The Canadian-born actor Melbourne MacDowell ran away from home when he was 11 and went to sea. In his 20s, he joined his brother’s theater company in Montreal. He played heroic roles in the tradition of John McCullough. He joined the company of Fanny Davenport, whom he married in 1889. Amy Leslie wrote of him in Some Players: “Melbourne MacDowell is Fanny Davenport’s greatest work of art. She took this stalwart Jovian animal, wild from the plains of Canada, lifted him to her own estate in the world of art, and imprinted upon his personality something of her own magnetism and exceptional power. He is to-day one of the handsomest, most forceful and influential actors on the stage. His voice is grown mellifluous and golden, his rash athletic gestures modulated to grace, and his splendid physique brought in from the lines of the giants.” After Davenport’s death, MacDowell costarred with Blanche Walsh for several seasons, followed by work in movies beginning in 1917.
One of the most influential producers and drama critics between the world wars, Kenneth Macgowan was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University and worked as a drama critic for the Boston Evening Transcript and the Philadelphia Evening Ledger before becoming the drama critic for the New York Globe in 1919, a position he held until 1923. Macgowan also wrote criticism for Vogue and Theatre Arts. In 1924, he became a producer when he joined Robert Edmond Jones and Eugene O’Neill in managing the Provincetown Playhouse in New York. Macgowan’s friendship with O’Neill was particularly significant not only because he produced several of O’Neill’s early plays (All God’s Chillun Got Wings, Desire under the Elms, The Fountain, and The Great God Brown) when they and Jones operated the Greenwich Village Theatre (1925–1927) but because he encouraged O’Neill’s inclination to move beyond realism in his plays. Macgowan presented the first New York production of August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata in 1924, as well as a hit revival of Anna Cora Mowatt’s† Fashion† (1924). He produced on Broadway and for movies. His books on theater, including The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921), Continental Stagecraft (1922, with Robert Edmond Jones), Masks and Demons (1923, with Herman Rosse), and Footlights across America (1929), did much to encourage acceptance of modernist production practices emanating from Europe’s stages and ushering in the New Stagecraft.
This expressionist drama by Sophie Treadwell, produced and directed by Arthur Hopkins with scene designs by Robert Edmond Jones, opened on 7 September 1928 at the Plymouth Theatre and ran for 93 performances. Having worked as both a “stunt” and “sob sister” journalist, Treadwell had followed with interest the 1927 trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray for the murder of Snyder’s husband, events that became the basis for her play about a sensitive working woman (played by Zita Johann) who marries her lecherous boss to escape her insensitive mother and the dehumanizing effects of urban life. She falls for a younger man (the yet-unknown Clark Gable) and, motivated by the dream of romance, kills her husband. The lover escapes, but she is brought to trial and executed. It was the stylization of settings and lighting with the staccato sounds of modern city life, the mechanized characterizations, and spare, rhythmic dialogue that made the slender plot so compelling. Not only is the play frequently revived but it remains in print.
Boston-born William Andrew McAloon began his career in his teens in 1876 as Andrew Williams. He ultimately found his way to vaudeville in 1892 as an actor and songwriter of such tunes as “A Violet from Mother’s Grave” and “The Story of the Rose (Heart of My Heart).” Mack also appeared in minstrel shows. On Broadway, Mack’s most notable appearance was playing Irish patriarch Patrick Murphy in Anne Nichols’s phenomenally successful ethnic comedy Abie’s Irish Rose (1922). Mack also appeared on Broadway in The Ragged Earl (1899), The Last of the Rohans (1899), The Rebel (1900), Tom Moore (1901), The Bold Sojer Boy (1903), a revival of Arrah-Na-Pogue† in 1903, The Prince of Bohemia (1910), a revival of The Mikado in 1910, The Humming Bird (1923), Woof, Woof (1929), and Pressing Business (1930). Mack appeared in a movie version of The Ragged Earl in 1914 and Bluebeard’s Seven Wives (1925), and he wrote the screenplay for The Unpardonable Sin (1915).
Born in Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada, Charles Willard McLaughlin graduated from Georgetown University and began a newspaper career, but he joined the Guy Hichman Players as an actor. Later he formed his own stock company in South Bend, Indiana. In San Francisco, he was leading man with the Alcazar Theatre’s stock company. He went into vaudeville, performing his own sketches, some of which he expanded into full-length plays. The 1910s and 1920s brought him considerable success as a playwright, and he continued to act. His plays include Kick In (1914), So Much for So Much (1914), Broadway and Buttermilk (1916), Blind Youth (1917), Tiger Rose (1917), The Big Chance (1918, with Grant Morris), The Unknown Woman (1919), Breakfast in Bed (1920), Near Santa Barbara (1921), Canary Dutch (1925), The Dove (1925), Fanny (1926), Honor Be Damned (1927), A Free Soul (1928), and The Common Sin (1928). Mack acted in Eugene O’Neill’s Gold (1921) and contributed dialogue to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Constance D’Arcy Mackay was educated at Boston University and spent time in Europe. At the turn of the century, Constance D’Arcy Mackay was an advocate for community pageantry as a way of bringing diverse populations together. She was also a leading exponent of children’s theater,* writing her first plays around 1903 and ultimately publishing over 30 volumes of plays for children in addition to handbooks for amateur production and a 1917 classic, Little Theatre in the United States. She was an activist for women’s suffrage, and for the College Equal Suffrage League she wrote the play The Monsignor to advance the cause. Among Mackay’s other writings, she collaborated with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland and Beulah Marie Dix on the play The Road to Yesterday (1906).
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Jessie MacKaye was educated in a convent school. A relative of theater manager Steele MacKaye, she otherwise came from a family of actors. Following training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, graduating in 1896, pert and vivacious MacKaye appeared in a production of Dandy Dick that year. She also acted in The Little Minister (1897) as part of Maude Adams’s company, and, in 1900, appeared with DeWolf Hopper in El capitan (1899) and The Mystical Miss, which she had already played in New York in 1899, in London. In 1900, MacKaye wrote in The Era Almanack that “the best actress is she who relies on self, since inspiration engendered by earnest study is pretty sure to find external expression.” Her career was brief; following her London engagement, she married and left the stage.
Born in New York, Percy Wallace MacKaye, son of theatrical luminary Steele MacKaye, emerged from his father’s shadow as a playwright and visionary who adopted theories emerging from modernist European theater, inspired the Little Theater Movement, and promoted the New Stagecraft. He studied at Harvard University, wrote poetry and taught courses, then embarked on a career as a playwright. His finest play, The Scarecrow, adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Feathertop, managed only 23 performances on Broadway in 1911 after its first presentation by the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1909. MacKaye also wrote masques and pageants, including St. Louis Masque (1914), marking the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding, and Caliban of the Yellow Sands (1916), staged in Central Park in acknowledgment of the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. His interest in Shakespeare also included a massive tetrology, The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark; or, What We Will (1949). MacKaye wrote the libretto for an operatic adaptation of Rip Van Winkle (1919) with music by Reginald De Koven. MacKaye’s seminal 1909 book The Playhouse and the Play, which called for the establishment of community theaters aimed at dramatic experiments and issues of significance to their audiences, may be his most lasting contribution. MacKaye continued to promote these themes in other works, including The Civic Theatre (1912) and Community Drama (1917), as well as writing a biography of his father, Epoch (1907).
James Morrison Steele MacKaye was born in Buffalo, New York, son of a lawyer and art fancier who sent his son to Paris to study art. MacKaye returned to join the Union army during the Civil War and rose to the rank of major before illness ended his service. After recovering, MacKaye returned to Paris and, in 1869, studied expression with François Delsarte. Returning to the United States, MacKaye lectured on Delsarte’s theories and opened a school in New York in 1871 to teach Delsarte’s techniques. MacKaye launched himself as an actor and playwright with Monaldi (1872), coauthored by Francis Durivage, but it failed to find an audience. He played Hamlet in London’s Crystal Palace in 1873, then scored New York successes with two plays, Rose Michel (1875) and Won at Last† (1877).
MacKaye assumed management of the Fifth Avenue Theatre† and refurbished it with a lighting system designed by Thomas A. Edison and other state-of-the-art equipment, including an innovative elevator stage that permitted fast scene shifts. Renamed the Madison Square Theatre, the theater opened with MacKaye’s hit play Hazel Kirke (1880), which achieved the longest run of a nonmusical work in the history of the American theater to that time. Management problems led to his loss of the theater, so MacKaye designed another theater, in which he planned to include a hotel, but it was never built. In 1885, MacKaye designed the Lyceum Theatre, which again incorporated technical innovations and a space for a drama school. Among MacKaye’s later plays, Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy (1887), a French Revolution melodrama, won favor, as did The Drama of Civilization (1887). MacKaye also designed a Spectatorium for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in which he planned to present The World Finder, a pageant of Columbus’s life, but the elaborate plan had to be scaled back due to a national economic recession. He was the father of Percy MacKaye.
McKeesport, Pennsylvania–born Aline Laveen MacMahon was raised in New York City and graduated from Barnard College prior to going on the stage in 1921, appearing in a Neighborhood Playhouse production of The Madras House. Her other Broadway credits included a few initial failures, musical revues† such as The Grand Street Follies (1924), Artists and Models (1925), and a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon in 1926. For the remainder of the 1920s, she appeared in Her First Affaire (1927), Maya (1928), Winter Bound (1929), and, after completing a brief run in If Love Were All (1931), MacMahon turned to movie work. In films, she played character roles and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for Dragon Seed (1944), playing a Chinese peasant. Her other screen roles included Five Star Final* (1931), Once in a Lifetime* (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Ah, Wilderness!* (1935), Cimarron (1960), I Could Go on Singing (1963), and a repeat of her stage role in All the Way Home* (1963). Despite success in films, MacMahon returned to Broadway with some regularity, including in Kindred (1939), Heavenly Express (1940), The Eve of St. Mark (1942), All the Way Home (1960), revivals of The Alchemist and Yerma in 1966, The East Wind (1967), and revivals of Galileo in 1967, Tiger at the Gates in 1968, Cyrano de Bergerac in 1968, Mary Stuart in 1971, The Crucible* in 1972, and Trelawny of the “Wells” in 1975, after which she retired.
David Belasco and John Luther Long collaborated on this one-act tragedy that opened on 5 March 1900 at the Herald Square Theatre for 24 performances. Conceived as an afterpiece for Belasco’s farce Naughty Anthony, Madame Butterfly proved more popular. Although critics carped about this slight character study, Madame Butterfly attained theatrical permanence via Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera version, as well as the London and Broadway musical Miss Saigon (1990) and David Henry Hwang’s* play M. Butterfly* (1989). In the Belasco-Long play, geisha Cho-Cho-San falls in love with Pinkerton, an American naval officer, who promises to remain true to her when he sails away with his fleet. Cho-Cho-San later learns from the American consul that Pinkerton has married another woman. When the story is confirmed, she commits suicide. Mary Pickford starred in a 1915 silent movie version.
The French melodrama La Femme X by Alexandre Bisson became a mainstay of the early 20th-century American stage, largely for the histrionic opportunities afforded an emotional actress in the portrayal of an erring woman who has sunk to the gutter and committed murder. She is brought to trial and finally redeemed by reunion with her son, who—in a wonderful coincidence—is the attorney appointed to defend the woman he does not recognize. She also gets to play a death scene. Charles Frohman presented an English version in London, opening 2 September 1909, and 12 days later, Henry W. Savage opened the first American production in Rochester, New York. Translated by John N. Raphael and edited for the American stage by William Henry Wright, it opened at New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre on 2 February 1910. Dorothy Donnelly elicited floods of tears in the title role, which was taken up on tour by Amelia Bingham, among others, as well as produced by resident stock companies to feature actresses like Eva Lang.
