A: Some say it’s as much an invention as a geographic entity. Broadway and 42nd Street is the center of a five-block circle comprising much of the “legitimate” theater district. Writer Damon Runyon described Broadway as “a crooked and somewhat narrow street trailing from the lowest tip of Manhattan Island to the city limits of Yonkers and beyond.”
“Broadway” stands for first-class theater, not that it has a monopoly on quality, and Off-Broadway—and more occasionally Off-Off-Broadway—are included in this book. Broadway was a farm with a manure dump in the early 1700s, at which time New York City already had two theaters. One represented the British Crown, the other Dutch settlers and those favoring home rule.
Q: What’s the most unusual coincidence involving a famous actor?
A: Possibly the eeriest or most ironic coincidence involved acclaimed tragedian Edwin Booth, an elder brother of President Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Edwin was at a railway depot in Jersey City, en route to Philadelphia near the end of the Civil War. The conflict caused habitual crowds at train stations, and as the vehicle started to move, Edwin suddenly dropped his valise to seize a tall young man by the coat collar as he fell off the platform. Edwin hauled him up to safety. The grateful youth, recognizing the celebrity, exclaimed, “That was a narrow escape, Mr. Booth.” The youth was Abraham’s son Robert Lincoln.
A: It’s now a generic word for actor. But Thespis of Icaria (or Icarus) was an actual Greek actor who made his stage bow at a dramatic festival honoring the god Dionysus over 2,500 years ago and won the laurel-leaf crown. To honor this deity of wine and revelry, audiences attended plays while under the influence—even though Greek plays (and later, Roman ones) began in the morning.
Greeks called an actor “the answerer,” for he responded to the chorus. Our word “hypocrite” evolved from the Greek for acting, that is, playing a part. Greek moralists often criticized actors for telling lies—that is, saying lines. Thespis is considered the first individualistic actor. He shifted the emphasis away from the chorus and onto the actor. He focused on tragedies and created characterization. He accustomed Greeks to plots and conflict, where previously they’d listened to recitations.
Q: Who was the first playwright?
A: The earliest playwright whose work has survived is Aeschylus (525?–456 B.C.E.). He reportedly wrote some 22 tetralogies, of which four complete parts of some four-parters, three quarters of one, and a few assorted fragments of others remain. Aeschylus was the first of Greek tragedy’s Big Three; Sophocles and Euripides were more inclined to challenge theatrical conventions. However, before Aeschylus, Greek plays featured one actor, who played several parts in turn. This playwright initiated writing for two actors and the chorus—young Sophocles added a third actor.
Aeschylus also reduced the chorus from 50 to 12, added simple properties (“props”) and painted backdrops, and introduced oratorio into drama.
Q: How big was the Greek influence on (our) theater?
A: It can be gauged by such words of Greek origin as: theater, drama, tragedy, comedy, also scene, episode, character, dialogue, music, mime, and chorus. Athenians called a producer “choregos,” a provider of the chorus. Over the millennia, “choregos” became associated more with chorus lines and the dance. In the first half of the twentieth century choreographers were usually known as dance directors. Unlike modern producers, those of ancient Greece weren’t in it for the money. Wealthier citizens were tapped to produce plays at dramatic festivals, a nonprofit honor viewed as a civic duty.
Q: Who was the first theatergoer among English-speaking rulers?
A: Charles II (c. 1660–1685) was the first to attend public performances. Elizabeth I (c. 1558–1603) was a theatrical devotee but didn’t go public with her pleasures. From 1649 to 1660, Britain was without a monarch, ruled by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, religious fundamentalists who abolished the theater.
Q: When did actors first get into trouble in the US?
A: In 1665, three actors in the American colonies—in Accomac County, Virginia (named after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen)—were arrested for putting on a play. Ye Beare and Ye Cubbe was written by one of the trio, which was acquitted. Christianity generally frowned on plays; any entertainment not devised or controlled by the Church was suspect. Also, European Puritans didn’t move to America so much for religious freedom—which they usually had at home—as for the ability to impose their minority religious views on others.
P.S.Virginia was less fanatical than several other colonies, hence the acquittal on the potentially grave charge of mounting a play.
Q: We know that colonial America, influenced by the Puritans, was anti-theater. Did this change after independence?
A: Some. Henry Ward Beecher was a famous preacher and pamphleteer in 1870s America. In his thundering sermons he often denounced theatergoing as a “sin”—never mind that he became involved in an adultery scandal. But during one sermon, he admitted to the lesser sin, declaring, “Yes, I have been to the theater.” Jaws dropped. “Mr. Beecher,” he repeated, “has been to the theater. Now, if you will all wait until you are past seventy years of age and will then go and see Joseph Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle, I venture the risk that it will not affect your eligibility for heaven, if you do nothing worse.”
P.S. One of Beecher’s sisters became more lastingly famous: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Abraham Lincoln called her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”
Q: When did performance spaces shift from outdoor to indoor?
A: Greek and Roman amphitheaters were, of course, open air. And matinees meant just that: performances commenced in the morning. By the Elizabethan era, public theaters—like Shakespeare’s Globe—were partly open to the heavens, and performances began in the afternoon. Renaissance Europe favored the comfort of indoor shows, which no matter the time of day necessitated developing the art of stage lighting.
Q: Who was the most famous actress with the shortest career?
A: Nell Gwyn (1650–1687), who acted for six years. Purportedly the daughter of a madam and possibly herself a prostitute, she was for a time an orange seller at London’s famous Drury Lane Theatre. At fourteen she debuted on stage. She earned fame playing fast women—for, as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, another English actress, said a few hundred years later, “A good woman is a dramatic impossibility.”
