden. Howell Hansel, the leading man, intended
to go into vaudeville, where many legit actors were finding lucrative work doing
sketches.
The stock company’s final show would
be The Galley Slave, after which its 26-week season would conclude.
Things were altogether lighter at the
Grand Opera House where Primrose and West’s Minstrel Company held sway. Unlike most other minstrel troupes, Primrose and West stood out for
including in its roster well-known actors from the legitimate theatre, among
them Ezra Kendall, who headed his own farce company before venturing into
vaudeville. Another respectable legit actor was Carroll Johnson, although
his background included a considerable amount of minstrelsy performance as an end
man. Billy Rice was yet another recruit from the legit. The show also had several
singers and acrobats, as well as “handsome scenic and electric effects.”
Across town at Williamsburg’s
Amphion was Augustin Daly’s production of The Geisha, recently at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music, as reported in an earlier blog entry. Stars Nancy Macintosh
as O Mimosa San, and Virginia Earle as Molly Seamore were still popular draws,
the former being an English artist who had gained repute in Gilbert and
Sullivan operettas. James Powers also continued to gain kudos for his
participation. Songs that stood out included “The Interfering Parrot,” “The
Amorous Goldfish,” and “Jack’s the Boy for Me” (a ricksha duet).
Also in that part of town, the Gayety
offered the premiere a farce, The Governors, presented by the Ward and
Vokes Company, with an unusually large company of 32 performers assisting Hap
Ward and Harry Vokes, popular vaudevillians. New songs by Charles A. Zimmerman enlivened
things, and specialties were provided by Lucy Daly, Margaret Daly Vokes, Johnny
Page, the Troubadour Four, and so on. Ward and Vokes, who had toured for two
years in A Run on the Bank gaining popularity in the roles of Harold and
Percy, brought those fellows back in this piece.
Harold and Perry, the comical leading
roles, get into mischief in a hotel office, as opposed to the bank of their previous
success. They appear in disguise as the titular governors, showing that “they
can wear an evening dress just as they can a tramp’s attire.”
Williamsburg’s American Theatre
returned to cheap melodrama with Frank Harvey’s The Land of the Living,
a thriller given by a company headed by Lillian Washburn in the role of
Meg. Variety acts were interpolated at various junctures. The scenic spectacles
included London’s Parliament, London Tower, slum scenes, and even a scene in
South Africa. The action involved a building exploding into the flies.
British male impersonator and
quick-change artist Vesta Tilley was back as well, occupying Hyde & Behman’s
vaudeville emporium with “her fifty odd suits of clothes, and her 750 neckties,”
as the Times Union put it, while blackface singing comedian Lew
Dockstader once again was on the bill, as were the Four Cohans, Charles T.
Aldrich, the tramp juggler; the Lamont family of acrobats; Reno and Richards,
tumblers; and the Musical Johnstons, etc.
The bill at the Brooklyn Music Hall in
East New York was headed by sketch artists Fred Hall and Mollie Fuller, and they
were joined by James F. Hoey; Johnston, Davenport, and Lorella in their sketch,
“The Foot Ball Players and the Farmers”; Louise Montrose in hers, “Vaudeville
at the Ball”; McCabe and Sabine, eccentric Irish comedians; and Pat and Mattie
Rooney in songs and dances. The latter two were the children of the great Irish
comic Pat Rooney, once a vaudeville star
The Star had “straight variety” this
week, featuring comic Sam Devere’s company. On the bill was an early form of
motion pictures called the “American biograph,” which had been seen in local variety
shows since 1896, and was replacing the earlier “cinematograph.” It had been
seen for 58 consecutive weeks at Keith’s vaudeville theatre in Manhattan. Other
divertissements included musicians Bartell and Morris; sketch artists Leonard
and Bernard; Catherine Rowe Palmer, contortionist; Walter J. Talbot, California
tenor; Pearl Haight, “the American Anna Held”; a one-act called “Peep-o’-Day
Club,” displaying Mildred Howard de Grey in her “barefoot passion dance”; a
cakewalk routine; and “The Salvation Army Lassies Quadrille.”
Finally, the Empire Theatre featured Joe
Oppenheimer’s Burlesque Company, opening with a burlesque called “The Greater
New York Club,” “in which inuendoes of a startling nature and frankly broad
lines were cheerfully recited by Harry LeClair and his assistants.” The olio
offered acrobats, trained dogs, and impersonations, not to mention tumbling,
juggling, and “serpentine dances.” Another LeClair-centered burlesque was “The
Little Queen of Egypt,” allowing the comics “to smear their faces with all the
colors of the rainbow.”