San Francisco–born Merle Maddern, a delicate beauty, went on the stage following her education at Berkeley University. She made her first Broadway appearance in Salvation Nell (1908), which starred her relative, Minnie Maddern Fiske; she appeared in a number of plays starring Mrs. Fiske and/or directed by Fiske’s husband, Harrison Grey Fiske. Her 40-year Broadway career included roles of variant size, ranging across her career from ingénue parts to character roles, in such plays as a 1910 revival of Pillars of Society, Kismet (1911), a 1918 revival of An Ideal Husband, A Place in the Sun (1918), Toby’s Bow (1919), Nice People (1921), In the Next Room (1922), Expressing Willie (1924), Sinner (1927), The Trial of Mary Dugan (1927), 1929 revivals of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, Five Star Final* (1930), The Left Bank (1931), A New Life (1943), a 1946 revival of Antigone starring Katharine Cornell, and a 1948 revival of Hedda Gabler starring Eva Le Gallienne.
George M. Cohan’s two-act farce opened on 6 March 1922 at the Gaiety Theatre for 80 performances. Cohan wrote, directed, and produced the play, and his daughter, Georgette Cohan, played the title role. In a satiric farce mocking the burgeoning film industry, a movie star, Garrison Paige, encounters an attractive girl, Madeleine, waiting for him in his apartment. She informs him that her father and brother have found her fan photos of Paige and believe he is attempting to seduce her. They are on their way for what may be a violent face-to-face encounter. A series of comic events play out, but as things spin out of control, it turns out that Paige’s butler fell asleep reading a movie script and dreamed the whole situation. Georgette Cohan (1900–1988) had made a hit playing Peter Pan in London, but her well-received performance was not enough to fill the theater, so Cohan himself stepped in as Paige to boost attendance.
The fairly small theater located on 24th Street near Broadway in New York was built in 1862 and operated under various managements as the Fifth Avenue Opera House, Brougham’s Theatre, and, from 1869 until it burned in 1873, Daly’s Fifth Avenue.† Rebuilt, redesigned by Steele MacKaye, and renamed Madison Square Theatre, it opened in 1879 and earned renown for its air-conditioning (air circulated over tons of ice and blown into the auditorium) and for its unique elevator stage (two stages, one above the other, so that one was in view of the audience, while the other, above or below, could be undergoing a change of scenery, thus reducing the time between acts to less than a minute). Renamed Hoyt’s Theatre in 1891, it continued in use until it was razed in 1908.
The English-born producer of children’s theater* Clare Tree Major began as an actress in London, then came to New York in 1916 to perform with the Washington Square Players. She appeared in Percy MacKaye’s Caliban of the Yellow Sands (1916), a pageant in celebration of the 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. From the 1920s, she devoted herself entirely to theater for young people, writing the plays and sending professional actors on tour in them. In 1927, she founded the Clare Tree Major Theatre Company, headquartered in Pleasantville, New York.
Langdon Mitchell’s play, adapted from William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy (1848–1850), opened at the Criterion Theatre on 26 October 1916 for 75 performances. Thackeray’s semi-autobiographical novel traced the early life of Arthur Pendennis (played by Brandon Tynan), including his first love affair, his education at Oxbridge University, his work as a journalist in London, and other adventures. In Mitchell’s adaptation, however, the attention is partially shifted to Arthur’s father, the elderly Major Pendennis, a cynical, cold, self-centered elitist, and it provided a “personal triumph,” as critic James Huneker wrote, for the venerable actor John Drew. Drew was supported by Helen Mencken, Alison Skipworth, and others. Critics felt that the skill with which Mitchell had adapted Thackeray’s Vanity Fair for Minnie Maddern Fiske, under the title Becky Sharp, eluded him in this case.
In an essay on Otis Skinner, critic John Mason Brown comments on “the difference between coming on stage and making an entrance.” While anyone can move into the playing space, it was the actors of Skinner’s generation who employed the old aggressive trick: “to swoop down on a play, and tuck it and its cast into their vest pockets,” “a kind of pillage, a hold-up staged in public.” Specifically, it was the actor’s first opportunity to score a point—that is, “a dramatic moment in itself—studied, built up and sustained—which usually rumbles in the wings long before it bursts into view but which, when once made, defies any eye to leave it.”
Actors in the modernist era carried individual makeup kits, created their own makeups, and were adept at the application, although techniques evolved along with advances in lighting from kerosene to gas to electricity. Tubes of grease paint came in various tones that could be blended in the palm of the hand. The greasepaint base was supplemented by liners for highlight and shadow, crepe hair applied with spirit gum, bald caps and wigs—all used in the service of characterization. The time spent at the dressing table applying one’s makeup was part of the process of transforming oneself into the role. Blackface makeup was widely used by white actors in the days before the integrated stage. That long-abandoned process of applying burnt cork is preserved in a sequence from the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer in which Al Jolson “blacks up.” For removal of makeup, any cheap lard would do. It was a point of pride for an actor to remove all traces of makeup using no more than two pieces of toilet tissue.
In Next Week—East Lynne!,* Gladys Hurlbut’s memoir of stock company acting at the dawn of the 20th century, she recalled that “every drug store used to carry a complete line of stage make-up. . . . The grease paint was laid out in rows, every color from clown white to Indian red. There were rabbits’ feet to spread on your dry rouge and big cans of cold cream that looked like lard. There were little iron pans with holders in which to melt your wax over a candle so you could bead your eyelashes. Every lash carried a big load of wax on it then! The face powders had wonderful names for their different shades: ‘Juvenile—flesh’ and ‘Character—old man.’ Then there was crepe hair for moustaches and beards and bolemania, a dark powder for making you look dirty or very foreign and dark.”
Son of an actress, Rouben Mamoulian was born in Russia and studied law at the University of Moscow. He abandoned his legal pursuits to study at Eugene Vakhtangov’s Studio Theatre. He directed The Beating on the Door (1922) in London, then headed George Eastman’s Theatre in Rochester, New York, from 1923 to 1926. In 1926, Mamoulian joined the Theatre Guild as a teacher, and in 1927, he directed Dubose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy. In 1928 alone, Mamoulian directed six Broadway productions, including Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions and Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne’s Wings over Europe. His other productions in this period range from a revival of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1929) to Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1930). After 1930, Mamoulian continued to direct for the stage with some frequency but mostly for musicals including such seminal productions as Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and Lost in the Stars (1949). With the arrival of sound movies, Mamoulian also turned his attentions to directing movies: Applause (1929), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Golden Boy* (1939), Blood and Sand (1941), and Silk Stockings (1957), among many others.
This four-act play by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson opened on 17 August 1908 at the Astor Theatre for 496 performances. Its nationalistic views caused some critics to dismiss it, but The Man from Home remained a popular play in stock for a decade and was made into movies in 1914 and 1922. Daniel Voorhees Pike, a lawyer from Kokomo, Indiana, travels to Italy to check up on his ward, Ethel Granger-Simpson. He is horrified to find her engaged to the feckless son of the duplicitous Earl of Hawcastle. Through various machinations, Pike exposes the earl’s corruption and brings Ethel and her brother, Horace, who has also run afoul of European sophisticates, back to the homey safety of rural Indiana. Tarkington and Wilson collaborated on several other plays for more than 20 years.
George H. Broadhurst’s four-act political melodrama opened on 4 December 1906 at the Savoy Theatre for a whopping 479 performances in a William A. Brady and Joseph R. Grismer production. The play’s dilemma centers on Alwyn Bennett (played by Frederick Perry), an appealing but feckless playboy, who is backed by unsavory back stairs political interests in a race for mayor of a major American city. Bennett is elected, but when a bill comes to his desk that will permit him to reward his corrupt backers, Bennett faces the dilemma of acquiescing or risking his political future and his family’s good name. The situation is complicated further by the woman he loves (played by Lillian Kemble) and what he knows she expects him to do. The cast included a young Douglas Fairbanks and George Fawcett in supporting roles. According to the New York Times, “it is a familiar tale of love and duty, with incidentals of politics, stock manipulation, and judiciary corruption,” but it entertained with good comic material in the mix of suspense and romance. A movie version was released in 1914 and The Man of the Hour was revived at New York’s Metropolitan Theatre in 2015.
Opening on 3 October 1905 at Hoyt’s Theatre, the “polite parlor farce with melodramatic trimmings” by Grace Livingston Furniss, from the novel of that title by Harold MacGrath, ran for 111 performances. Henry E. Dixey played a lieutenant home on leave, who plans to surprise his sister by taking the place of her coachman to drive her home from a ball. He unwittingly responds to the wrong carriage call, drives the young woman and then gives her a brotherly embrace. She responds by calling a policeman. Of course, they are destined for each other, but only after two more acts of comic complications that include a Russian spy.
This hit melodrama by Jules Eckert Goodman, adapted from a story by John Fleming Wilson, opened on 2 September 1916 for 457 performances at the Playhouse Theatre. Henry Potter (played by Henry Hull) is a feckless young New Yorker whose prominent father sends him to San Francisco to start at the bottom of the family business and, hopefully, to work his way up. Henry instead falls into alcoholism. He meets a young woman, Marcelle (played by Mary Nash), who cares for him and encourages him to sober up. However, he does the opposite. Henry’s father is appalled by his drinking and hires a ship captain to kidnap Henry and dump him in Shanghai where his behavior cannot bring disgrace to the family. There, Henry encounters Marcelle, who has become a drug addict. Together the prodigal and his girl struggle to recover their humanity “to the audible satisfaction of the first and second balconies,” as the New York Times critic noted. A silent movie version in 1924 featured George O’Brien and Dorothy Mackaill and a 1931 “talkie” adaptation starred Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.
This one-act French play by Anatole France is important in American theater because its 1915 production as a curtain-raiser to George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion at Wallack’s Theatre in New York is regarded as having launched the New Stagecraft in American scene design. Although one can see the influence of Joseph Urban’s act 2 setting for Madame Butterfly at the Boston Opera in 1912 (which was in turn influenced by a kimono that singer Alice Nielsen brought back from Japan, as well as Viennese Werkstatte style), Robert Edmond Jones’s design simplified the geometric elements and had a more revolutionary impact, as Arnold Aronson notes, because of the greater visibility of a Broadway production. Against the gray, white, and black of the exterior of the judge’s house, the stained-glass colors of the late medieval costumes took on special vibrancy.
Broadly used, the term manager could encompass the activities of the producer, the entrepreneur, and the local theater lessee. A company manager would need to interact with a theater’s manager, and both might deal with the management of a circuit of theaters. Star performers who managed their own companies often found the business side overwhelming, as did Edwin Booth during the period of construction of Booth’s Theatre, when he exhausted himself with touring to raise funds, was taken advantage of by unscrupulous operators, and lacked the financial acumen to keep business matters entirely in order. On the other hand, Mrs. John Drew ran a tight ship in her long management of Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre.†
Alfred L. Bernheim quotes two comments about managers made in 1883: “Most of our managers are thick-skulled people and few of them are gentlemen. They seem to have been born on the road, and how they got to New York and succeeded is only to be accounted for on the principle of ignorance and the almighty dollar. . . . As a general thing they are financiers and brokers, who, like their Wall Street brethren, watch the market and go as that goes.” And an observation from 1879, also quoted by Bernheim: “The manager, if he would succeed, must cater to the taste of his patrons, both in the selection of his company and of his plays. He must give the public what they want, not what he thinks they ought to want.” As those remarks suggest, it was not such a long step from managing to producing.
At the top of the field, it becomes impossible to distinguish between a producer and a manager. Indeed, Michael B. Leavitt’s memoir Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 1859–1909—an impressive record of practices and personalities from all aspects of theater management, including minstrels, burlesque, and other variety forms—uses the terms virtually interchangeably. Among the dozens of managers profiled in his book are Theodore A. Liebler, George C. Tyler, William Harris Sr., Henry B. Harris, Henry W. Savage, and William A. Brady. Augustus Pitou rose to managerial prominence in legitimate theater. In opera, Maurice Grau and Milton Aborn were outstanding. Nate Salsbury proved his managerial acumen first in operetta and later in Wild West shows. See also ACTOR-MANAGER.
Harrison Grey Fiske, editor of the New York Dramatic Mirror, leased the Manhattan Theatre in 1901 to establish a repertory company (producing up to nine plays a year) starring his wife, Minnie Maddern Fiske. Rivaling the powerful Theatrical Syndicate, the Fiskes toured the country between 1906 and 1914 with a troupe that impressed critics and audiences with its strong ensemble acting and highly realistic details in scenery and costumes.