Gwyn also got laughs in comedy and excelled at “trouser roles” (wearing male clothing). But when Charles II chose her for his mistress, she left the stage for good (if not for good). Nell continued building her fortune, though on his deathbed Charles supposedly implored his brother, next in line to the throne, “Don’t let poor Nelly starve.” At Gwyn’s death, she was worth £100,000, or some $6 million today.
Q: Did anyone ever become a Broadway star via a striptease?
A: Of course it was a mock striptease, but dancer Joan McCracken, who’d appeared in Oklahoma!, became a star in choreographer Agnes de Mille’s 1944 hit Bloomer Girl. McCracken played a maid-of-all-work and performed a comical 1861-style striptease that audiences loved. A mock strip had also made a star of Mary Martin in the 1938 Leave It to Me, via Cole Porter’s vampy “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
P.S. McCracken was at one point married to Bob Fosse, later to fellow dancer and future novelist Jack Dunphy. When novelist Truman Capote met Dunphy, he was smitten and determined to have him. Capote theorized that anyone, if you concentrated on that person long and intensely enough, could be had. Dunphy left McCracken and the stage, and he and Capote became a couple for the rest of their lives.
Q: Who was the oldest practicing playwright?
A: George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), at ninety-three. But his 1949 play Buoyant Billions was not a hit.
Q: Who was the father of the American musical?
A: Don’t assume. Some would say the “father” was a mother: playwright-actress-novelist-lyricist Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824). Only one of her plays exists in its entirety. By age twenty, she’d failed as a governess, so being of a literary bent, she wrote Victoria, an epistolary novel. Her most popular book, Charlotte Temple, was continuously in print from 1795 to 1906, with two further printings after World War II. But though the novel had over two hundred editions, it didn’t make Ms. Rowson rich, for there were no copyright laws then, and royalties didn’t exist.
The Englishwoman eventually found herself on the stage in the new United States. That led to writing plays, one of which was Slaves in Algiers; or, a Struggle for Freedom (1794), a farce with music. Via this work, set on the Barbary Coast of what is now Libya and involving American sailors captured and enslaved by Muslim pirates, Rowson became—on June 30, 1794—the first female playwright to be produced professionally in America, and “the mother of the American musical.” (The musical’s events were based on real-life ones. The pirates sent a demand for ransom to Congress; the US refused, and finally American forces headed “to the shores of Tripoli.”)
Susanna Haswell Rowson died in Boston in 1824, her theatrical successes long past, but her personally unprofitable novels still widely read. Sadly, her pioneering and musicals had never been held in high esteem; rather than being reviewed on their own merits they’d been treated as novelties, remarkable chiefly because of their distaff authorship
P.S. The first American actor to go into politics was, of course, a stage actor. John Howard Payne had also been a prolific playwright and was one of the first American actors to star in England, as Hamlet (age twenty-two). His play The Fall of Algiers was inspired by an incident in Susanna Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers, but he’s best remembered for the song “Home, Sweet Home,” from his play Clari, the Maid of Milan. Payne became American consul to Tripoli once it re-established diplomatic relations with the USA.
Q: Since Chicago was based on a real story, why wasn’t this musical done sooner, especially since there had been a movie starring Ginger Rogers as Roxie Hart in 1942?
A: The antics of two murderesses inspired a 1920s Broadway comedy and the ’40s film—not one of Rogers’s big hits—but wasn’t generally viewed as the stuff of musical comedy, which until Cabaret (1966) was a typically light and fluffy genre. Besides, rights to redo Chicago were held by Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, whose headline had read “Woman Plays Air Jazz as Victim Dies.” After she became a fundamentalist Christian she refused anyone seeking to resurrect her play, Chicago, which she felt glamorized and trivialized murder. When Watkins died a recluse worth $2 million in 1969, she had so faded from memory that the New York Times ran no obituary.
Of course the perfect composer-lyricist team to bring Chicago to Broadway in the 1970s was Kander and Ebb, who’d done the dark and acclaimed Cabaret. Chicago’s initial reviews during its out-of-town Philadelphia run were negative, but Philly audiences liked it, and it became a bigger hit after returning to the Great White Way in 1996—it’s currently the longest-running revival in Broadway history. (The film version won the Best Picture Academy Award in 2003.)
Q: Do all composers accept that it goes with the territory when a song is dropped from a musical prior to its New York opening?
A: Songs are routinely dropped. Some composers protest, most are resigned to it, and some seem to comply sweetly, like Jerry Herman. But some object vigorously, no one more so than lyricist Carolyn Leigh. She and composer Cy Coleman did the music for Little Me (1962), based on Patrick Dennis’s post—Auntie Mame novel. Coleman decided during a Philadelphia tryout to drop a song, whereupon the enraged Leigh left the theater, found the nearest policeman, and dragged him backstage, where she demanded he arrest Coleman. (This, during a performance.) It was Coleman and Leigh’s last show together.
Q: What was the oddest musical ever?
A: Oddity is in the mind of the beholder, but Lieutenant is surely a contender. The 1975 rock opera focused on the massacre by American forces at My Lai during the Vietnam War. Its songs included “Kill” and “Massacre.” It lasted nine performances.
Q: Who “invented” musical comedy?
A: The consensus is Jacques Offenbach. Before he left his native Cologne for Paris in 1833, musical theater was usually opera or its imitators, or carnival playlets performed with new lyrics on traditional melodies. Thus, a German invented musical comedy in France, and Broadway perfected it, specifically via Jewish, gay, and/or European-emigre composers.
Q: Is a musical’s title crucial to its success?
A: Basically, a rose is a rose. A 1925 musical originally titled My Fair Lady became Tell Me More (who remembers that?), while Lady Liza and The Talk of London was finally called My Fair Lady (1956). Would the originally intended East Side Story have been any less successful than West Side Story? Or the mega-flop Breakfast at Tiffany’s have been any more successful under its first moniker of Holly Golightly?
