4. FEBRUARY 1898: Week 6

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 19^th-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.”

 

 

3. JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1898: Week 5

 

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 5: Monday, January 31-Saturday. February 5, 1898

The big news in Brooklyn’s theatre world as January faded into February was the beginning of a two-week appearance by Julia Marlowe, increasingly recognized as one of the leading dramatic actresses of her time. Her reputation would later increase even more significantly when she married and teamed up with E.H. Sothern to tour the country in Shakespeare. A season earlier she had found great success in Bonnie Prince Charlie, but her career is thought to have really taken off with her appearance in Charles Frohman’s production of Countess Valeska, a romantic costume drama, which formed the first week of her run at the Montauk Theatre. The second week would be devoted to several classics in repertory.

Having introduced it on January 10 at Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Theatre, Marlowe took it on the road when her engagement ended, beginning with Brooklyn. This was the star’s own adaptation of Rudolph Stratz’s German play, Der Lange Preusse (The Tall Prussian), in which Napoleon, although briefly seen from the rear, plays a crucial role in the plot. Set in 1807, just prior to the Battle of Friedland, it presents Countess Valeska (Marlowe), a Polish widow, hosting Napoleon, whom she reveres, at her castle the night before, while her former lover, the “tall Prussian” (Bassett Roe), who—his horse having been shot from under him—is hiding from the French in the castle. The countess is split between her patriotic loyalty to Poland and Napoleon and her still burning love for the Prussian officer, who disguises himself as her overseer until he can manage to slip away. The presence in the castle of his father, who plans to assassinate the “Little Colonel,” further complicates matters, as does the interference of a French officer who not only desires the countess but sees through the Prussian’s ruse. The excitement mounts until the Prussian, with the countess’s help, leaps from a castle window into the moat, and swims to safety.

Marlowe made the best of the highly emotional situations, and managed the comic moments with aplomb. Attractive castle scenery and vivid costumes made this swashbuckling drama extremely popular.

Each of Brooklyn’s other legitimate theatres had something to offer this week, with Western district playgoers able to visit The Idol’s Eye at the Columbia, The Pacific Mail at the Grand Opera House, The Electrician at the Bijou, and The Ticket-of-Leave Man at the Park. Over in the Eastern District, the Amphion had My Friend from India, and the American showed a pair of Irish comedies, The Dear Irish Home and The Cruiskeen Lawn. Each of Brooklyn’s four major vaudeville and burlesque houses was similarly active.

 

The first of these, The Idol’s Eye, was a Kiplingesque comic opera set in India, and starring Frank Daniels, who had met with great success in his previous outing, a comic opera called The Wizard of the Nile, which recently had occupied him at New York’s Broadway Theatre and on the road for a couple of years. Like his last show, this one also had a book and lyrics by Harry B. Smith, librettist of the Reginald De Koven operettas, and music by the still admired Victor Herbert (“bandmaster of the 22^nd Regiment”); loosely inspired by Kipling’s “The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney,” it told of the adventures in India of an American aeronaut touring the world in search of adventure, a Cuban planter and his daughter, a Scotch kleptomaniac, and an American novelist. The company, sets, and costumes from the New York run remained intact. 

Abel Conn, the aeronaut (or balloonist), played by Daniels, descends in his balloon into the waters near a British garrison. Soon, he involved with a nearby Brahmin community involved in trying to catch the thief who stole the precious ruby of the title; it’s a gem capable of making women fall in love with whoever possesses it. A matching jewel, with similar powers, is in the eye of an idol in the Temple of Juggernaut. It is believed that the idol is about to come to life. As Brooklyn Life put it, “The aeronaut’s running up against peculiar Brahmin customs, his substitution of himself for the supposed vivified image, the theft of the second ruby and the queer things that happen to the possessors of the two jewels, bring about many amusing complications.”