Born in New York City, the comic actor and playwright Louis Mann was on stage from the age of three. He studied at the University of California before joining a stock company run by Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough in San Francisco. In 1882, he performed repertory in support of Tommaso Salvini. Other greats with whom he performed include E. H. Sothern and Daniel E. Bandmann. He formed his own company to tour certain plays and, in 1910, wrote his own play, The Cheater, to give himself the comic role of Godfried Plittersdorf. His greatest success came in Friendly Enemies (1918), in which he costarred with Sam Bernard, and which he toured as well as revived in New York. Mann also acted on Broadway in The Girl from Paris (1896), The Girl in the Barracks (1900), Julie Bonbon (1906), The White Hen (1907), The Bubble (1915), The Unwritten Chapter (1920), a 1921 revival of The Whirl of New York, Give and Take (1923), and others. Mann was married to actress-playwright Clara Lipman.
Born Florence Friend in London, England, she rose to stardom there. In 1896, Daniel Frohman brought her to New York to perform in his Lyceum Stock Company. Mannering made her American debut in The Courtship of Leonie opposite James K. Hackett, whom she married in 1901. They costarred until their separation in 1907 and divorce in 1910. Among her best roles were those in Trelawney of the “Wells” (1898 and revived twice), The Manoeuvres of Jane (1899), Janice Meredith (1900), The Walls of Jericho (1905), A Man’s World (1909), and The Garden of Allah (1911). She retired after her 1911 marriage to Frederick E. Wadsworth, head of the Detroit Boat Company.
John Hartley Manners was born in London, England, but spent most of his career as a playwright and director working in the American theater. His play, Crossways (1902), written for Lillie Langtry, brought him to New York as a member of its cast. In collaboration with Henry Miller, Manners wrote Zira (1905), which starred Margaret Anglin, and it was a moderate success. When he married actress Laurette Taylor in 1911, Manners turned his attentions to writing stage vehicles for her. The first of these, Peg o’ My Heart (1912), was the best and most successful, a work she toured in for years. Subsequent Manners plays, mostly sentimental comedies, found success, although typically more on tour than in New York. These include The Patriot (1908), The House Next Door (1909), The Girl and the Wizard (1909), The Prince of Bohemia (1910), The Indiscretion of Truth (1912), The Harp of Life (1916), Out There (1917), Happiness (1917), Getting Together (1918), One Night in Rome (1919), and The National Anthem (1922). His plays suited popular tastes in the first two decades of the 20th century, but he rarely challenged his skill as a dramatist or the talents of Taylor, who would be seen to better advantage in her legendary performance in Tennessee Williams’s* The Glass Menagerie* (1945) at the end of her career.
Opening on 8 February 1910, the protofeminist drama written and directed by Rachel Crothers ran for 71 performances at New York’s Comedy Theatre. Set in a boardinghouse inhabited by artistic people, the play vividly demonstrates the double standard in action. A woman novelist named Frank Ware (played by Mary Mannering) has adopted a boy, whom she has not yet named, even though he is old enough to be given a penknife by her beau, Gaskell. Nor does Frank think she owes anyone an explanation of why she is a single mother. Then it turns out that Gaskell is the very one who fathered the child in Paris and abandoned the mother, who died, confiding her son to Frank’s care. Frank cannot accept the prevailing view that Gaskell can get away with having a child out of wedlock, while she could not. She sends him packing. Emily Stevens starred in a 1918 movie version of A Man’s World.
Born in Berlin, Prussia, Richard Mansfield spent his early childhood in European travels with his parents, Maurice Mansfield and opera singer Emma Rudersdorff. After his father died, his eccentric mother left him in boarding schools in London and Switzerland. When she achieved popularity as a singer in Boston, in 1872, she sent for him. Mansfield tried various business and artistic pursuits in Boston with little success, so he returned to England. For several years, he barely subsisted on the streets of London until W. S. Gilbert hired him for a touring company of H.M.S. Pinafore.
In 1882, Mansfield returned to the United States and began his quarter century as one of the finest intellectual actors of his day. Despite his acclaimed performances in A Parisian Romance (1883), Prince Karl (1886), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), Beau Brummell (1890), Cyrano de Bergerac (1895), and notable Shakespearean productions—including Richard III (1889), King Henry V (1900), and Julius Caesar (1902)—his career path was uneven, largely due to his legendarily hot temper and his lack of social graces. Among his aforementioned most notable appearances on Broadway, Mansfield also acted in Napoleon Bonaparte (1894), The King of Peru (1895), The Story of Rodion, the Student (1895), Castle Sombras (1896), the American debut of George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (1897), The First Violin (1898), Beaucaire (1901), Old Heidelberg (1903), Ivan the Terrible (1904), The Misanthrope (1905), and Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1907). William Winter wrote a biography, The Life and Art of Richard Mansfield (1910). Mansfield was married to actress Beatrice Cameron who, following his death, celebrated his legacy with readings from his favorite plays.
Robert Bruce Mantell was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, and ran away from home in order to be an actor in England. After two brief, unsuccessful visits to the United States, Mantell finally made his New York debut in 1883, opposite Fanny Davenport in Victorien Sardou’s Fedora at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. His performance the following season in Called Back was hailed in the New York Times: “His graceful stage presence and musical voice, which is managed with great skill, are as effective as they were in Sardou’s play, and in the two most striking scenes . . . , Mr. Mantell is given the opportunity to exhibit some of the power which made him the lion of the day among theatre-goers last season.”
After touring for several seasons in old romantic historical melodramas like Monbars, Mantell remade himself as a Shakespearean actor (in such plays as Othello, King Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, King John, Romeo and Juliet, among others) and, according to Lewis C. Strang, was “remarkably successful in catching the popular ear” through his personal magnetism and direct rapport with his audiences. Among Mantell’s Broadway appearances were a 1904 revival of Richelieu, The Dagger and the Cross (1905), a 1909 revival of Louis XI, and as Hamlet in Percy MacKaye’s pageant Caliban of the Yellow Sands (1916), which marked the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Mantell made his movie debut at the dawn of that industry, appearing in scenes from Monbars in 1896. He acted in seven additional films, including Under the Red Robe (1923). His son, Robert B. Mantell Jr. (1912–1933), was also an actor who appeared in his father’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac and two films.
Robert Burns Mantle was born in Watertown, New York, where he apprenticed as a printer. He became a drama critic in 1898, writing reviews for the Denver Times and the Denver Republican before moving to Chicago for a six-year stint as critic for the Inter-Ocean. In 1907, Mantle joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune. Later he became critic for the New York Evening Mail (1911–1922) and then the New York Daily News (1922–1943). As a strong proponent of a serious American drama, Mantle’s most lasting contribution may be the Best Plays annual he founded in 1919 (and edited from its founding to the 1947–1948 volume). It featured abridged versions of what he regarded as the most important American plays of the year, as well as narrative and statistical information on that year’s Broadway theater season. Mantle’s other books include American Playwrights of To-Day (1929) and Contemporary American Playwrights (1938).
New York City native Victor Mapes was educated at Columbia University, graduating in 1891. A job as a journalist led him to Paris, where he studied playwriting at the Sorbonne. His first play, La Comtesse de Lisne, was staged in France in 1895. Not long after, Mapes returned to the United States and took a stage manager job with producer Daniel Frohman in 1897, subsequently becoming a drama critic for the New York World using the pseudonym Sidney Sharp. He established himself as a dramatist with A Flower of Yeddo (1898) and The Tory’s Guest (1900). While continuing to write plays, Mapes also worked as a director at Daly’s Theatre, and, in 1904, he took over management of Boston’s Globe Theatre. Two years later, Mapes became director of Chicago’s New Theatre, but its mission of producing worthy plays without elaborate production values found little audience support. Mapes’s most successful play, written in collaboration with Winchell Smith, The Boomerang (1915), ran for 522 performances on Broadway. He also found success with The New Henrietta (1913), revised from Bronson Howard’s play by Mapes and Smith, and The Hottentot (1920), coauthored by William Collier. Mapes’s other plays produced on Broadway included Don Caesar’s Return (1901), Captain Barrington (1903), The Lassoo (1917), and The Long Dash (1918). Mapes also wrote for the movies, though mostly adapting his own plays for the screen.
Born in New York City, Scott Marble acted with many stock companies and on Broadway, then became a prolific author of melodramas that tended to find their audiences on the road more than in New York. His plays include The Police Patrol (1892), Tennessee’s Pardner (1894), The Sidewalks of New York (1895), The Cotton Spinner (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1896), The Heart of the Klondike (1897), Have You Seen Smith? (1898), On Land and Sea (1898), and Daughters of the Poor (1899). Marble’s The Great Train Robbery provided the story for perhaps the first hit movie, directed in 1903 by Edwin S. Porter.
The Marbles are less widely known than other American acting dynasties like the Booths, the Barrymores, or Chapmans because the Marble family remained devoted to repertory in the Midwest. Dan and Anna (Warren) Marble had four children in the profession during the modernist era: William “Billy” (1840–1912), John (1844–1919), Edward (1846–1900), and Emma (1848–1930). Edward’s daughter Anna (1880–1946) was a playwright and press agent, who married Channing Pollock.
America’s first playwrights’ agent as well as a producer, Elisabeth Marbury was born into a well-established New York City family. Educated in the classics, in bookkeeping, and in social skills, she defied the expectations of her fashionable upbringing to undertake her own business enterprises. Marbury was drawn to theater through her charitable work on benefit performances in the mid-1880s, the success of which led to Daniel Frohman’s recommendation that she make a career in theater management. It was also through a charity event that she met actress Elsie de Wolfe, with whom she maintained a liaison for more than 40 years.
Marbury’s first professional venture in theater was the management of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1888. She was in Paris to arrange the French production of it when she offered to manage the American productions of plays by the commercially successful playwright Victorien Sardou. That association led to her becoming in 1890 the only English-language representative for all French playwrights. From her head office in the Empire Theatre Building (where she channeled a steady stream of international plays to Charles Frohman in offices a floor below hers), Marbury opened play-brokering offices in Berlin, London, Madrid, Moscow, and Paris. Among her many other ventures were the American Play Company (1914), the Castle House ballroom dancing school, the intimate-scale Princess Theatre musicals she produced (1915–1918), war relief activities, and various offices in the Democratic Party. Marbury’s partner de Wolfe retired from acting and, with Marbury’s encouragement, became a fashion leader and interior designer, often designing scenery for plays produced by Marbury. Marbury published her autobiography, My Crystal Ball, in 1923.
Born in Poznan, Prussia, Max Marcin attended school in the United States and worked as a journalist before attempting playwriting. His first Broadway success, The House of Glass (1915), was a light melodrama, but he demonstrated versatility in popular theater with his next play, the hit comedy Cheating Cheaters (1916). In collaboration with Charles Guernon, Marcin had another hit with Eyes of Youth (1917) and continued with only slightly diminished success during the next decade writing well-constructed entertainments, including The Woman in Room 13 (1919, written with Samuel Shipman), Silence (1924), and Badges (1924, in collaboration with Edward Hammond). Never averse to writing on demand, Marcin crafted a stage vehicle for champion prizefighter Jack Dempsey called The Big Fight (1928).
Eugene O’Neill’s three-act indictment of the excesses of capitalism in an opulently staged historical drama about Marco Polo opened on 9 January 1928 at the Guild Theatre and ran for 92 performances. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian and designed by Lee Simonson, the Theatre Guild production featured Alfred Lunt as the Venetian traveler who becomes ever more crassly materialistic, to the point that the Princess of Cathay (played by Margalo Gillmore*) dies heartbroken in her love for him. Morris Carnovsky* played the Khan of Persia, and the large cast also included Mary Blair, Dudley Digges, Sanford Meisner,* and Henry Travers. Also a satiric view of Western ideas of Eastern life, the sweeping work also explores racism, imperialist attitudes, and religious difference. Marco Polo, an inveterate capitalist, goes so far as to state: “I hate idleness, where there’s nothing to occupy your mind but thinking.” The Theatre Guild’s 1930 revival achieved only eight performances, but a 1964 American National Theater and Academy* revival ran for 49 performances with Hal Holbrook* in the title role, and a 2006 off-Broadway* revival was well received by critics. The BBC filmed the play for television in 1939, but to date there has been no movie version.