Q: Who was Broadway’s most prolific and successful librettist?
A: Harry B. Smith was the most prolific. He had three hundred shows and six thousand songs. But how successful was he? Today his one somewhat-remembered song is “The Sheik of Araby,” typically heard as an instrumental, minus Smith’s lyrics. In most businesses, quantity and quality aren’t synonymous. In his heyday, Smith wasn’t as celebrated as several of his less-prodigious contemporaries.
Q: What theatrical agent had the longest career?
A: Nat Day (1886-1982) began his stage career in variety in 1898, then went into the agency business in 1904 and stayed in it for seventy-seven years. Coincidentally, he at one time shared an office floor on London’s Oxford Street with the later-discovered serial killer Dr. Crippen, and actually booked Crippen’s wife for various engagements.
Q: Why is wearing green in a play considered bad luck?
A: Before the twentieth century, a green spotlight, or “limelight,” was used to pick out the star. If said star wore green, the result was semi-invisibility—the true actor’s nightmare.
Q: Why do actors consider Macbeth such an unlucky play?
A: Many productions of “the Scottish play,” as it’s referred to by those who won’t say its name, have been plagued by injuries, disasters, even deaths. Sir John Gielgud’s 1942 production saw the deaths of four actors. (Its designer later killed himself.) Macbeth is associated with black magic, and to quote from it in an actor’s dressing room is deemed very unlucky. The antidote is to go outside, turn around three times, spit, knock thrice on the door, and beg readmittance. (This is also the antidote, minus spitting, for whistling in a dressing room.)
Q: Did an actor ever kill a critic?
A: Probably not. But in 1936 Orson Welles staged Macbeth for the Negro Division of the Federal Theatre. The setting was switched to the Caribbean, and the witches’ magic to voodoo. After a scathing review by Percy Hammond of the New York Herald Tribune, some of the cast held an all-night voodoo ceremony to get back at Hammond. Three days later he died.
Q: Was a critic ever actually killed?
A: Yes, but it was in France in 1945 and Robert Brasillach had collaborated with the Germans. While a critic and editor, he’d called for the executions of Resistance actors and vented his anti-Semitic hatred. He was finally executed at the fort of Montrogue, France, aged 35.
Q: Who is or was the most mean-spirited Broadway critic?
A: It’s not John Simon—surprise. By consensus, it seems to have been one William Winter, the New York Tribune’s drama critic from 1865 to 1909. One reason for his ongoing grouch may have been his weekly salary of $50, the least of any head of a New York paper’s drama department. Besides his dubious taste, Winter had many hates, including foreigners. Such great European actresses as Duse, Bernhardt, and Réjane he labeled and libeled as “foreign strumpets,” and the pioneering Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen he deemed “a reformer who calls you to crawl with him into a sewer, merely to see and breathe its feculence.”
Speaking of bigotry, the often-sour Heywood Broun detested Abie’s Irish Rose, a comedy about a Jewish-Catholic marriage. In 1922 he wrote that it was “So cheap and offensive that it might serve to unite all the races of the world in a common hymn of hate.” Broun was certain, or hoped, it would be a flop. The record-breaker ran for 2,327 performances and was revived in 1954.
Q: Apart from losing money, did a flop play ever set a record?
A: The longest-running flop in theater history was The Ladder (1926), a drama of reincarnation. It ran for seventeen months in New York—at a loss of a then-monumental $750,000—because it was backed by Texas oil tycoon Edgar B. Davis. By late 1927 tickets were free, yet The Ladder played to mostly empty houses. Undaunted, Davis later opened it again in Boston. Wags called it the play that wouldn’t die.
Q: Is there any way of telling that a play will be bad?
A: George Jean Nathan, critic for the American Mercury, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Theatre Arts, etcetera, believed there were various giveaways, such as: “When, as the curtain goes up, you hear newsboys shouting, ‘Extra, extra!’ ” Or “The moment anyone puts anything into a drawer with a furtive look.” And “Any mystery play in which, at the very start, someone remarks that the nearest house is two miles away.” Plus “In four cases out of five, when at the rise of the curtain the wife is writing a letter and the husband, in an easy chair, is reading a newspaper.”
Nathan eschewed one-star shows, particularly the one-woman variety: “A woman talking steadily for two hours is hardly my idea of entertainment whether in the theater or in private.” In the wake of Oklahoma!’s success, he noted, “It seems that the moment anyone gets hold of an exclamation point these days, he probably sits down and writes a musical show around it.” About improvisation he felt, “An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.”
Known to friends as difficult, to others as impossible, Nathan held that “No chronically happy man is a trustworthy critic.”
Q: Why are classics that get made into musicals often given new titles?
A: Sometimes it’s obvious, as with Henry Fielding’s Rape Upon Rape, which became Lock Up Your Daughters (1959). Or T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats—just Cats was more practical. In some cases, an original word was judged noncommercial, like “prejudice” in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which became First Impressions in 1959. Or “cry” in Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, which became the lyrical Lost in the Stars (1949).
It’s frequently assumed most people have forgotten or never knew the original sources, which some Broadway producers view as free material with time-tested value. On the other hand, whose bright idea was it to rename the still-popular and beloved Little Women A Girl Called Jo?
Q: How could a musical of Gone with the Wind fail to be a financial success?
A: The musical version, which made its American bow in Los Angeles, closed en route to Broadway, a fiasco in its native land. In 1966 a nonmusical play of Margaret Mitchell’s novel had its world premiere in Tokyo, in a nine-hour production. It was a huge hit. The Japanese who owned the stage rights to the book then decided a musical GWTW might be as or even more popular. They commissioned Harold Rome to compose it and Joe Layton to stage it. It opened in Japan in 1970 as Scarlett.