Chief of the comic engines running the show is what happens when Abel saves someone from suicide, which, says a judge, makes the latter legally dead, and his rescuer responsible for his behavior. This allows him to get into all kinds of scrapes from which Abel must extricate himself to stay out of trouble.

The critics liked the lyrics and exotically-hued tunes, and Daniels again proved himself an entertaining comic lead. Among his supporting cast members, Helen Redmond scored as the pretty Cuban maid, and Claudia Carlstedt was applauded as the High Priestess. The chorus girls were “pretty, pure voiced, and well drilled,” said the Times Union.

The revival of Paul Potter’s The Pacific Mail, seen last week at the Gayety, moved this week across the borough to the Grand Opera House, where it was well received. As before, the play proper was filled with variety acts, including opera singer Mme. Alexa and boxer Kid McCoy.

At the Bijou, there was Charles E. Blaney’s melodrama The Electrician, which had provided its audience with some entertaining shocks when it played there a year earlier. Making use of elaborate scenery showing the young Western city of Denver and the nearby gold mining territory, it featured Frank Karrington as the hero, P. Augustus Anderson as the bibulous villain, Helena Collier as the soubrette, and Florence Stone as the heroine.

The story is that of young Tom Edson (Karrington), son of a inventor, who rises from the humble job of electrician to that of philanthropist and millionaire mine owner. The plot involves a mortgage on Tom’s father’s electric plant, which is on the brink of being foreclosed; Tom’s stymied attempt to pay off the mortgage when challenged by scoundrelly bank cashier Kenneth Sauvage, his rival for the hand of Edith Sessions; Edith’s clever ruse to pay the mortgage just as the clock-operated vault is closing; Kenneth’s plot to ruin Tom by cutting the lines in the power house, thus breaking his contract with Denver; Tom’s father’s death in the power house when he discovers Kenneth’s villainy; Tom’s last-minute mending of the wires; his search for his father’s killer by becoming a miner; and, after becoming a mining millionaire, known as Edwin Palmer, the Gold King, his Monte Cristo-like entry, when he finally brings Kenneth Sauvage to justice.

And the Park Theatre Stock Company, its labor problems settled, revived Tom Taylor’s once very popular British melodrama, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, an 1863 play, first produced in New York in 1864 at Wallack’s Theatre, and not seen locally for some time, but still welcome for its being both “sensational and rational,” according to the Brooklyn Daily Times.

As common in such melodramas, it deals with an innocent man being thought guilty of someone else’s malfeasance, and the ultimate discovery and punishment of the perpetrator. A young Lancashire man, Bob Brierly, played by Howell Hansel, is the unfairly persecuted hero. The action largely takes place in Pentonville Prison, to which he is sent, and the story recounts his struggle to wash off the stain of the stigma placed on him by this experience. Only his sweetheart, May Edwards (Henrieta Crosman), believes in his innocence. Playing a crucial role in all this is Hawkshaw the detective (Edward Esmond), whose name eventually became a synonym for his job.

Across town at the Amphion, My Friend from India, a farce by H.A. Du Souchet based on theosophy, and produced by the Smyth and Rice Comedy Company. Originally seen in 1896 at New York’s Bijou Theatre, it had been successful when it premiered at Brooklyn’s Montauk a year earlier, and then was a hit in New York at Hoyt’s before packing them in on the road. In England it was so popular it had as many as five touring companies, its title there being My Friend the Prince.

Erastus Underholt, a retired Kansas City pork packer, has been struggling for years to get his family into the upper strata of metropolitan society, and thinks he has a golden chance when his man-about-town son Charles brings home a barber he stumbles across named A. Keene Shaver. He has no idea the next morning where he found the man or even what his name is. While the man is sleeping Charles goes through his clothes to learn his identity, but all he finds is a book on theosophy. When the barber wakes and can’t find his clothes, he wraps himself in a yellow bedsheet, soon running into Charles as he is being admonished by his father for his indiscrete behavior. Seeing the barber in his sheet, he is inspired to introduce him as his friend from India, a distinguished teacher of theosophy in “The Order of the Yellow Robe.” Erastus, thinking it will be the lever to spring him into society, makes it widely known that an esteemed Indian theosophist is his houseguest. Anxious to flee, the barber finds his every exit blocked by Erastus’s security, so he decides to play along and pretend to be a learned pundit. Therein follow a series of rib-tickling complications until all is happily resolved.