Considered the first American drama to adopt the “social problem play” realism pioneered by Henrik Ibsen, James A. Herne’s drama focuses on Margaret Fleming’s discovery that her husband, Philip, has fathered a child by a young woman working in his mill. When the child’s mother dies in childbirth, Margaret, who suffers from near blindness due to the birth of her own daughter, takes responsibility for the child. Devastated by her husband’s deceit and its sudden revelation, Margaret loses her eyesight. In a sequence that shocked audiences, Margaret suckles the illegitimate child at her own breast.
In the original version of the play, Margaret rebuffed Philip’s plea for reconciliation, but Herne’s revision concludes with a reconciliation. First produced on 4 May 1891 for one performance at Boston’s Chickering Hall, Margaret Fleming shocked audiences with what Hamlin Garland called its “radical” depiction of marital infidelity and its consequences. Herne’s wife, Katharine Corcoran Herne, played Margaret. Herne won the label of the “American Ibsen,” but few American playwrights followed this example (including Herne himself) for a generation. William Dean Howells called Herne the greatest U.S. playwright of the era.
Born in San Francisco, the actor got his start with Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels. By the mid-1890s, he was acting in legitimate theater in New York. From the 1900s to the 1940s, he directed and produced plays on Broadway but often returned to acting, notably to create the role of Chris Christopherson in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie in 1921.
Born Sarah Frances Frost in Upton Caldbeck, Cumberland, England, she was brought to the United States when she was four. The Frost family lived in a Kansas suburb of Kansas City in 1872. Her acting career began after the family moved to Cincinnati. From 1880 to 1884, she toured with juvenile companies, performing under the name Fanny Brough. After taking three years to study under actress Ada Dow, she returned to the stage as a star, using the name Julia Marlowe. With Dow taking the financial risk, Marlowe made her debut as Parthenia in Ingomar. On Broadway, she also acted in Barbara Frietchie (1899); When Knighthood Was in Flower (1901); The Cavalier (1902); 1907 revivals of The Sunken Bell, Jeanne D’Arc, and John the Baptist; The Goddess of Reason (1909); and a 1913 revival of If I Were King.
In 1887, Marlowe first appeared in her great Shakespearean roles, Juliet and Viola, followed by Rosalind in 1889. She married her leading man, Robert Taber, in 1894 and, for several seasons, was billed as Mrs. Taber; they divorced in 1900. In the early years of the 20th century, Marlowe was one of the top names in New York and on the road, for she projected an appealing wholesomeness, and she had a distinctive beauty with her expressive eyes and cleft chin. She worked hard to develop her vocal quality and used her plaintive tones intelligently.
In 1904, Charles Frohman teamed Marlowe with E. H. Sothern as costars in Romeo and Juliet, and the symbiosis was magical. Together, Sothern and Marlowe restored to the American stage the Shakespearean repertoire, which had fallen into neglect. They played Beatrice and Benedick, Ophelia and Hamlet, Katharine and Petruchio, Portia and Shylock, and Viola and Malvolio in lushly mounted productions. They married, toured to London, retired for a time, entertained the troops during World War I, and always advocated for the art of the theater in the life of a nation.
Born William A. Sliver in Baltimore, he gave up his law practice and changed his name to become an actor. However, it was as a playwright of stage material for celebrities that he made a fortune. Marsden wrote regularly for stage Irishmen including Joe Murphy (for whom Marsden wrote Kerry Gow, 1880), Roland Reed (Cheek, 1883), and W. J. Scanlan (The Irish Minstrel, 1884). Among his other plays produced in New York were Zip; or, Point Lynde Light† (1874), Musette (1876), and Otto, a German (1881).
Born William Phillips in Nevada City, California, he found his calling as an actor when he studied dramatic literature at Santa Clara College. He joined a stock company in San Francisco and later toured with Helena Modjeska. The versatile actor enjoyed a 40-year stage career before going into movies. Some of his best roles were in The Builders (1907), Paid in Full (1908), The City (1909), and in a comedy by his wife Marion Fairfax, The Talker (1912).
Born in the Czech Republic, Lawrence Marston went on the stage as an actor in the United States but ultimately wrote plays, produced, and directed. Marston’s plays included An Innocent Sinner (1896), The Widow Goldstein (1897), For Liberty and Love (1897), The Helmet of Navarre (1901), The Penitent (1902), The Little Mother (1902), A Remarkable Case (1902), After Midnight (1904), When the World Sleeps (1905), and Jeanne D’Arc (1906). He transitioned to directing (and producing) after 1906, and his two most notable productions were the astonishingly successful Anne Nichols comedy, Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), and Death Takes a Holiday (1929), which provided an early opportunity for Katharine Hepburn.* However, both Hepburn and Marston were fired before the play opened. Marston’s other Broadway productions included The Prince of India (1906), The Round Up (1907), The Sins of Society (1909), a 1910 revival of Jim the Penman, Drifting (1910), Kismet (1911), Eyes of Youth (1917), Up in the Clouds (1922), The Monster (1922), The Virgin of Bethulia (1925), Taps (1925), Man or Devil (1925), Money Business (1926), The Jeweled Tree (1926), The Crown Prince (1927), Half a Widow (1927), and Happy Landing (1932). Marston also worked as a screenwriter and movie director, including a 1914 screen version of Under the Gaslight† starring Lionel Barrymore.
Opening on 5 February 1925 at the Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre, Rachel Crothers’s popular comedy-drama focused on the new woman and ran for 163 performances. The title character is a flapper who wrestles with ideas about love and marriage, issues thrown into relief by a prologue showing her grandmother, Mary I, manipulating her man in the 1870s. A scene set in the 1890s shows her mother, Mary II, as a conflicted Gibson girl. The bulk of the play is set in 1923, when Mary III witnesses a fight between her parents that reinforces her misgivings about marriage. Ultimately, she is able to reconcile a woman’s desire for economic independence with the romantic ending that pleased audiences. Crothers directed her own play, and Louise Huff played all three Marys. See also †WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION.
In the slang of the 1880s, “to mash” was to excite the admiration of one of the opposite sex. Thus an attractive actor might have numerous female fans who were “mashed” on him. The usually unwelcome attentions could range from “mash notes” delivered at the stage door to more aggressive pursuits like an incident in New York City that was reported in the Kansas City Times in 1888: “The proud position of being a ‘mash actor,’ though envied by a brainless few, has its drawbacks. The sight last week of Bob Hilliard rapidly transporting his Apollo-like form across Twenty-sixth street, while a discarded female acquaintance made frantic efforts to detain him by means of a firm grip upon his coat-tails, was both inspiriting and educational, and has been the talk of the town. By Hilliard’s seeking the refuge of a china shop, and enlisting the sympathies of its proprietor and staff of clerks, the petticoated Lochinvar was despoiled of her prey.”
To be “mashed” on an actor or actress went significantly beyond the passive admiration expressed by stage-door Johnnies and matinee girls. “Mashed on Rhéa” was the headline on a front-page story during the Kansas City engagement of Hortense Rhéa, reporting that “a Boston merchant of considerable means” had been following the actress from town to town, never missing a performance, repeatedly sending up his card at the stage door but never receiving any encouragement from her after an initial interview granted in response to his claim to have crossed from Europe on the same steamship with her.
Theater audiences particularly attracted mashers, youths who would hang around in public places in hopes of attaining some physical contact with a girl or woman. Local mashers did not necessarily seek the attention of any particular actress but mooned over the fair sex opportunistically. The Kansas City Evening Star ran a four-paragraph commentary in 1880 on “Opera House Mashers,” teens who could be seen under the streetlight, wearing “natty hand-me-downs,” as the audience came out after the performance. “He don’t go inside and mash the fascinated darlings, like the famous professional matinee mashers of Chicago. . . . He was never known to make a mash. He does not possess the necessary nerve to follow up a mash. He simply exhibits himself, and expects some poor stricken thing to kiss him. He is no good.”
The theatrical mask is of ancient origin. The modernist theater offers only occasional examples when the mask is integral to the production, notably in Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown. Robert Edmond Jones also used masks to good scenic effect in Macbeth (1921) and as costume pieces in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. W. T. Benda was the supreme mask maker in New York.
Born in Orange, New Jersey, into the wealthy family that manufactured Mason & Hamlin organs, John Mason made his acting debut with the Boston Stock Company. With his first wife, Marion Manola, he performed in musicals. After their divorce, he turned to legitimate theater and earned respect, according to his Variety obituary, as “one of America’s foremost actors.” In 1886, he played Edmund to Edwin Booth’s King Lear. He played a supporting role to Viola Allen in The Christian. Among his numerous stage appearances in the 1900s and 1910s, he played leading roles in two plays by Augustus Thomas: the gambler hero in The Witching Hour (1907) and the kindly Jewish Dr. Seelig in As a Man Thinks (1911). Mason’s second wife was actress Katherine Grey.
Born in New York City, Frances Aymar Mathews was a prolific playwright, beginning with Bigamy (with E. Henderson, 1881). Actress Fanny Davenport commissioned her to write a play about Joan of Arc, and the result was Joan (1898). Her most successful play, Pretty Peggy (1902), about Peg Woffington, starred Grace George.
Any performance scheduled during daylight hours could be called a matinee. Family fare was often scheduled for the Saturday matinee slot. Full-week engagements by touring stars usually included two matinee performances, a Saturday and a weekday, often Wednesday. See also MATINEE GIRL; MATINEE IDOL.
Since it was considered appropriate for women to attend the theater during daylight hours without male escort, matinee audiences were predominantly women. Young ladies often attended in small groups on a regular basis, enjoying—perhaps as much as the plays—the freedom from adult supervision as well as the justification for daytime wardrobe enhancement. The matinee girl made an obsession of her theatergoing and became a devoted fan of certain attractive actors known as matinee idols. She would imitate an admired actress’s style of dress or manner of wearing a hat. When the stock company actress Eva Lang developed a matinee girl following in Kansas City during the 1900s, the young women would go home after the play to practice in front of a mirror the Eva Lang gestures and the Eva Lang walk.
A term applied to handsome leading men who attracted large audiences of women to matinee performances of popular melodramas and comedies, it also applied to movie actors. In the case of matinee idol John Barrymore, for example, the term applied to him at the height of his stage career (1910s–1920s) and in movies (1920s–1930s).
The playwright Adelaide Matthews was born in Kenduskeag, Maine, and attended drama school in New York. She wrote many successful comedies in collaboration with Martha Stanley, including Nightie Night (1919), Scrambled Wives (1920), Puppy Love (1926), and The Wasp’s Nest (1929). With Anne Nichols, she wrote Heart’s Desire (1916) and Nearly Married (1929).
Born in New Orleans, the son of wealthy parents, James Brander Matthews moved to New York and attended Columbia University. He began law school in 1871, but when his family’s fortunes collapsed, he took a job writing for the Nation (1875–1895). Matthews also completed several plays, including Margery’s Lovers (1878), A Gold Mine (1889), and On Probation (1889). He had a deep interest in French literature and theater, and this led to a position teaching literature at Columbia in 1891.
In 1902, Matthews became the first American academic to be a professor of dramatic literature. He did much to elevate theater as an academic discipline, stressing that plays were not simply literature but must be studied in light of performance issues. He continued at Columbia until his retirement in 1924. Among his two dozen books are The French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1882), Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States (1886, a five-volume work coauthored with Laurence Hutton), Development of the Drama (1903), Principles of Playmaking (1919), and two autobiographies, These Many Years (1917) and Rip Van Winkle Goes to the Play (1926).