It was next unleashed on the West: In 1972 Gone with the Wind opened in London, not New York, because of lower costs and less-caustic critics. Though the musical version had returned to the better-recognized title, it was still minus the film’s extremely famous theme music. The critics were divided, but Londoners made up their own minds, and GWTW ran a year, thanks partly to out-of-towners and tourists. Predictably, the clutch of American critics who went to London to review it slammed it. Even so, an American debut in Atlanta was planned.
Instead it opened in 1973 in LA, then San Francisco, with Lesley Ann Warren as Scarlett and former Bonanza star Pernell Roberts as Rhett Butler. A ten-city tour was planned, with a Broadway opening in 1974. However, the British producer was reportedly horrified by the dreadful west coast reviews, and GWTW didn’t leave California (although in 1976 it opened in Dallas and toured three cities before sinking).
The US and UK musical ran two and a half hours, versus the 222-minute movie and the four-hour Japanese Scarlett. Many people agreed that June Ritchie in London gave a magnificent performance as Scarlett, Broadway historian Ken Mandelbaum even claiming that it rivaled Vivien Leigh’s—repeated eight times weekly. The fact remains that huge numbers of people in Tokyo, London, and elsewhere enjoyed the musical (also, in Japan, the nonmusical), but New Yorkers, excepting a handful of professional hard-boiled eggs, didn’t get a chance to see or enjoy for themselves.
Q: What was the longest consecutive performance in one role?
A: One tends to think of Yul Brynner, post-Hollywood, returning to the stage in The King and I over and over again. But this record is held by James O’Neill (1848–1920), father of playwright Eugene. He enacted the Count of Monte Cristo over six thousand times between 1883 and ’91, then returned to the role in later life.
Q: Why was Eugene O’Neill sometimes called the only major playwright on Broadway?
A: Because he was born in Times Square on October 16, 1888, at 43rd Street and Broadway, at the Barrett House (later the Cadillac Hotel). Much of his childhood was spent in hotels while his father toured.
Q: Do nonprofessional playwrights ever have big successes with a play or plays?
A: Everyone from Picasso to Pope John Paul II has tried their hand at writing a play—and getting it produced. Though there are occasional fluke successes—e.g., comic actor Steve Martin—generally the successful playwright is a full-time professional. In his Desire Caught by the Tail, Picasso made all of his characters die at the end from inhaling the fumes of fried potatoes. Friends who attended the Spaniards play agreed that Pablo should stick to his day job.
Q: Who was the first female manager of an important American theatre and what’s her relationship to a current movie star?
A: Louisa Lane Drew (1820-1897) began as a child actress and married her third husband—fellow thespian John Drew—in 1850. She mothered two actors—another John Drew and Georgiana Drew. “Georgie” married pugilist-turned-actor/playwright Maurice Barrymore, and gave birth to three stars: Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore—the latter grandfather to Drew Barrymore, who began as a child actor. For thirty years beginning in 1861, Louisa ran her own theatre, the Arch Street, in Philadelphia, and appeared opposite leading actors like Edwin Booth and Irish comedian Tyrone Power. She was a much-admired actress-manager, capable in all aspects of her business, such as carpentry, in which she sometimes instructed apprentices.
Q: Who founded the first American acting “dynasty”?
A: It wasn’t long-lived, and it wasn’t the first, but the Booth family had a significant impact. Junius Brutus Booth (1796–1852) was English, like most of 19th-century America’s celebrated actors. He was father to Junius Brutus Jr. (1821–1883), Edwin (1833–1893), and John Wilkes (1839–1865). Fortunately for Junius Sr., he didn’t live to see his youngest son become a presidential assassin. Booth père was an alcoholic and sometime rowdy. His aquiline profile was renowned, but in his 40s his nose was broken during a fight. Post-Profile, a fan told Booth she couldn’t “get over” his nose. He snapped back, “No wonder, madame, for the bridge is gone.”
John Wilkes Booth was killed soon after murdering Abraham Lincoln. His act drove his much-more successful brother from the stage for four years. Edwin Booth was one of the first American actors to earn an international reputation and become a star in England, where Stateside actors were considered second-rate. In 1869 Booth opened the $1 million Booth Theatre in New York City, which showcased him in Shakespearean roles. Its failure bankrupted the actor in 1873 and he had to tour extensively in the United States and United Kingdom, specializing in Shakespeare.
Edwin’s Gramercy Park home became headquarters for The Players, the club he founded that was a combination social haven (gossip was officially discouraged) and museum of theatrical heirlooms. It later produced theatricals featuring professional actors, and helped separate Edwin’s reputation and Shakespearean legacy from his brother’s murderous rage. (Booth was biographed in the 1954 film Prince of Players, starring Richard Burton.) One of Edwin’s closest friends was the scion of an equally long-lived major acting dynasty: comedian Joseph Jefferson III, famous for his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle.
Q: Isn’t nepotism much less common on Broadway than in Hollywood?
A: Less, anyway, and more often behind the scenes. For instance, take the 1964 28-show-a-week musical spectacular Wonderworld, which played the New York World’s Fair for 250 performances. It costarred Chita Rivera and Gretchen Wyler, with music by Jule Styne. The lyrics were by his older son, Stanley—the son also musicalizes.
Oscar Hammerstein II had a producer brother named Reginald, likewise Angela Lansbury, whose brother Edgar produced Godspell and her turn as Mama Rose in Gypsy (music by Jule Styne, lyrics by the unrelated Stephen Sondheim).
Q: Who was America’s first star actress?