Funny, lively, and consistently amusing, it had audiences laughing throughout. The current showing had Frederick Bond as the ambitious pork packer; Helen Reimer as an old maid who has a hilarious scene with a mirror; and May Vokes as Tilly, a German servant girl, a role that established her reputation.

In a switch from its steady diet of melodramas, Williamsburg’s American Theatre featured Dan McCarthy in a pair of his own Irish plays, The Dear Irish Home, seen in Brooklyn at the Bijou the previous year, and The Cruiskeen Lawn, first seen locally in 1891. Neither appears ever to have been done in Manhattan. McCarthy was a versatile Irish actor, singer, dancer, and playwright. In The Dear Irish Home, performed Monday through Wednesday, he played two roles, old Dennis Burns and young Dennis Burns, “a gallant Irish lad,” with each involved in a series of comic misunderstandings. A highlight was an Irish Christmas Eve scene in which he played Santa Claus, with a very funny entrance down the chimney. Songs and dances were scattered through the play for additional fun.

From Thursday through the end of the week, McCarthy offered The Cruiskeen Lawn, dealing with a villain’s attempt to gain possession of an estate rightfully belonging to others. He stops at nothing short of attempted assassination to carry his plans into effect, and has, like all Irish villains, the satisfaction of succeeding until a certain period, when all is made right. McCarthy displayed his versatility as Dublin Dan, and Act Three allowed for a succession of beautiful Irish scenic pictures.

The Gayety, inclining lately toward nonlegitimate attractions, boasted a bill led by British music hall male impersonator Vesta Tilley, “the best-dressed man of the day,” who sang songs that “are not only free from offense, but are pretty and diverting as well. Her clothes are at once the envious despair of the chappies,” said the Daily Times. Her performance involved quick changes allowing her to play five different characters. The Eagle pointed to her “the Vesta Tilley scarf, which was one of the novelties of her long engagement at Weber and Fields’; it is made from an old-fashioned Paisley shawl and it is worn with a peculiarly Tilley grace, which imitators find it hard to equal.” Blackface performer Lew Dockstader shared the stage with Tilley, along with “his singing coons.” Also on the bill were the Four Cohans—with George M., of course—Charles T. Aldrich, René and Richards, and others. The weekly Sunday variety concert featured Pauline Hall, the Donovans, Joe Welch, and other then familiar performers.

Burlesque visited the Empire Theatre under the aegis of Al Reeves’ Burlesque Company, with Reeves singing and plucking his banjo with topical songs, joined in the olio by Cissy Grant, “shapely serio-comic,” comedy acrobats Manning and Prevost, and so on. The two burlesques were “Fogerty’s Boarders” and “An Isle of Gold.”

Hyde & Behman’s Adams Street emporium proudly presented another first-class woman impersonating a man, Miss Johnstone Bennett, doing her popular sketch, “A Quiet Evening at Home,” costarring George Leslie in the part formerly played by Miller Kent. The bill also listed Mr. and Mrs. Robyns in the sketch, “The Counsel for the Defense,” Prof. Leonadis and his trained cats and dogs, the “equestrian baboon” called Jessie, comedienne Marie Heath, “American costers” Hines and Remington, monologist Ray L. Royce, the Newsboys Quintet, etc.  

The Brooklyn Music Hall bill featured the sensational wire walker Lina Pantzer; musical comedians Howe, Wall, and Walters; Irish storyteller John Kernell; married sketch team Harry Foy and Florence Clark; comic bicyclists Ferrell and Stark; and, among others, song and dance artist Elsitia.  