Born William Somerset Maugham in Paris, this distinguished British novelist also wrote several plays. Jack Straw (1908), the first of his sophisticated comedies staged in New York, starred John Drew. Charles Frohman’s productions of Maugham’s relatively slight works—including Lady Frederick (1908), Mrs. Dot (1910), and Smith (1910)—were precursors to Maugham’s finest high comedies: Our Betters (1917), Too Many Husbands (1919), The Circle (1921), and The Constant Wife (1926), all of which were subsequently revived. Moving from comedy to drama, Maugham had a major hit with The Letter (1927). One of his short stories was adapted as Rain (1922) by John B. Colton and Clemence Randolph to become one of the most successful plays of the era.
Written by George H. Jessop and Horace Townsend, this sentimental play featuring a ballad-singing stage Irishman opened 28 September 1891 at the Fourteenth Street Theatre and ran for 102 performances. It was this production that launched Chauncey Olcott to stardom in Irish character roles in 1892, after he replaced W. J. Scanlan as Terence Dwyer.
The playwright and movie writer Edwin Justus Mayer was born in New York City. He did freelance writing while working at various jobs, and he published his autobiography, A Preface to Life (1923), when he was 25. He was press agent for Arthur Hopkins. His two major Broadway plays were The Firebrand (1924) and Children of Darkness (1930), which he also directed. With music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, The Firebrand was adapted into a musical, The Firebrand of Florence (1945). Mayer also wrote The Last Love of Don Juan (1955). In Hollywood, Mayer worked closely with director Ernst Lubitsch on To Be or Not to Be (1942) and A Royal Scandal (1945), as well as other films including The Affairs of Cellini (1934), based on The Firebrand, and They Met in Bombay (1941).
The prominent manager of actors and opera singers had begun as a stagecoach driver for Wells Fargo Express and as San Francisco correspondent to the New York Clipper under the byline Reyam Sucram, his name spelled backward. Although he is best remembered as manager of Sarah Bernhardt’s first American tour (and is mentioned in her memoirs), Mayer also managed Charlotte Cushman,† Edwin Booth, Adelina Patti, Adelaide Nielson, Mary Anderson, Rose Eytinge, Fanny Davenport, Olga Nethersole, Henry Irving, Lillie Langtry, and Madame Calvé. Several of his management ventures were in association with Henry E. Abbey. He lived at the Lambs Club, of which he was an early member.
Indianapolis-born Kate Mayhew had a career as an actress that lasted more than 75 years during which time she appeared in over 500 stage productions. She debuted at New York’s Niblo’s Garden† in 1873 and acted in M’Liss,† both in New York and on tour in 1878. Mayhew had been locked in a legal battle with Annie Pixley over M’Liss, but Pixley largely prevailed and the role made her a star, while Mayhew also found some success with it. During the 1870s, Mayhew also appeared as an ingénue in many popular 19th-century melodramas. After playing Asian characters in the 1890s, Mayhew evolved into a cherubic character actress and, on Broadway, appeared in The Vanderbilt Cup (1906), Johnny, Get Your Gun (1917), The Little Teacher (1918), The Wonderful Visit (1924), The Small Timers (1925), The Wisdom Tooth (1926), Jonesy (1929), The Joyous Season (1934), The Farmer Takes a Wife (1934), A Journey by Night (1935), and Alice Takat (1936). Mayhew also appeared in revivals of August Strindberg’s The Father and George Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem in 1928, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1930, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin† in 1933. Mayhew acted in a few films, including Baseball’s Peerless Leader (1913), Hazel Kirke (1916), and Tongues of Flame (1924).
Born Lilian Slatten on a farm near Brownsville, Illinois, she left home at age 16 to escape an unwelcome suitor. In New York City, she drifted into acting, taking her stage name and performing mostly on tour. In 1901, the petite blonde character actress married the tall, handsome actor Edgar Selwyn, with whom she appeared in Arizona. After 1903, she devoted herself entirely to playwriting and won considerable success with Polly of the Circus (1907), Baby Mine (1911), and Twin Beds (1914). She and Selwyn collaborated on the book for a musical, The Wall Street Girl (1912). During World War I, she headed a unit of the Over There Theatre League to entertain American troops in France. Mayo and Selwyn divorced in 1919. Mayo retired to Harmon-on-the-Hudson, New York, and became active in social causes.
Born Rosalie Virginia Scott in Greenville, South Carolina, this African American actress came to New York City with her family when she was six. In 1904, she married Dr. Henry Pruden McClendon, a chiropractor and Pullman porter. A 1916 scholarship enabled her to study under Frank Sargent at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and professional engagements followed. She rose to stardom on the New York stage and gained recognition as “the Negro race’s first lady” through her performances in Deep River (1926), In Abraham’s Bosom (1926), Porgy (1927), and The House of Connelly* (1931). She contributed to planning for the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project* and performed for a time in Mulatto* (1936) until her final illness necessitated her leaving the cast.
The Irish-born actor John McCullough came to the United States at 15, learned his craft by performing with amateur companies, and made his professional debut on 15 August 1857 at the Arch Street Theatre† in Philadelphia. During the 1860s, he toured as second lead to Edwin Forrest.† He then entered management, running a San Francisco theater in partnership with Lawrence Barrett. McCullough’s last decade was spent touring as a star in historical melodramas and Shakespeare. He was physically imposing and handsome, with a grand, heroic style that was already seen as old-fashioned in the 1880s, when he suffered periods of mental instability. The respect felt for McCullough by his fellow players is touchingly evoked in Footlights and Spotlights (1924) by Otis Skinner, who called “Genial John” one of the “finest spirits” he ever met, and in Fifty Years of Make-Believe (1920) by Frederick Warde, who praised McCullough as “an honor to the profession that he so conspicuously adorned.”
Novelist and playwright John Patrick McEvoy was born in New York. After completing a degree at Notre Dame, he worked as a journalist before scoring a theatrical success with the long-running comedy The Potters (1923). Another play, God Loves Us (1926), was a failure. Most of McEvoy’s writing for the stage consisted of sketches for the revue† series Americana (1926, 1927, 1932), Ziegfeld Follies of 1925, and libretti for musicals, including Allez-oop (1927) and Stars in Your Eyes (1939). His novel, Show Girl, was the source for the 1929 Ziegfeld-produced musical of the same name, which starred Ruby Keeler and Jimmy Durante. He also wrote nearly two dozen movies, including Glorifying the American Girl (1929), The Lemon Drop Kid (1934), Love in Bloom (1935), and W. C. Fields’s vehicle It’s a Gift (1934), as well as movie adaptations of The Potters (1927) and Show Girl (1928).
San Francisco–born Frank McGlynn, son of Irish immigrant parents, studied law and was admitted to the bar, but he turned to the theater when he appeared in Victor Herbert’s The Gold Bug in 1896, after which he toured in Under the Red Robe. McGlynn had his first Broadway success playing the title role in John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln (1919), reprising the part in 1929 for a revival. He made something of a habit of playing historical characters, as when he played Andrew Jackson in That Awful Mrs. Eaton (1924). His other Broadway credits include Steadfast (1923), Catskill Dutch (1924), A Free Soul (1928), The Broken Chain (1929), and Frankie and Johnnie (1930). McGlynn had appeared in silent films, including the 1924 short Abraham Lincoln, the first of multiple screen appearances in which he played Lincoln, including The Littlest Rebel (1935), The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), Hearts in Bondage (1936), The Plainsman (1936), Wells Fargo (1937), and The Lone Ranger (1938). His son, Frank McGlynn Jr. (1904–1939), was also an actor who appeared mostly in B westerns and bit roles.
Born in Chicago, William Anthony McGuire worked as a newspaperman, although he wrote plays in his youth. His most successful plays were Six-Cylinder Love (1921) and Twelve Miles Out (1926), but he also directed, produced, and wrote librettos and sketches for nine Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.–produced musicals and revues,† including Rosalie (1928), Whoopee (1928), and The Three Musketeers (1928).
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, this stocky comedian worked as a newspaper reporter before making his acting debut in 1901 in Rome, New York, as Crumpet in The Honorable John Grigsby. That play took him to Broadway when it opened at the Manhattan Theatre on 28 January 1902. He soon achieved stardom with notable performances in Becky Sharp with Minnie Maddern Fiske (1903), in Strongheart (1905 and for his 1907 London debut), and many others until he turned to radio in the 1930s. Above all, McIntyre was identified with the title role of drummer Bob Blake in The Traveling Salesman (1908), the hit comedy that ran for 280 performances.
The critic and playwright John J. McNally was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Although he studied law at Harvard University, he went into newspaper work, becoming drama editor for the Boston Times and, later, editing or writing for the Boston Star and the Boston Herald. Revels (1880) was the first in his series of plays for the Rogers brothers. Besides his original works, including The Widow Jones and The Night Clerk (both 1895), he adapted spectacles from London’s Drury Lane Theatre for American audiences.
The English actor Bruce McRae, nephew of Sir Charles Wyndham and of Bronson Howard, was born in India and educated in France. He made his stage debut in 1891 at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre in Thermidor and quickly rose to popularity. He played Dr. Watson to William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes in that play’s original production (1899) and was leading man to Ethel Barrymore for several seasons from 1902. His Broadway credits include The Moth and the Flame (1898), When Knighthood Was in Flower (1901), Cousin Kate (1903), revivals of Camille playing opposite Margaret Anglin and A Doll’s House costarring Barrymore, J. M. Barrie’s Pantaloon/Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire (1905), The Silver Box (1907), a 1907 revival of Rosmersholm costarring Minnie Maddern Fiske and George Arliss, Lady Frederick (1908), The Lily (1909), Nobody’s Widow (1910), Come out of the Kitchen (1916), Daddies (1918), The Gold Diggers (1919), The Awful Truth (1922), and Little Miss Bluebeard (1923).
Besides his touring engagements, McRae played two seasons (1911–1912) with stock companies in Denver. He was often cast in society roles, though he held those character types in disregard. He continued to act despite chronic heart ailments, and he even persisted with his last role, in The Legend of Leonora (1927) with Grace George, after a heart attack. McRae appeared in several movies, beginning in 1914, including Hazel Kirke (1916) and The World’s a Stage (1922), his last.
The son of Chicago’s famed theater manager J. H. McVicker,† Horace McVicker also went into management. Based in New York, he managed Abbey’s Theatre and later managed Ethel Barrymore on the road.
The son of notable stage actor Robert McWade, Robert McWade Jr. followed his father on the stage, making his debut in 1903. His major Broadway appearances included a 1907 revival of Ben-Hur, William Vaughan Moody’s flop The Faith Healer (1910), Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1910), Cleves Kinkead’s Common Clay (1915), the hit Cheating Cheaters (1916), and The Old Soak (1922). He also acted in The Boys of Company “B” (1907), Via Wireless (1908), The Fourth Estate (1909), The Country Boy (1910), The Governor’s Lady (1912), Years of Discretion (1912), The Deluge (1917), The Matinee Hero (1918), New Brooms (1924), The Home Towners (1926), Devil in the Cheese (1926), and many others. McWade began acting in movies from 1924 and appeared in over 80 films, including screen versions of plays he appeared in, such as New Brooms (1925) and The Home Towners (1928), as well as classics including Cimarron (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), 42nd Street (1933), and The County Chairman (1935).
The eminent actor Robert McWade was born in Long Sault Rapids, Canada, and made his stage debut at Detroit’s Metropolitan Opera House. His long career encompassed engagements with Charlotte Cushman,† Edwin Booth, and many others. His own version of Rip Van Winkle was a mainstay of his career for 23 years and rivaled that of Joseph Jefferson. On Broadway, he appeared in The Devil’s Auction; or, The Golden Branch (1867) and a revival of Ben-Hur in 1905. McWade acted in movies, mostly short subjects, in 1912–1913, beginning with a short version of his Rip Van Winkle, as well as playing Touchstone in As You Like It (1912), Father’s Hot Toddy (1912), and The Bringing Out of Papa (1913). He was the father of Robert McWade Jr., who had a long career on stage and in movies.