A: Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876) was an assertive eldest child who hated housework and had no desire to wed. At eighteen she went into opera, acting as well as singing her roles, unlike more stationary divas. Then she lost her singing voice. She took to the dramatic stage—due to her plain looks, romantic parts were out—and broke through, with cheering audiences and glowing reviews, as Lady Macbeth in 1835. In 1837 she joined the Park Theatre, then New York’s most prestigious company, bowing as Patrick in The Poor Soldier. But four years later she was stuck mostly in secondary roles.
She quit and moved to London, where she became a star on her debut, which one reviewer claimed surpassed anything seen there since the talent of Edmund Kean thirty years before. Besides Lady Macbeth, Cushman essayed Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Hamlet in Edwin Booth’s borrowed tights. When she returned to the United States after five years, her British stardom made her a welcomed celebrity, and she went from triumph to triumph. Cushmania peaked in 1852 when she gave her farewell performances and moved to Rome.
Though rich, she continued acting in Europe. At her final performance, shortly before she died from cancer in 1876, a tribute was bestowed upon America’s greatest actress, with William Cullen Bryant presenting her with a laurel wreath. Cushman’s passing garnered headlines around the world. Half a century later, she was the first member of her profession to be inducted into the Theatrical Hall of Fame. She was the first American actor to be as highly regarded as an English actor. She eschewed the usual histrionics and ad-libbing of the era for felt and disciplined acting. Cushman was initially thought eccentric because she insisted upon play rehearsals. She may also have been the first to institutionalize curtain calls.
P.S. Like some twentieth-century actresses, Charlotte Cushman wore men’s clothes offstage. In the 1800s this caused tremendous comment. Yet she didn’t camouflage her nature by presenting men to the public as “beaux.” The press played down her relationships, various of which Elizabeth Barrett Browning termed “female marriages.” Yes, Virginia, America’s first star was a lesbian.
Q: Was Agnes de Mille’s dream ballet in Oklahoma! (1943) the first?
A: From its Freudian influence and how much has been written about it, one would think so, but it wasn’t. George Balanchine used a dream ballet in 1936 in On Your Toes. There was one in the 1937 Babes in Arms and in 1938 in I Married an Angel, whose title ran afoul of censors objecting to the idea of fornication with a heavenly being. Pal Joey (1940) and Lady in the Dark (1941) also featured dream ballets, but thanks to Oklahoma!’s impact they became a staple into the 1960s. (Their waning popularity paralleled Freud’s.)
As realism crept in, as exemplified by shows like Pal Joey and Cabaret, audiences were less willing to accept different actors playing the same characters, i.e., Laurey and Curly and a Dream Laurey and Dream Curly.
Q: Which musical conventions are now extinct?
A: Besides dream ballets, the scene “in one”: a scene played in front of a traveler curtain while behind it the scenery is changed. Technology obviated the need, and today’s audiences are used to watching a set change or move before their eyes. Also, musicals feature less dancing today. Television has shortened attention spans, but also, the more realistic the musical, the less dance fits in. Dancing in contemporary musicals typically requires an aggressive and/or erotic edge, else it seems hopelessly old-fashioned.
Q: Don’t good reviews help a theatrical career?
A: Theatrical success is more dependent on good notices than is success in the movies. But consistently good reviews can indicate boredom or being taken for granted. Peggy Wood, best remembered as Mother Abbess in the film version of The Sound of Music (she “sang”—dubbed—“Climb Every Mountain”), enjoyed “a wonderful career on the stage,” working with the greats and doing important plays. She noted, “I was very lucky and even renowned for my good reviews. I never really got a terrible one.” But Wood never became a stage star. Sometimes controversy, or at least variety, helps.
Q: Do all theatrical producers yearn for hits and hope to avoid flops?
A: In today’s more complicated fiscal arena, it’s not so simple. Mega-musical producer Cameron Mackintosh—openly gay yet Britain’s highest-paid subject—admits that during a premiere’s intermission, “I retreat to the bar and pray that it will be a mega-disaster so I can pull it off straight away. The worst thing to have in the theater is a near success.” Macintosh produced Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon, but also, for example, Moby Dick, which sank almost without a trace.
Q: Has an actress ever beaten up a producer?
A: The aptly named June Havoc, the former Dainty June and Mama Rose’s real-life daughter, did when the 1944 musical Sadie Thompson closed prematurely. The closing notice went up on New Year’s Eve. She recalled: “[A.P. Waxman] was a little man; everyone loathed him. On closing night, he called the cast out onto the stage. I did not come out of my dressing room. Then the little man made the mistake of coming to my room.
“I don’t know what it triggered in me, but he started toward me and I closed the door, locked it, and let him have it. I beat him unmercifully. I was taken to the hospital.… They gave me a sedative, and when I came to, people from the company were sitting there waiting—they were taking shifts. They had all wanted to beat him up.”
Q: What was the most scandalous thing Tallulah Bankhead ever did?
A: The “Alabama Foghorn” was outrageous, outspoken, exhibitionistic (a flasher even in her sixties), and almost-openly bisexual in those days. Her biographies read like glamorous soap opera. Probably Tallulah’s most then-shocking public gesture was deciding not to wear stockings on stage in 1919 during a particularly hot New York summer night. Producer Lee Shubert begged her not to so affront “public decency,” but she did, receiving hisses, mostly from women.
Through the 1920s Bankhead was an ongoing hit in London. When stage veteran Mrs. Patrick Campbell (her actual billing) was asked the source of Tallu’s West End success, she declared, “She’s always skating on thin ice—and the British public wants to be there when it breaks.”
Q: Who were the Shuberts?
A: Brothers Sam, Lee, and Jacob were Lithuanian immigrants to Syracuse, New York. Sam died prematurely in 1905. Lee and “Jake” (or J.J.) helped break the power of the Theatrical Syndicate or Trust, which had almost monopolized show business in the US. The Shuberts’ theater empire became the largest ever. The brothers’ business savvy and their penchant for real estate gave them unrivaled theatrical power. Predictably, they put the bottom line before art and were eventually referred to as a near-monopoly.