And, at the Star, there was Brooklyn Bridge jumper Steve Brodie, who leapt last year from farce acting to vaudeville, with a sketch from a play he used to appear in, set in his Bowery saloon. The press release for his sketch, “A Night at Steve Brodie’s,” noted that in England, Albert Chevalier had made a career out of presenting the songs, stories, and character types of London’s “East Side,” but that New York’s East Side was an even richer territory for such material. “There is a greater jumbling of nationalities, a more various and amusing jargon of tongues, for, besides its usual residents, who would no more think of moving from their locality than if it meant stepping off the globe altogether, the Bowery is a great district for the cosmopolitan. Brodie has mastered all the various characters to be met with in his neighborhood, and especially in his saloon, which is the popular resort for the many, and has adapted them to the stage for the amusement of the theatregoing public.

The bill was managed by Gus Hill, whose company included Annie Hart, mimic C.W. Williams, musical sketch artists Hiatt and Pearl, several boxers sparring and bag punching, and the like.

 

 

 

 

 

2. JANUARY 1898: Weeks 3 and 4

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 3: Monday, January 17-Saturday January 22, 1898

The naughtiness attributed to French singer Karina’s costume malfunction in this blog’s previous entry was becoming endemic, it seems. One paper noted that Manhattan was sweating over shows like The Telephone Girl, The Conquerors, The French Maid, and The Ballet Girl, while Brooklyn’s hormones were raging from The Girl from Paris, A Stranger in New York, and the aforesaid, “flatly vulgar,” Karina.

The Girl from Paris, which finished out its second week at the Montauk, received both a slap on the wrist and a pat on the back from the Brooklyn Daily Times. Here, for the fun of it, are some comments on the showgirls on view, written at a time when it was as common for journalists to comment on a woman’s appearances as it was to use words like “coon,” and worse, in racial references: “These girls cannot recite lines, a circumstance thoroughly well proved by their efforts in that direction, nor can they do much else beyond putting themselves on exhibition. There is not a single really unattractive girl in the whole collection, and four or five of them are positively picturesque until they essay to speak, and then the illusion vanishes. The brunette young lady, with soulful eyes, who replies, ‘I think so too’—or words to that effect—makes the remark in much the same manner as does the three-year-old Sunday School pupil, when the latter begins that inspired recitation, ‘You’d scarce expect one of my age, etc.’ The birdish blond with the baby expression speaks her seven words as if they hurt her, which perhaps they do, but later she kicks up her stockings, or what is in them, with an evident enjoyment of the proceeding. Mr. [E.E.] Rice ought to let those girls of his who can talk, talk; those who can kick, kick; those who can sing, sing; and those who can only look pretty confine themselves to doing so.”

Three stars of The Circus Girl.

New to Brooklyn was The Circus Girl, an English musical comedy produced by Charles Frohman, on view for a two-week run (something apparently becoming more common) at the Columbia. The week’s big show, it arrived here after a long run under Augustin Daly’s auspices at Daly’s Theatre in New York last summer before Frohman, after a bitter fight with Daly, acquired its touring rights; Daly settled for the New York rights, which, apparently didn’t include Brooklyn. It was known for its brisk, amusing book, and jinglingly pretty tunes, and came to Brooklyn with sets and costumes modeled after those in the show’s two-year London run at the Gaieties, under the aegis of the distinguished George Edwardes. Set in Paris,  with scenes showing famous landmarks, it was the work of six Londoners and two Berliners, the former group including James T. Tanner and W. Palings (book); Harry Greenhank and Arian Ross (lyrics); Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton (music), with some of the action ascribable to a German comedy by Freund and Mannstadt called Eine Tolle Nacht. Whatever hint of a plot it had was submerged by all the fun and gaiety. The company employed 75 performers, one of the newcomers being Mabel Howe.