George M. Cohan produced Augustin MacHugh’s comedy/drama based on an Everett Ruskay skit at the Hudson Theatre, where it opened on 12 October 1920 for 202 performances. Cohan played Richard Clarke, a kindhearted lawyer who considers himself a failure. A friend persuades Clarke that to succeed a man must be selfish and mean. He travels to a Pennsylvania town to collect a bill from J. Hudson and Co., but he discovers that J. Hudson is an attractive young woman, Jane Hudson, being bilked by an unscrupulous tightwad. Clarke gives up his “mean” persona and represents Jane, whom he ultimately marries. Critics applauded Cohan’s performance and found the play “delightfully humorous comedy, well played.” Movie versions were released in 1923 and 1943, the latter starring Jack Benny.
Canadian-born actor, director, and writer John Meehan set out to be a chef but pursued an acting career on Broadway before turning to directing and writing. He acted in Soldiers of Fortune (1902), The County Chairman (1903), Genesee of the Hills (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston (1908), Abraham Lincoln (1919), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Captain Jinks (1925), and A Journey by Night (1935). Meehan directed the Broadway productions of George M. Cohan’s The Tavern (1920), The Meanest Man in the World (1920), So This Is London (1922), The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly (1923), Yellow (1926), and A Lady for a Night (1928). As a playwright, Meehan had Broadway productions including The Very Minute (1917), Barnum Was Right (1923), The Tantrum (1924), Bluffing Bluffers (1924), Bless You, Sister (1927), and The Lady Lies (1928), none of which was particularly successful. Among the 34 movies Meehan wrote were The Divorcee (1930), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, A Free Soul (1931), The Painted Veil (1934), Madame X (1937), and Boys Town (1938), which he coauthored with Dore Schary,* also resulting in an Academy Award nomination.
One of those movie character actors whose face is known from dozens of films but whose name is unfamiliar, Scottish-born Donald Meek trained for a career as a gymnast, but a broken leg ended that hope. He turned to acting and amassed an impressive list of screen credits, but that work was dwarfed by the 800 characters Meek played in theater. Beginning in England, where he performed with Sir Henry Irving when he was eight years old, and in Australia, as well as on tour, Meek was a prodigious talent before his permanent move to the United States. He fought in the Spanish-American War, contracting yellow fever, which caused the premature loss of his hair. Meek’s trademark baldness helped make him immediately recognizable. His surname says it all; Meek often played milquetoast characters, usually of a kindly and benign nature, though occasionally Meek played corrupt or even villainous types. On Broadway, Meek acted in The Minister’s Daughters (1903), Going Up (1917), Nothing but Love (1919), The Hottentot (1920), Little Old New York (1920), Six-Cylinder Love (1921), Tweedles (1923), The Potters (1923), Fool’s Bells (1925), Spread Eagle (1927), Mr. Moneypenny (1928), Broken Dishes (1929), and Take My Tip (1932). Meek made his first screen appearance repeating his Six-Cylinder Love character in 1923, followed by supporting roles in such classics as Captain Blood (1935), Pennies from Heaven (1936), You Can’t Take It with You* (1938), Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), My Little Chickadee (1940), State Fair (1945), and over 100 others.
The playwright and agent Roi Cooper Megrue was born in New York City, educated at Trinity School and Columbia University, and worked with Elisabeth Marbury as a play broker. His familiarity with playwrights’ contracts and negotiations with theater managers took him to a leadership role in the Dramatists Guild. His own plays were produced on Broadway throughout the 1910s. Noteworthy among these were It Pays to Advertise (with Walter Hackett, 1914), Under Cover (1914), Under Fire (1915), Under Sentence (with Irvin S. Cobb, 1916), and Tea for Three (1918). According to his Variety obituary, the unmarried playwright’s “affectionate relationship with his mother was epic.” He and his widowed mother, Mrs. Stella (Cooper) Megrue, shared an artistically furnished apartment.
London-born actor Fuller Mellish spent much of his career in the American theater in character roles. On Broadway, Mellish acted in The Only Way (1902); a range of revivals of Shakespearean plays and a 1907 revival of Rosmersholm with Minnie Maddern Fiske and George Arliss; The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1909); What Price Glory (1924); several musicals including The Student Prince (1924), My Maryland (1927), and Present Arms (1928); Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1929); Melo (1931); and others until shortly before his death. Mellish appeared in 20 movies between 1915 and 1934. His son, Fuller Mellish Jr. (1895–1930), and his daughter, Vera Fuller Mellish (1893–1968), were both successful working actors.
The dominant dramatic genre on the American stage throughout the entire 19th century, melodrama lost its edge only in the 20th century when the influence of Henrik Ibsen and a growing preference for plays of psychological realism relegated the cheap appeals of melodrama first to the ten, twent’, thirt’ theaters and then to the silent movies. Melodrama had taken hold in Europe by 1800 with the widespread translation and staging of German-language plays by August Kotzebue and French plays by Guilbert de Pixérécourt, both of whom deployed gripping plots leavened by sentimentality and comedy. Adaptations of their work by William Dunlap† and Mordecai Noah† established the fairy-tale melodrama on the early 19th-century American stage, followed by romantic historical melodramas like those written for Edwin Forrest.† Historical melodramas that continued to be revived throughout the 19th century include Ingomar, the Barbarian and The Two Orphans.†
By midcentury, Thomas S. Hamblin,† manager of New York City’s Bowery Theatre, had demonstrated the viability of maintaining a stock company to perform blood-and-guts melodrama for working-class audiences. After the Civil War and the enduring example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,† melodrama was often co-opted by social reformers, with temperance melodramas as a prominent subcategory. A growing demand for scenic spectacle spawned what Bruce McConachie has termed “apocalyptic melodramas,” featuring conflagrations, shipwrecks, natural disasters, street riots, and battlefield action. Among the most successful authors of plays with sensational effects were Augustin Daly, Dion Boucicault, David Belasco, and later, Owen Davis.
While the spectacular effects of sensation dramas like Mazeppa,† Ben-Hur, Blue Jeans, and The Heart of Maryland continued to draw popular audiences throughout the modernist era, the genre also took a turn toward depicting the familiar reality of its patronage after 1870. Those who kept their stories more grounded in everyday experience included Bronson Howard, Clyde Fitch, Steele MacKaye, and William Gillette with plays like Shenandoah, The City, Hazel Kirke, and Secret Service, respectively. While certain aspects of melodrama—clear distinctions between good and evil, suspenseful situations, tight and logically structured action—will always have a place in some form of the drama, the genre itself gradually fell out of fashion as the motion picture siphoned off its strongest customer base. By the early 20th century, the grand manner of acting that was so effective in scenes of pathos or terror appeared overwrought and laughable.
Liebler & Co. produced Israel Zangwill’s four-act drama, based on his own novel, at the Comedy Theatre, where it opened on 6 September 1909 for 136 performances. Starring Chrystal Herne and Walker Whiteside, the play concerns a Russian-Jewish family caught up in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, including the composer son David, who has survived a pogrom and escaped to the United States. David’s family was killed in the pogrom, and he composes an “American Symphony” in hopes of living in a free society without ethnic hatred and violence as he tries to forget his tragic losses. When the play was performed in Washington, D.C., President Theodore Roosevelt was in attendance and praised its author, Zangwill. Whiteside reprised his role in a 1915 movie version. The Melting Pot was revived at New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse in March 2006.
A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Rosa Smock married twice but worked under the name of her first husband, Frank Melville. She took Melville’s name and debuted in a male role in Queen’s Evidence in Zanesville, Ohio, as well as other popular 19th-century melodramas, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin,† The Two Orphans,† and Fanchon, the Cricket.† Melville, in partnership with her sister, Ida, set up a touring company, and in 1894, she appeared for the first time as Sis Hopkins, an unsophisticated, eccentric country girl in Zeb. The response to her performance was such that the play moved to New York, after which three additional plays, Little Christopher and The Prodigal Father, in 1896–1897, and By the Sad Sea Waves in 1898–1899, featured the character, as did a popular vaudeville sketch, Sis Hopkins’ Visit. This led to a full-length play, Sis Hopkins, with which Melville scored such a hit that she ultimately appeared in it over 5,000 times. Melville acted in 21 short movies as Sis Hopkins and two other films, Man’s Law and God’s (1922) and The Bishop of the Ozarks (1923), playing other characters. Mabel Normand took on the role in a 1919 film version, Sis Hopkins, and Judy Canova starred in a 1941 remake.
Henry C. DeMille and David Belasco based this four-act melodrama on an actual case of embezzlement drawn from newspaper headlines. Men and Women featured Maude Adams and William Morris when it opened on 21 October 1890 for 204 performances at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre, produced by Charles Frohman. A financial panic is set off when two young bank tellers, Edward Seabury and William Prescott, are suspected in the theft of bonds from their bank’s vault. Edward’s engagement to Dora, William’s sister, is jeopardized when Calvin Steadman, a rival for Dora’s love, frames him. When Governor Rodman supports Edward, Steadman reveals the governor’s shady past, leaving Edward in jeopardy until a repentant William confesses that in a moment of weakness he took the bonds. There is no prosecution, but William cannot find a job and fears he will lose his fiancée, Agnes, daughter of the disgraced governor. The bank president, taking pity on the lovers and convinced of William’s remorse, gives the young man a second chance. Critics applauded the play and the cast, but it was to be the last collaboration of DeMille and Belasco. Lionel Barrymore appeared in a 1914 movie adaptation of Men and Women. DeMille’s son, William C. deMille, directed a 1925 screen version.
Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, son of a cigar manufacturer. Remembered as a journalist whose cynical style epitomized intellectual attitudes of the first quarter of the 20th century, Mencken—along with his friend, dramatic critic George Jean Nathan—edited The Smart Set and The American Mercury. Mencken also wrote two unsuccessful plays, The Artist (1912) and Heliogabulus (1920). The character of sarcastic reporter E. K. Hornbeck in Inherit the Wind* (1955) was inspired by Mencken, who covered the famous Stokes “monkey trial” that is re-created in the play.
Helen Meinken and her sister, actress Grace Menken, were born in New York City to deaf parents. As a child, Helen played a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to open the Astor Theatre in 1906, followed by engagements with DeWolf Hopper in The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1908) and with Eddie Foy in Mr. Hamlet of Broadway (1909), and others. She made her adult debut on Broadway in Major Pendennis (1919) with John Drew. The first of her three husbands was the then little-known Humphrey Bogart. Her long list of credits as a leading lady include the role of Queen Elizabeth in the Theatre Guild production of Mary of Scotland* (1933). Increasingly troubled by facial paralysis from the 1940s, she turned to radio and producing. For the American Theatre Wing,* Menken produced the Stage Door Canteen* series, organized the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Awards, and served as president. At the 1966 Tony Awards,* she was posthumously recognized with a Special Award for a lifetime of service to Broadway theater.
Born in Seville, Spain, Beryl Mercer, the daughter of an English diplomat and an actress, went on stage at age four in England. Her career began fully at age 10 when she acted in London productions of The Darling of the Gods, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Shulamite in 1906, which brought her to the United States where she repeated the role. The small, rotund character actress appeared in a diverse range of stage and movie roles when she took up permanent residence in the United States. On Broadway, Mercer acted in A Lady’s Name (1916), The Lodger (1917), The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (1917), Humpty Dumpty (1918), Three Live Ghosts (1920), The ’49ers (1922), Queen Victoria (1923), Outward Bound (1924), a 1926 revival of Pygmalion, Right You Are If You Think You Are (1927), and Brass Buttons (1927). She appeared in an all-star 1917 eight-performance revival of J. Hartley Manners’s Out There for the benefit of the American Red Cross during World War I. Mercer also acted in silent films and is most remembered as gangster James Cagney’s uncomprehending “Ma” in Public Enemy (1931). Mercer also appeared in such screen classics as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Outward Bound (1930, a reprisal of her stage role), Smilin’ Through (1932), Cavalcade (1933), Berkeley Square (1933), Jane Eyre (1934), The Little Minister (1934), Magnificent Obsession (1935), Three Live Ghosts (1936), Night Must Fall (1937), The Little Princess (1939), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), among many others. Her second husband was actor Holmes Herbert.