Lee was a big fan of Sarah Bernhardt—whose 1906 American tour he sponsored—not only for her talent but for her business acumen. Years later, he would often recount, “English she couldn’t talk. English she couldn’t pronounce. But, boy, could she count in English!”
Q: How was the stranglehold of the infamous Trust broken?
A: In 1895 six powerful businessmen joined forces to seize control of the American stage, not just in New York. Their Theatrical Syndicate all but took over the supply-and-demand ends of show biz by booking nearly all the acts and players and by owning or controlling almost all the theaters. By eliminating competition the Syndicate could fix prices. As growing urban populations’ demand for live entertainment increased, the sextet’s greed did too, and ticket prices went up while performers’ salaries and production costs were slashed.
The Trust intimidated star after star into signing with it. One lone actress-manager consistently stood against them: Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932). For twelve years the star toured under adverse conditions, sometimes acting in a tent. Yet people flocked to see her. She chose controversial plays and performed in a boldly naturalistic style. Fiske made plays by Ibsen acceptable and successful in the US, even when dealing with a volatile topic like divorce in A Doll’s House.
The energetic and progressive Fiske opposed bullfighting and clubbing seals to death for their fur, and almost single-handedly rescued the snowy egret from extinction after its feathers became popular on women’s hats. She shamed society ladies into giving up egret feathers, and within one season the fashion for them died. The publicity resulted in laws to ensure the birds’ protection.
Fiske’s allies against the Trust were impresario David Belasco and the brothers Shubert, who quietly bought up individual theaters as they became available (sometimes using other names). The embryonic Shubert empire was shaky and heavily mortgaged; to enable the brothers to retain their theater network, Minnie Maddern Fiske agreed to use her drawing power on tour in their mutual war on the syndicate. Ironically, the woman later nicknamed the Trust-Buster would live to see the Shuberts become almost as monopolistic on Broadway as the Trust had been.
Finally, a telegram from Manhattan was sent to Fiske while she was performing in Cincinnati, offering her the use of any Trust theater she cared to occupy, and on independent terms. The monopoly was broken, marking the moral highpoint of a shining forty-five-year career that earned Fiske the significant title of “First Lady of the American Theater.”
Q: Did a musical ever have its premiere in the Yukon?
A: The 1964 Broadway flop Foxy, starring veteran ham Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz), did open and play seven whole weeks in the remote, frozen Yukon. Why? Foxy, inspired by Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1616), was set in that area, and Canada was pushing tourism to the Yukon, so it co-produced and opened the show. Canadian-born star Beatrice Lillie was chosen to show up and introduce Foxy on opening night in far-off Dawson City.
Playing in the middle of nowhere, with a skimpy population and few tourists even on weekends, the musical saw mostly empty houses. Fading star Lahr was at loggerheads with much of the cast and crew. He mugged and ad-libbed madly, trying to completely dominate the show. When it reached New York Lahr won critical raves and a Tony Award, but few younger audience members—he was celebrating his fiftieth year in show business. Foxy was his Broadway swansong.
As for playing the frozen north, Lahr declared, “You kon have it, buster!”
Q: Was Mitch “Man of La Mancha” Leigh a one-hit wonder?
A: Most Broadway composers used to have several hit songs, but Leigh had “The Impossible Dream.” Period. However, he’d previously worked in advertising where he had created another hit “song”: “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
Q: Why is Broadway gayer than Hollywood?
A: Because the stage is more of an actor’s medium, and it’s from a distance. The camera specializes in outer personality, gestures, stereotypes, and reaching mass audiences versus a more sophisticated and tolerant urban audience. As to why so many performers are gay, Sir Ian McKellen (a Tony winner) explains, “We learn to start acting, to start passing, as children and teens, as soon as we realize we’re different.”
Why are so many gays creative and artistic? Novelist-playwright Truman Capote believed, “We channel our creative instincts into our surroundings and the world itself, not just into reproducing. We want to make the world more attractive and kinder, more wonderful.… Theatre’s the best and easiest place to pretend.”
Q: What proportion of Broadway is gay?
A: Who can say for certain? But theatre columnist and author Mark Steyn offers, “On the basis of my own unscientific research, I would say that, of the longest-running shows of the 1940s, some two-thirds had a homosexual contribution in the writing/staging/producing department. By the 1960s, the proportion of long-runners with a major homosexual contribution was up to about ninety percent.”
Leonard Bernstein once apprised a friend, “To be a successful composer of musicals, you either have to be Jewish or gay. And I’m both.”
Q: Did someone ever commit suicide to ruin a theatrical premiere?
A: The playwright Congreve wrote, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Rachel Roberts’s dramatic promise was subsumed by her marriage to superstar Rex Harrison. After he left her (he had six wives, and mistress-actress Carole Landis’s suicide in 1948 nearly cost him his Hollywood career), Roberts’s life went downhill. She yearned for a remarriage; friends said she’d been more in love with Harrison’s Portofino villa than with the testy actor himself. But Rex refused, and the already suicide-prone actress planned to kill herself in time to spoil his much-heralded return to Hollywood in a revival of My Fair Lady.
That production took in the largest amount of money for a single week of any show until that time: $409,884, at the 2,699-seat Pantages Theatre in January 1981. Rachel had intended to grab the newspaper headlines for herself and in so doing remind the town and industry of the Landis suicide. But her Hispanic gardener didn’t show up to discover her body on the appointed day, and the LA coroner, despite Roberts’s precautions, didn’t at first believe it was suicide. After all, she was in her fifties, and British.