The titular heroine, said Brooklyn Life, is “La Favorita, of Drivelli’s Circus, but another girl, Dora Wemyss, gives the plot its main excuse for being. Much to the disgust and despair of her lover, she has a penchant for circus acrobats. The young fellow sees but one way out of his difficulty, and that is to palm himself off as one of the profession. This leads to his joining the aforesaid circus, where the society man is transformed into the ‘Cannon King.’ His adventures and those of his prospective father-in-law, Sir Titus Wemyss, furnish material for the main part of the action.”

The most brilliant scene was at the circus itself. Songs that stood out included “A Simple Piece of String,” “A Wet Day,” and “Not a Proper Way to Treat a Lady.”

John C. Slavin was the American bartender; Joseph C. Fay was Sir Titus; Alfred Hickman was the lover, Samuel Edwards was the circus proprietor, Edwin Hanford was the clown, Amanda Fabris was La Favorita, Mabelle Howe was Dora, and Mary Young was the slackwire walker, the latter having scored highly in the New York version.

The American Theatre (not to be confused with the Manhattan playhouse of the same name) continued doing cheap melodrama with Edward E. Kidder’s Shannon of the Sixth, starring W.H. Powers, and set in India, where the plot takes off after the stealing of a valuable gem, “Light of Heaven,” from a Hindu temple. Romantic complications arise when British Captain Arlington accuses Irishman Lt. Shannon, his rival for the hand of Dora, the general’s daughter, of the theft. Shannon is court-martialed, denounces his allegiance to the queen, and escapes to the Delhi hills. Complications follow until we get to the play’s main attraction, when Dora is captured by native troops and bound to the mouth of a canon just as it is to be fired. “Just in the nick of time, Shannon appears, rushing headlong from rock to rock, and releases her just as the gun belches forth its deadly charge with a mighty roar.” So similar was this to a scene in another recent play, The Cherry Pickers, that the respective authors began to squabble publicly over whose idea the whole thing was.

A French-derived, three-act, knockabout farce called Never Again, adapted by Henry Gray Carleton from the French of Desvallières and Mars, whose original was Le Truc de Seraphia (Seraphin’s Trick), had been seen locally the previous fall, after a long run at Manhattan’s Garrick Theatre. It now returned to Brooklyn, playing at the Amphion in its Charles Frohman production. E.M. Holland starred.

Seraphin is the concierge at 25 Rue Sardine, where he randomly takes names from the directory, writing to them that if they wish proof of spousal or romantic infidelity, to call at his address. Once there, they are connected to a hatter resident there, Seraphin’s partner in his trick. The hatter dispels their suspicions about their wives or lovers, and charms them into buying his hats, although some actually indiscrete characters get thrown in, and the complications accrue.

The Gayety returned to straight drama with a revival of Paul Potter’s The Pacific Mail, seen in 1894 with William H. Crane. In this revival, the emphasis was on farce. Robert E. Graham was appreciated in the leading role. As per the usual approach for such works, various variety acts were squeezed in for filler, among them pugilist Kid McCoy, punching a bag and jabbing at a sparring partner, Doc Payne, for three rounds; dancer Mlle. Fourgere, “a French serio-comic of particularly liberal ideas”; and Mme. Alexa, an opera singer. The Gayety’s Sunday night variety concerts continued, with Williams and Walker, “the genuine and clever negroes,” back again, along with popular singer Helen Mora, musical tramp Charles R. Sweet, and so on.

Another old warhorse, the racing melodrama In Old Kentucky, seen locally several times over the years, was mounted with new scenery at the Bijou. The play depended on its picturesqueness, colorful characters, and racing action, using treadmills. Queen Bess, ridden by the Kentucky heroine, wins the big race, and the villain’s horse is soundly defeated. Much loved features, noted by the Eagle, were “The breezy, gallant Kentucky colonel, the charm and innocence of the girl heroine, the faithfulness and loyalty of the old negro servant, the spirit, gloss, and beauty of the Kentucky thoroughbred, Queen Bess, and the fun and frolic created by a band of pickaninnies.”