Liebler & Co. produced Israel Zangwill’s four-act comedy, based on Zangwill’s novel of the same name, at the Garden Theatre (with subsequent moves to the Criterion Theatre and the Garrick Theatre), where it opened on 28 December 1903 for 148 performances. Eleanor Robson played the title character, an orphaned chambermaid, who becomes romantically involved with a poor but snobbish composer, Lancelot (played by Edwin Arden). Their evolving relationship slowly breaks down his elitist attitudes. Laura Hope Crews and Julia Dean were also in the cast. Merely Mary Ann was revived in 1907 for a brief run, with Robson again in the lead, supported by H. B. Warner as Lancelot and Holbrook Blinn. The play inspired three movie versions, in 1916, 1920, and 1931, the last with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.
Born in Stoke Newington, England, Marguerite Merington immigrated with her parents to New York City. She became a teacher of Greek but, for over 50 years, devoted herself to writing. Captain Lettarblair (1891), her first play to reach the stage, was produced by Daniel Frohman, often revived, and published in a handsome edition. It remained her most popular work, although she preferred Love Finds the Way (1898). Thereafter she wrote fairy-tale plays for children’s theater* and historical dramas for high school students, many of which were published in collections.
Born in Rehutia, near Mankipur, India, the actor Philip Merivale was educated in England. He abandoned a London business career in 1905 in favor of acting. He performed with English actor-managers Frank Benson, Sir Herbert Tree, and others. He played his first New York engagement in 1910 in The Scarlet Pimpernel and returned to the United States in 1914 in Pygmalion with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Thereafter, he made his career in American theater, with notable successes in the 1930s.
This four-act comedy by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly opened on 13 November 1922 for 398 performances at the Cort Theatre. In Simsbury, Illinois, Merton Gill is enamored of the newly popular movies to the point that he is mocked by his fellow townspeople and loses his job as a clerk at Gashwiler’s General Store. He rushes to Hollywood and meets a bathing beauty–turned–queen of slapstick comedies, Flips Montague, a character inspired by Mabel Normand, who gets him bit roles in movies, but he is disillusioned by what he regards as the phoniness of it all. When he is cast in a slapstick comedy, Merton acts his role with such gravity that it becomes hilarious. Now a star, he marries Flips. This popular comedy, inspired by Harry Leon Wilson’s Hollywood spoofs in the Saturday Evening Post, was filmed in 1924 and 1947.
Born in Buffalo, New York, the critic James Stetson Metcalfe graduated from Yale University in 1879. He held prestigious positions in the newspaper and magazine publishing world, but he gained notoriety in 1905 when the Theatrical Syndicate responded to his reviews by preventing him from attending plays. Barred from 47 Manhattan theaters, Metcalfe took the matter to court, which resulted in a ruling that no ticket buyer could be refused admission. He was married to actress Elizabeth Tyree.
Opening on 23 December 1929 at the Theatre Guild, S. N. Behrman’s drama ran for 92 performances under the direction of Philip Moeller. Alfred Lunt played ruthless capitalist Raphael Lord, a fictive image of notorious swindler Charles Ponzi, whose pursuit of money propels his lust for power. A third-act miscalculation almost redeems him, but the curtain falls on his return to wheeling and dealing. Lunt’s wife, Lynn Fontanne, was also in the cast in what many critics considered the least challenging role of her career. Lunt’s role was showier and he won plaudits, but Meteor would fall low on any list of the Lunts’ accomplishments.
Portland, Oregon–born Maud Jane Methot went on stage in childhood, billed as the “Portland Rosebud.” Methot joined Portland’s Baker Stock Company between 1919 and 1922, after which she moved to New York and acted in The Mad Honeymoon (1923). She next appeared opposite George M. Cohan in his play The Song and Dance Man (1923), followed by roles in Alias the Deacon (1925), What Ann Brought Home (1927), The Song Writer (1928), All the King’s Men (1929), Now-a-Days (1929), Great Day (1929), Half Gods (1929), Torch Song (1930), and Strip Girl (1935). Methot turned her attentions to movie work from 1930 and appeared notably in such films as Counsellor-at-Law* (1933), Jimmy the Gent (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Marked Woman (1937), The Sisters (1938), and others, though her roles diminished in size and importance after the mid-1930s, in part as a result of alcoholism. Methot was married to actor Humphrey Bogart from 1938 to 1945. They became known as the “Battling Bogarts” in gossip columns due to their turbulent relationship. He referred to her as “Sluggy,” and their divorce in 1945 precipitated a slow decline into hardcore alcoholism that hastened her death.
Annie Nathan grew up stagestruck and, in the aftermath of her parents’ divorce, an advocate for women’s causes. She married Dr. Alfred Meyer and became a playwright, novelist, literary critic, and founder of Barnard College (1889). Her controversial novel Helen Brent, M.D. (1892) is premised on a woman’s right to a career. Of her 20 or so plays, several reached the stage in New York: The District Attorney (1895), The Dreamer (1912), The Spur (1914), The Advertising of Kate (1922), The New Way (1923), Black Souls (1932, Provincetown Playhouse). The Dominant Sex (1911) was published but not produced. Her autobiography, It’s Been Fun, was published shortly after her death.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, the playwright George Middleton graduated from Columbia University and got his first New York production both in 1902. That play, The Cavalier (with Paul Kester), initiated a string of successes, some written in collaboration. With Guy Bolton, he wrote his two best-known plays: Polly with a Past (1917) and Adam and Eva (1919). The prolific author had 15 volumes of published works, with five plays produced by David Belasco. From 1942 to 1958, Middleton also worked in the United States Copyright office, specializing in alien property. He held a number of offices, including president of the Dramatists Guild (1927–1929) and honorary vice president of an international playwrights confederation (1929).
Born in Paris but educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, Jo Mielziner became the most important scene designer on Broadway after Robert Edmond Jones. He began his career acting and designing for the Jessie Bonstelle stock company in Detroit and for the Theatre Guild, where he gained recognition for his design of Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman (1924). His remarkable output spanned every form of drama, from the classics to contemporary works, from musicals to tragedy. In his early years, Mielziner worked in both realistic and expressionist veins pioneered by others, but he steadily moved toward a more uniquely poetic, painterly simplicity achieved, in part, through skeletal or fragmentary settings and sensitive lighting. He pioneered new lighting techniques in collaboration with Edward F. Kook. From the late 1920s, Mielziner designed Pulitzer Prize winners, mostly after 1930. These plays included Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928), Elmer Rice’s Street Scene (1929), Of Thee I Sing (1931), Winterset* (1935), The Glass Menagerie* (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire* (1947), Death of a Salesman* (1949), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* (1955), and Gypsy (1959).
Most remembered as a poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote several plays from the time of her acting apprenticeship with the Provincetown Players in 1917. Her theatrical reputation is based almost entirely on a one-act play, Aria da Capo (1919), first produced by the Players, a work that became one of the most frequently staged one-acts of the early 20th century, especially popular with amateur groups. Millay’s few other plays include The Princess Marries the Page (1918) and The Lamp and the Bell (1921), and her libretto for the Deems Taylor opera The King’s Henchman (1927).
The son of actors Henry Miller and Bijou Heron (1863–1937) was born in New York City and sent to schools in Europe. After a stint as company manager for his father’s 1907 tour of The Great Divide, Miller managed all his father’s productions until 1915. He went to London in 1916 to produce Daddy Long-Legs. Miller acquired two London theaters during his six years there in addition to the Henry Miller Theatre on Broadway. Specializing in high comedy, he produced a total of 99 shows in New York and London, most of which he underwrote without seeking additional backers. Among those productions are The Czarina (1922), Casanova (1923), The Captive (1926), The Constant Wife (1926), Her Cardboard Lover (1927), The Patriot (1928), Our Betters (1928), Paris (1928), The Age of Innocence (1928), Journey’s End (1929), The Love Duel (1929), Berkeley Square (1929), Dishonored Lady (1930), The Good Fairy (1931), The Animal Kingdom* (1932), The Late Christopher Bean (1932), The Petrified Forest* (1935), Victoria Regina (1935), Tovarich (1936), Harriet (1943), Dear Ruth* (1944), The Cocktail Party (1950), and many others. The jovial but hot-tempered bon vivant was credited with discovering Audrey Hepburn, whom he imported for Gigi in 1951. In 1965, he received the American Theatre Wing’s* Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award* for his distinguished career of nearly 50 years in theater.
Actor and producer Henry John Miller was born in London, moved with his family to Canada, and began acting in Toronto at age 18. He made his New York debut at Booth’s Theatre in 1880. Subsequent engagements included a stint with Augustin Daly’s company in 1882, the Madison Square Theatre (1882–1885), and Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum in 1887. Miller rose to stardom under Charles Frohman from 1889 to 1897. The New York Times review of Heartsease, in 1897, described him as “an actor of good presence, sensibility, ambition, and zeal, not endowed with a very expressive countenance, though he makes good use of his small natural equipment; possessing a rather monotonous voice, and no extraordinary share of physical power. He has been a popular favorite, and is likely to increase his popularity under the shrewd management of Charles Frohman.” Miller maintained his star status for over 15 years, and it was claimed that he played more roles than any other leading actor.
Miller appeared on Broadway in Anselma (1885), The Wife (1887), Shenandoah (1889), The Young Son (1893), The Masqueraders (1894), John-a-Dreams (1895), the first American production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), A Woman’s Reason (1896), Bohemia (1896), The Master (1898), The King’s Musketeer (1899), The Only Way (1899), Robin Hood (1900), The Viceroy (1900), Richard Savage (1901), D’Arcy of the Guards (1901), The Wild Rose (1902), The Taming of Helen (1903), a 1904 revival of Camille, Joseph Entangled (1904), Zira (1905), and Brown of Harvard (1906).
In 1902, he began playing opposite Margaret Anglin, with whom he starred in the play still most associated with his name, The Great Divide (1906), in which he made his London debut in 1909. The role of Stephen Ghent served the handsome, manly actor well, and he revived the play in New York in 1917. Among his later credits, Miller appeared in The Servant in the House (1908), A Woman’s Way (1909), The Faith Healer (1910), Her Husband’s Wife (1910), The Rainbow (1912), Molière (1919), and The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919). In 1918, Miller opened his own theater, Henry Miller’s Theatre, in New York. An affectionate biography, Backstage with Henry Miller by Frank P. Morse (who maintained that Miller’s voice was “melodious”), was published in 1938.
Born Cincinnatus Heine Miller in Liberty, Indiana, this poet, journalist, and playwright spent his formative years in the gold mining camps and among the Native Americans of the Pacific coast. His poetry earned him the epithets “poet of the Sierras” and “the Byron of the Rockies.” Miller wrote the story upon which the popular western drama The Danites (1882) was based. Although the dramatization was long credited to Miller, it was ultimately found to have been the work of a hired writer.
Born in Evansville, Indiana, Mary Ellen Reynolds went on the vaudeville stage at age four billed as “Mademoiselle Sugarlump” as part of her family’s act, the Five Columbians. After a decade of trouping in vaudeville, the blonde, delicate Miller performed for the Shuberts in the 1914 and 1915 editions of The Passing Show. In 1918, producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. costarred her (with Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, and W. C. Fields) in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. The following year, in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, she again scored a success and was rumored to be Ziegfeld’s mistress. Ziegfeld also starred Miller in the musical Sally (1920), with music by Jerome Kern, in which she introduced Kern’s “Look for the Silver Lining.” Miller made a foray into nonmusicals in a revival of Peter Pan in 1924 and reteamed with Kern for Sunny (1925), a hit featuring Kern’s “Who?” and the title song about a circus star. Ziegfeld presented her in two additional musicals, Rosalie (1928), featuring a score by George and Ira Gershwin, and Smiles (1930), in which she costarred with Fred Astaire. A brief foray in Hollywood reaped three movies at the dawn of the sound era, Sally in 1929, Sunny in 1930, and Her Majesty, Love (1931); she costarred with W. C. Fields in the latter. Her final Broadway appearance, in the hit revue† As Thousands Cheer (1933), featured a score by Irving Berlin. Miller died as a result of complications following surgery for a sinus infection. She has been immortalized in a biographical film, Look for the Silver Lining (1949), in which June Haver starred as Miller, and a Jerome Kern biopic, Till the Clouds Roll By, in which Judy Garland played Miller.