Q: Was Irving Berlin the greatest-ever Broadway composer?
A: He was one of the all-time greats, and one of few, like Cole Porter, who wrote both words and music. As a pianist, he wasn’t good and played only in one key, F sharp. Nor did he actually write his music; he dictated tunes to an assistant. He’d become a composer via misunderstanding: when asked to deliver a lyric, the Russian (born Israel Balin) thought he also had to compose the melody.
Berlin lived long enough—1888–1989—to become a legend in his own time, but early on wasn’t that universally esteemed. When Berlin, a Jew, married Ellin Mackay, she was expelled from the Social Register, whose editor sniffed, “Irving Berlin has no place in society.” Berlin’s wife’s eighteen-year-old sister lived with a Nazi diplomat and undiplomatically showed off her charm bracelet with a diamond swastika to her brother-in-law.
Berlin, who wound up agnostic, composed America’s most widely played secular yuletide song, “White Christmas,” and the most popular Easter song, “Easter Parade.” He also created “God Bless America,” whose royalties go to the officially homophobic Boy Scouts of America (the British-founded group’s UK branch is not anti-gay).
Q: Who made the most money from a play in the shortest time?
A: Noel Coward claimed to have dashed off Private Lives (1930) in a few days. Anne Nichols wrote Abie’s Irish Rose (1922) in three days (in her twenties). The “sentimental comedy” supporting religious tolerance (a Jewish-Irish couple) broke Broadway’s record for longest-running play and held it for fourteen years, though for three years producers had declined it. Nichols eventually used her own house for collateral to help finance her play. Though she’s barely remembered today, the New York Times recorded in 1962 that Abie’s Irish Rose “brought its author spectacular fame and fortune, earning her more money than any single play has ever earned a writer.”
Q: When did music become more than mere entertainment on Broadway?
A: One of the benchmarks was December 27, 1927, in Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, when the first-night Manhattan audience got a shock that made several gasp: the curtain rose on a chorus of sweating black stevedores loading cotton while singing, “Niggers all work on the Mississippi. Niggers all work while the white folks play.…” The two Jewish artists confronted theatergoers with an aspect of American life that they’d preferred not to think about, let alone paid to learn more about. The musical, which dealt with interracial love and became an instant, often-revived classic, was based on the novel by best-seller Edna Ferber (So Big, Giant).
Q: On a lighter note, what about musicals and swimming pools?
A: Though Miss Saigon boasted an actual helicopter, it wasn’t until 1952, in Wish You Were Here, that a swimming pool was put onstage in a musical. Alas, most critics found it shallow. Conversely, the first musical to take place in a swimming pool—at Yale—was the Burt Shevelove—Stephen Sondheim adaptation of The Frogs, an ancient Greek classic which most critics found too deep.
P.S. The first musical to feature electric light was Evangeline, in 1888, with personal supervision by Thomas Edison.
Q: Who was the unluckiest American stage performer ever?
A: It had to be Laura Keene, a renowned actress with her own company. Her biggest hit was Our American Cousin, of which a benefit for her one-thousandth performance as Florence Trenchard would take place on April 14, 1865, in Washington, D.C. The event would include the farewell performance of “clown consummate” Harry Hawkes as Asa Trenchard. Since the recently ended Civil War, theaters had reopened, and this gala occasion would find President Lincoln and his wife, Mary, in attendance.
The comedy was heartily and gratefully received. Laughter erupted after Asa bawled, “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man trap!” At that moment, the door behind the presidential theater box opened while the guard assigned to the Chief Executive was in the bar drinking whiskies. Disgruntled actor and Southern fanatic John Wilkes Booth aimed a .44 derringer at Abraham Lincoln’s head and fired once at point-blank range. Booth then jumped down to the stage, shocking the actors into petrification while much of the audience wondered if this were a planned entertainment. Despite a leg injured in the dramatic leap, Booth got away—for the time being.
Lincoln’s assassination ruined the career of Laura Keene, one of the first American women to head an acting company. She and her company were punished via guilt by association. John’s brother Edwin was forced into temporary retirement. Theaters across the country were closed, and hundreds of actors lost their livelihoods, as preachers and newspapers denounced the entire profession as heading for hell. As recently as the 1960s when actor Ronald Reagan ran for California governor, his rival proclaimed that, “An actor killed Lincoln.”
After Lincoln died, before dawn, Laura Keene and her fellow actors were arrested for conspiracy. Although Edwin Booth later made a comeback, Keene tired of fighting the taint of Lincoln’s assassination. Her fortunes dwindled in her remaining eight years, and she briefly found work as a lecturer, dying of consumption in 1873 at fifty-four. One of Keene’s theatrical innovations had been spending significantly on advertising. J.H. Stoddard, a popular actor of the era, deemed her “the greatest stage manager I have ever known.” In 1867 she was one of the first American managers to encourage native talent by offering the then-considerable sum of $1,000 for the best play written by an American.
P.S. John Wilkes Booth’s violent action hurt numerous individuals outside of the theater, as well. One was a Dr. Mudd, at whose home the fleeing assassin stopped to have his broken leg set. Mudd had no idea who Booth was or what he’d done. But after the episode came to light, the doctor was imprisoned for life, his sentence eventually commuted because of his services at the jail during an epidemic. The innocent physician’s predicament gave rise to the popular expression, “Your name is Mudd.”
Q: Who is or was the most sexual personality on Broadway?
A: Some may have matched director-choreographer Bob Fosse in quantity, but no one probably surpassed him. Richard Adler, composer of Damn Yankees, stated, “There is nobody who knows anything about Fosse who doesn’t know about his sex life. He made it very public; he just didn’t care. How he portrayed himself in [the film] All That Jazz is playing down what he was really like. This man was sexually insatiable!”