Those indefatigable Park Theatre stock thespians had not yet gone on strike, this week seeing them slap on the greasepaint to revive Henry C. DeMille’s The Lost Paradise, adapted from Ludwig Fulda’s German play, and made into a film with H.B. Warner in 1914. It had premiered in 1891 at Proctor’s 23^rd Street Theatre, with future super-agent William Morris and future super stage star, Maude Adams. Half a dozen new actors joined the company this week, with Howell Hansel and Henrietta Crosman in the roles once played by Morris and Adams.

A labor-related play, which was ironic considering the Park company’s recent threat to strike, it tells of the love of an iron works superintendent, Reuben Warner (Hansell) for his boss’s daughter, Margaret Knowlton (Crosman), but she is already engaged to her father’s (Robert Ranson) partner, Bob Appleton (John Daily Murphy), who’s received a half interest in the business as part of the arrangement. Thus is the superintendent’s wish to gain the woman’s hand spurned. But the partner betrays his true nature in an outrageous fit of temper, and the fiancée abandons him in favor of the man who truly deserves her.

This week’s Grand Opera House slipped into nonlegitimate territory with Hanlon’s Superba, a musical spectacular show mingled visual appeal with vaudeville acts, which had been around for a decade, making frequent updating and revisions to keep it fresh. Its gorgeous costumes, sets, and lighting effects charmed young and old, as did master clown Charles Guyer; the Rossi Brothers, acrobats; beautiful whistler Nellie Daly; and many new ballets, illusions, and mechanical effects.

Audiences seeking nondramatic delights visited the Empire, where a 30-member troupe called the Rentz-Santley Novelty and Burlesque Company satirized contemporary fads and fashions under the title “A World of Pleasure, with rope-skipping burlesquer Lottie Elliott, sketch artists Sullivan and Foster, Lawson and Ward with their comic bicycling act, and, among others, Frances Namon, “a woman bag puncher.” Audiences loved to see men and women pounding not only each other but the leather bags used when training.

Other variety acts on view locally were, at the Brooklyn Music Hall, Carl and Saphira Baggesen, doing a routine as a waiter and waitress in which he clowned and she juggled; the Stewart Sisters, doing “parlor imitations”; the two Abaccos, comedy acrobats; the Harpers, buck and wing “coons,” and others. The extensive bill at Hyde & Behman’s featured, among others, Irish comedian and singer Robert Gaylor, Lillie Western playing many musical instruments, Al W. Wilson and Lee Erroll in the comic sketch, “A Tip on the Derby”; comic opera performers Louise Royce and Josie Intropidi in a sketch called “Only Engaged”; and Baldwin and Daly, “The Happy Hottentots.” At the Star, Al Reeves’s Burlesque Company was engaged with its 35 members and two burlesques: “Fogarty’s Boarders” and “The Isle of Gold.” Also on view was Lumiere’s cinematograph, “one of the best moving picture machines before the public.” In time, it would be the moving picture machines that dominated as live theatre in Brooklyn shriveled.

Week 4: Monday, January 24, 1898-Saturday, January 29, 1898

 

Not much was new on Brooklyn’s stages this fourth week of the new year, and 20^th of the 40-week, 1897-1898 season, running from September through June. Brooklyn’s first significant theatre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which opened in 1861 (near City/Borough Hall, not where it is today), had presented very little legitimate theatre of late, but this week it rented its stage to present four performances of the Japanese-inspired musical comedy, The Geisha, seen elsewhere in prior Brooklyn engagements.

It pictured the English abroad in Japan, with sprightly scenes set in the “Tea House of the Ten Thousand Joys” and a garden party given by a Japanese marquis. Brooklyn Life said it “conveys a really good idea of the picturesqueness of Japanese tea house life and the doll-like women, whose singing and dancing make these resorts a feature of travel in one of the most fascinating countries on the globe." Performed by the musical theatre actors in Augustin Daly’s New York company, at Daly’s Theatre, where it was ensconced since last season, its cast was headed by singers Nancy McIntosh, Virginia Earle, Julius Steger, and James T. Powers, etc.

Also making waves was comic star William H. Crane, at the Montauk, reviving his representative performance as Senator Hannibal Rivera in Washington correspondent David Lloyd and Sydney Rosenfeld’s long popular newspaper comedy of Washingtonian politics, The Senator. It had rarely been off the stage for nearly 10 years, having had four major New York productions; in Brooklyn, it piled up 32 performances at the Park Theatre when it was run by Col. Sinn.

Crane’s role fit him perfectly, the good politician whose goodness sent him to the capital, where he became even better liked when he demonstrated how high his character was. This Western senator seeks to pass a bill that will secure the claim of an old man who seeks reimbursement for the loss of a ship sunk by the British in a neutral port, where it should have been safe from attack. The claim, though just, had been allowed to drag along for years while the claimant grew ever frailer and older. The senator, having voted against some scabrous bills, has earned the enmity of certain of his fellows who now take revenge by refusing to pass his bill. He throws himself into the fight to win. When he achieved victory, the audience went wild.

Also on board were Annie Irish as Mrs. Hilary, Miss Percy Haswell as Mabel Denman, and so on.

Saucy French chanteuse Anna Held, of “the flowing locks, languorous eyes and the risky [sic] songs,” as the Eagle described her, who was either already or soon to be married to impresario Florenze Ziegfeld, left her prosperous assignment at New York’s Koster and Bial’s, coming over with her company for a week at the Amphion, her own company in support. In addition to her familiar repertoire, she added “The Animated Chorus” for which a sheet of music filled the theatre’s rear, the notes indicated by the “wooly” heads of a team of Black performers bobbing up and down, like the “follow the bouncing ball” shorts soon to invade movie theatres. Miss Held sang, of all things, a repertory of “coon” songs, most popularly “I Want Dem Presents.” Others tried imitating these bouncing head numbers, but hers remained the most popular.

The bill also contained a brief farce, “The Gay Deceiver,” and, far more importantly, Chester Bailey Fernald’s “The Cat and the Cherub,” a “Chinese” one-act that bore noticeable resemblances to the recently premiered The First Born, about life in a San Francisco Chinese tenement alley. These latter were the closest representations yet to showing life among America’s Chinese immigrant community. Brooklyn Life, recalling that Fernald’s story had first appeared in the Century, said readers would remember “the pretty tale of the little Chinese boy who was always carrying about his “good luck cat”—One-Two—and whose adventures led him to the house of glittering things. The play deals only with the kidnapping of the child by Chin Fang, keeper of an opium joint.” It was set on a street in Chinatown, and while tragic, “is never gloomy.”

Back for a second week at the Columbia Theatre was the beautifully mounted The Circus Girl, starring Amanda Fabris, which benefitted from the addition to the cast of sweet, pretty, and young Gladys Wallis in the ingenue part of Dora.

Herbert Hale Winslow’s Who Was Who?, with Mason and Kelly, seen earlier this year at the Gayety, now moved across town to the Grand Opera House. And the musical spectacle called Superba entered the Gayety in its place. Critic Roland Oliver of the Brooklyn Citizen considered it “placid, polite, and rather pudgy.” On Sunday, January 23, the Gayety gave its next vaudeville concert, starring Maggie Cline, now over a case of the grippe.