Q: Was Carrie the musical really as bad as they still say?
A: On a superficial level, Carrie resembled a more recent teen-centered movie-into-musical, Hairspray. Of course, the latter doesn’t have a blood-spattered heroine or a religious-fanatic mother whom she offs by fadeout. Carrie’s unlikely source was Stephen King’s 1974 novel, made into a hit film in 1976. Betty Buckley, the movie’s kindly gym teacher, enacted Carrie’s monster mom in the Broadway musical twelve years later.
Carrie was the most expensive flop in Broadway history, losing $8 million for its British and West German investors. First performed in England, it originally starred Barbara Cook, who had the insight or luck to bolt the production pre-Broadway. (Reviews were terrible, and a stage accident reportedly almost decapitated her.) Cook had been attracted by the music. The Broadway reviews, even worse than the British ones, focused more on the plot and dramatics than the score or the elaborate staging.
The show aimed too (non-) squarely at the MTV crowd rather than average theatergoers, and didn’t have time to find its audience, nor for word-of-mouth to spread. Carrie played less than a week—reserve funds to keep it running had already been eaten up. Theater historian Ken Mandelbaum observed Carrie’s jarring mix of “often breathtaking sequences and some of the most appalling and ridiculous scenes ever seen in a musical. It alternately scaled the heights and hit rock bottom … and unlike so many flops, was not dull for a second.”
Q: When was Broadway’s golden era?
A: The 1920s was the Great White Way’s most exciting, pioneering, and booming period. America’s participation and victory in “the Great War” (World War I) provided energy and optimism. Prosperity had reached the masses, and there was a building boom. Over seventy-six “legit” theaters were in operation, with more coming. During the hot and humid summers Broadway all but closed down, except for girl-and-comedy revues like Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. Yet in 1927 alone, there were 268 openings. Tickets ranged from fifty cents to five dollars, and a show was a hit if it passed one hundred performances—producers and investors had a one-in-three chance of success. Plays and musicals didn’t have much to fear from movies, which were still silent.
But Broadway differed from other U.S. theatrical venues due to being part of Manhattan Island’s expensive real estate. From way back, theaters have had to compete with other sorts of land use. Thus Broadway was and is primarily a commercial theater. Its acknowledged goal is profits first, art second.
Regarding art, it was in the ’20s that plays and musicals moved into the modern era. Stage realism and naturalism in acting developed rapidly, partly thanks to the enormous impact of the visiting Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski, the “Method,” Russian actors who remained in America to coach, and American disciples like Lee Strasberg would influence Broadway (and also Hollywood) acting for decades to come, and still do.
• The record-breaking hit Abie’s Irish Rose was presented in Los Angeles, pre-Broadway, as Marriage in Triplicate.
• Joseph Kesselring’s comedy hit Arsenic and Old Lace was earlier titled Bodies in Our Cellar and was a thriller before producers Howard Lindsay and Russel [sic] Crouse helped give it a lighter touch.
• After terrible reviews greeted Nunnally Johnson’s Broadway play The World Is Full of Girls, he reportedly sent a telegram to producer Jed Harris: “Change title immediately to Oklahoma!” Except that “Girls” opened some nine months earlier!
• Oklahoma! would likely have been a smash hit whatever its title, but it began as Away We Go! (after the square-dance call, not Jackie Gleason’s catch phrase); based on a non-musical poetically titled Green Grow the Lilacs—not a hit—“experts” believed it was doomed because it featured a murder and was the maiden effort of the new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The latter had experienced a string of failures, but collaborating with Rodgers completely changed lyricist Hammerstein’s luck.
• The title Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a graffito found in a Greenwich Village men’s room by playwright Edward Albee; he did seek widower Leonard Woolf’s permission to use the late writer’s name. (Early on, producer Richard Barr overheard one playgoer telling another after the show, “Well, I loved it. But why did they call the wolf Virginia?”)
• The Seagull features a stuffed seagull perched on a bookcase, per the playwright’s stage directions; Noel Coward, no fan of Chekhov and particularly not of The Seagull, once said, “I hate plays that have a stuffed bird sitting on the bookcase screaming, ‘I’m the title, I’m the title, I’m the title!’ ”
• “My last show was Everybody Loves Me (1956). I shouldn’t have set myself up like that. Hardly anybody loved it. That was the end.”—producer MAX GORDON in 1970 (he produced Born Yesterday in 1946 and had four concurrent hits during the 1933–34 season)
EVERYONE KNOWS ACTOR JOHN WILKES BOOTH assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865 in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. For many years he was the only actor to have murdered somebody in a theater. The only actor to have been murdered just outside a theater was William Terriss, popularly known as Breezy Bill, a hero of melodramas. He was killed in 1897 outside the stage door of London’s Adelphi Theatre by a small-part actor with an imagined grievance against the star.
Terriss’s friend, the even more popular Henry Irving—the first actor to be knighted, in 1895—bitterly and accurately predicted, “Terriss was an actor—his murderer will not be executed.” Justice for actors in those days was unlikely, if at all.
No actress has ever killed in a theatre. However, not long after women were allowed to perform onstage—Shakespeare’s female roles were, of course, written to be enacted by males—two British actresses did get down and dirty. Elizabeth Barry (1658–1713) and Peg Woffington (1714–1760) each nonfatally stabbed a rival actress.
Another fatal fellow was Irish actor Charles Macklin, born in 1700 or earlier. He died in 1797 and last performed in 1789. Apparently peaceful at home, he was quite cantankerous at work. He once caused a “violent disturbance” just by appearing on stage, and another time indirectly caused a riot via his friends’ aggressive support. When another actor once borrowed a wig of Macklin’s without permission, he poked the offender in the eye with his cane, which penetrated to the brain and killed the colleague.