The Park Stock Company, having abandoned their strike threat—when their demand for only two matinees, Wednesday and Saturday, was accepted—brought back a hoary but nostalgia-laden revival of The Streets of New York, remembered for Frank S. Chanfrau’s Badger and the big fire scene, during which not a word was spoken, and which used to be hailed as a miracle of realism. Adapted from Dion Boucicault’s The Poor of New York, originally known in French as Les Pauvres de Paris, it debuted at Wallack’s in Manhattan in 1857, almost 40 years earlier, with Lester Wallack as Badger, confidential clerk of banker Gideon Bloodgood. Its plot, inspired by the financial panic of 1837, was about an embezzlement and its action shifted around the city, showing Wall Street, the Five Points, and Union Square. Howell Hansell was now Badger, Henrietta Crosman (then spelled Crossman) was the banker’s daughter, Alida Bloodgood, William Davidge, Jr., was Capt. Fairweather, and Edwin Esmonde was Livingston.

A rip-roaring Western-style melodrama set in the Oklahoma territory and Northwest Texas, reputed to be hotbeds of crime and outlawry at the hands of ruthless gangs of violent gangs, arrived in Scott Marble’s The Great Train Robbery. The play was incorporated into a now classic early movie Western of the same name in 1903, which was highly successful. Premiered in 1896, the play, inspired by tales—among others—of the James brothers and the Dalton brothers, was reputed to be “the first American drama attempting to portray life in this section.” Action-packed, like the later movie, it had sensationalistic scenes, including a realistic train robbery in which the express car is exploded with dynamite and the safe cracked. Among the scenic splendors was a depiction of the Red River Canyon.

Like modern movies, 19^th-century plays sometimes exploited famous natural disasters for their intrinsic dramatic and spectacular effects. Among such events was the Johnstown flood of 1889, shown in Louis Eagan’s The Midnight Flood at the American Theatre within a melodrama of love, hate, and intrigue. Eagan himself played the hero, a young lawyer unjustly accused of murder, and in prison when the flood arrives; a highlight was his heart-stopping escape from drowning like a rat.

The vaudeville and burlesque houses were up to their usual stuff. Brooklyn Music Hall audiences enjoyed such acts as Arthur and Jennie Dunn in their sketch, “The Actresses and the Bell Boy”; Amelia Glover, recovered from her recent, widely published illness, demonstrating why she was so beloved a dancer; Dixon, Bowers, and Dixon in their “Three Rubes” sketch, and a nice complement of singers, jugglers, and comedians. More impressive, we’re told, was the lineup at Hyde & Behman’s, where you could see comic actor Odell Williams, recently applauded in such legit plays Pudd’nhead Wilson and The Heart of Maryland, now trying a Southern character sketch, “The Judge,” in Brooklyn before doing it anywhere else.  

Lydia Titus, art song specialist, graced the bill, as did T. Nelson Downer, “King of Koins”; the Donovans, doing Irish specialties; comic sketch artists Stinson and Morton; tenor James W. Morgan, and other long-forgotten entertainers. Finally, the Empire Theatre’s bill, under the aegis of Weber’s Parisian Widows’ Company, presented Howard and Emerson, with their illustrated songs; Letta Meredith, “a clever burlesquer”; the Cosmopolitan Trio; Tenley and Simonds, Irish comedians; Boyce and Black doing a blackface routine; Lizzie Vance, soubrette, and, among other acts, a sketch called “A Night in New York.”

Burlesque continued at the Star, with Scribner’s Columbian Burlesquers, the bill being the standard two burlesques in between which was the olio of variety acts, such as Clarice Thomas and Quinn, the Millar Sisters, and others. Burlesque #1 was “The Columbian Reception,” representing the Evangelina Cisneros episode, in which the beautiful young woman of that name, a rebel during the Cuban War of Independence from 1896, escaped from prison, gaining worldwide fame for her exploit. The Cuban revolution was on everybody’s radar; one could even go to New York’s Eden Musee and see 24 scenes, many of the war itself, captured by what was usually called the cinematograph. Burlesque #2 was “Mike from Klondike,” yet another piece exploiting the recent explorations of the Klondike.