A Washington, D.C., native whose father was a Howard University sociologist and the first African American student to attend Johns Hopkins University, May Miller began writing poetry as a child and studied with Mary P. Burrill and Angelina Weld Grimké while still in high school. Miller continued her education at Howard University, where she won an award for her play Within the Shadows (1920). She continued her studies at American University and Columbia University prior to teaching high school in Baltimore for 20 years. She became a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance, publishing her poetry and writing the plays The Bog Guide (1925), Scratches (1929), Stragglers in the Dust (1930), and Nails and Thorns (1933). She also wrote historical plays about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, which were anthologized in Negro History in Thirteen Plays (1935).
A popular female impersonator, Gus Mills achieved his first successes in Simmons, Slocum’s and Sweatnam’s Minstrels in Philadelphia, followed by stints with Emerson’s Minstrels and Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels in New York. Mills also appeared in vaudeville. News stories reported that he dressed as a woman both on and off stage and was his own costume designer. The Lewiston Saturday Journal of Maine noted in 1895 that “the ever reliable and remarkable Gus Mills” stood out in his performance there, and a critic for the Kansas City Evening Star, reflecting less generous attitudes of the time, wrote in 1880 of Mills that “[a]s a female impersonator he draws a large salary and is a most remarkable success, but as a man he is a gigantic failure and not worth the powder that would blow his effeminate soul to purgatory.”
Born Robert Davidor in Dinaburgh, Russia, Robert Milton came to the United States as a child and began his theatrical career as an assistant director for Richard Mansfield, Minnie Maddern Fiske, and William Harris Jr.. In partnership with John Murray Anderson, Milton ran an acting school in New York in the 1920s as an early advocate of the methods of Constantin Stanislavsky, with graduates including Bette Davis* and Lucille Ball. On Broadway, Milton staged (and in some cases produced) several important plays and musicals in the first three decades of the 20th century, including The New Henrietta (1913), Oh, Lady! Lady! (1918), Friendly Enemies (1918), Adam and Eva (1919), Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), You and I (1923), The Youngest (1924), Outward Bound (1924), Peggy-Ann (1926), Revelry (1927), The Marriage Bed (1929), and Dark Victory (1934). He also directed a Theatre Guild revival of The Seagull starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in 1938. For the movies, Milton directed a dozen films, including Charming Sinners (1929), Outward Bound (1930), Devotion (1931), and Bella Donna (1934).
This legendary vaudeville and burlesque theater, which also featured boxing matches, opened in October 1878 situated in the Bowery at Delancy Street. Seating 1,850 spectators, Miner’s Bowery Theatre was a theater owned by Harry C. Miner (1842–1900) who, over time, had built and managed several New York theaters. Miner’s was known for its rowdy audiences and opportunities for amateurs to begin their careers, though the theater pioneered the use of a large hook to yank performers offstage who failed to please and coined the phrase “Get the hook!,” applied when a performer was flopping. Among the major performers to either get their start at Miner’s or perform there after established were Eddie Cantor, Weber and Fields, and the Four Cohans.
George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber collaborated for the first time on this three-act comedy based on Ferber’s short story “Old Man Minick”; the play was produced by Antoinette Perry at the Booth Theatre on 24 September 1924 and ran for 141 performances, with Perry and Phyllis Povah in leading roles. The story dealt with an elderly man struggling with the dilemma of living with his son and daughter-in-law or choosing a lonely life in a retirement home. Under the title Old Man Minick, it was made into a movie in 1932. A superior screen version starring Fred Stone was released in 1939 under the title No Place to Go.
Although both minstrel singing and blackface performance can be traced back to the Middle Ages, the origin of this American entertainment is usually credited to Thomas D. Rice,† who was performing a “Jump Jim Crow” song and dance in blackface by the 1830s. In 1843, a group calling itself the Virginia Minstrels† began to set the pattern for a minstrel show, which was perfected by the long-lived Christy Minstrels.† Numerous others followed, and after the Civil War, minstrelsy became a ready foothold for African Americans who wished to find a way into show business. Thus the latter part of the century saw a proliferation of “genuine” Ethiopian minstrels. Yet the stylized production values called for blackface or burnt cork makeup, even by black performers.
The minstrel chorus wore identical bright-colored costumes, often shiny satin, cut in fancy evening dress style with top hats. They would sit in a semicircle, sometimes several rows deep, during the comic patter between the whiteface straight man called the Interlocutor and the two end-men, Tambo and Bones. A cakewalk culminated the songs and patter of the first part of the show. The second part comprised olio acts, often including a male in drag. The third part was a short play, either a “plantation spectacle” or a burlesque of well-known highbrow material. See also DOCKSTADER, LEW (1856–1924).
Written by James A. Herne with actor Harry M. Pitt in mind, this melodrama of the American Revolution† was Herne’s first completely solo effort as a playwright. It opened on 6 April 1886 at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre† to critical applause but proved of only moderate interest to audiences. Herne was influenced by American literary romanticism, particularly the works of James Fenimore Cooper, and showed little of the influence of Henrik Ibsen’s realistic plays that marked some of Herne’s subsequent dramas. Dorothy Foxglove (played by Herne’s wife, Katharine Corcoran Herne), daughter of a British commander, wears a locket revealing her true identity. She has been separated from her family and raised by Reuben Foxglove. Buffeted by various forces and battles (tableaux depicted the battles of Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Concord as well as Paul Revere’s famous ride and George Washington† on his white horse), Dorothy falls in love with the Indian Roanoke, who, like her, turns out to be the lost child of a colonial officer.
The spectacular pantomimic drama created by Austrian director Max Reinhardt premiered in London in 1911 and was staged in 16 other European cities before World War I. Following the war, a New York production was arranged in collaboration by arts philanthropist Otto Kahn and impresario Morris Gest. With scene designs and costumes by Norman Bel Geddes, it opened at the Century Theatre on 15 January 1924 and ran for 298 performances. The city of Cleveland arranged for it to transfer there over Christmas of that year. During the next five years, The Miracle was performed in 12 American cities that could raise a guarantee of a quarter of a million dollars for a minimum run of three weeks. In each city, a public auditorium would be virtually transformed into a cathedral. The spectacle required 40 boxcars of scenery, 17 miles of electrical cable, a touring company of 400, in addition to 200 local extras.
George M. Cohan crafted this melodramatic play from Robert Hobart Davis’s novel. It opened on 21 September 1914 for 97 performances at the Astor Theatre and was produced by Cohan and Sam H. Harris. The play focuses on some con men attempting to bilk a small community that believes its blind minister is a faith healer. The scheme works for a time, until they are moved by the minister’s fervor and the simple belief of his congregation, “healing” them of their evil impulses. The Miracle Man was made into a movie twice, most famously in 1919 starring Lon Chaney in a film now considered lost, and in a 1932 version with Boris Karloff.* The Miracle Man was a longtime staple of stock and touring companies.
Born in Covington, Kentucky, Caroline Scales lived with her parents in Canada, where she became a student of elocutionist Jessie Alexander. At age 18, she went on the stage in New York and toured with Augustin Daly’s company playing, among other roles, Phoebe in As You Like It. Miskel-Hoyt acted in The Face in the Moonlight with Robert B. Mantell and appeared in Charles H. Hoyt’s A Temperance Town (1893), becoming Hoyt’s second wife the following year, after which she retired from the stage. Miskel-Hoyt returned in Hoyt’s A Contented Woman (1897), winning accolades, but the next year, shortly after giving birth to a son, she and the baby died from complications.
This Pulitzer Prize–winning comedy-drama by novelist Zona Gale, adapted from her novel of the same name, was the most acclaimed of several stage adaptations Gale crafted from her literary works. The simultaneously touching and satiric portrait of midwestern small-town life focuses on “old maid” Lulu, who is teased into participating in a mock wedding ceremony. When the “fake” marriage is found to be legal, Lulu awkwardly embarks on a honeymoon with her husband, Ninian, only to return unexpectedly after she learns that he is already married. Public dissatisfaction prompted Gale—after the show had opened—to rewrite and substitute an alternate ending in which Lulu and Ninian are reunited. Produced by Brock Pemberton at the Belmont Theatre, Miss Lulu Bett ran for 198 performances beginning on 27 December 1920. A silent movie version appeared in 1921.
The romantic comedy in four acts by George C. Hazelton Jr. opened on 9 October 1900 at the Bijou Theatre (later moving to the Savoy Theatre) and ran for 104 performances. Henrietta Crosman played the renowned orange wench-turned-king’s-mistress, Nell Gwynn. Aubrey Boucicault played King Charles II. Because theatergoers had seen other plays about Gwynn, the interest of this one centered upon the witty repartee and the period costumes. Mary Pickford played the title role opposite Owen Moore in a 1915 movie adaptation of the play.
John Grant Mitchell was born in Columbus, Ohio, educated at Yale and Harvard, and tried both newspaper work and law before turning to the stage. He studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and made his acting debut in Julius Caesar with Richard Mansfield in Chicago in 1902, followed by his New York debut in that production. He remained a staple of Broadway casts until he went to Hollywood in 1933 and switched to movie acting. Among his Broadway credits are The House of Mirth (1906), The Chaperon (1908), Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1910), Years of Discretion (1912), It Pays to Advertise (1914), The Champion (1921), Kempy (1922), The Whole Town’s Talking (1923), One of the Family (1925), Baby Cyclone (1927), and All the King’s Men (1929). On screen from 1916, Mitchell emerged as a fine character actor in such films as Our Betters (1933), Dinner at Eight* (1933), The Show-Off (1934), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), On Borrowed Time* (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Man Who Came to Dinner* (1942), and Arsenic and Old Lace* (1944).
He began as a call-boy at Niblo’s Garden Theatre,† where he rose to staging shows. He became a prolific director even as the concept of directing was being developed. He directed many of Charles Hoyt’s plays, staged 11 Victor Herbert operettas and 13 Ziegfeld Follies. He directed two major Broadway hits in 1903: The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Toyland. A feature story on Mitchell’s stage effects appears in the 21 December 1905 issue of Vogue. After he became almost deaf, he continued directing dance numbers by leaning on the piano to feel the rhythmic vibrations. At his funeral, his fellow Lambs Club member Gene Buck said: “His greatness inspired every composer, manager, and player with whom he came in contact.”
Born in Philadelphia, the son of prominent fiction writer S. Weir Mitchell, Langdon Elwyn Mitchell later adapted some of his father’s Civil War novels for the stage. He studied abroad, graduated from Columbia Law School, and was admitted to the New York bar in 1886. His earliest produced plays were in London in 1892: the full-length Deborah, a Civil War drama starring his actress wife Marion Lea, followed three months later by three one-acts, notably In the Season. Mitchell remains best remembered for his eyebrow-raising satire of divorce, The New York Idea (1906). Many of his plays were based on novels, notably Becky Sharp (1899), which he wrote for Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Major Pendennis (1916). Other Mitchell plays include In a Season (1895) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1906); the latter was among his most produced adaptations, taken from Jacob Gordin’s original. In 1928, Mitchell became the first professor to hold the Mask and Wig Club Chair in playwriting at the University of Pennsylvania.
Margaret Julia Mitchell was born in New York City. She began doing walk-on roles as a child performer, but her adult acting career began at age 19 where she developed a specialty in young boy’s roles. Among the many actors she worked with was John Wilkes Booth,† sparking gossip that the two were lovers for a time in the 1850s. For a quarter century, beginning in 1861, the tiny, energetic actress played the gamine role of Fanchon in Fanchon, the Cricket,† a dramatization of a story by George Sand, scoring her greatest success. Her portrayal of Jane Eyre (1885) was admired, and she appeared in such chestnuts as The Lady of Lyons and Ingomar. Maggie the Midget (1888) was created for her, but the public continued to demand Fanchon until she retired at 58 after appearing in The Little Maverick in Chicago in 1892. Over the course of her career, Mitchell developed friendships with literary and political notables, including Abraham Lincoln,† Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Mitchell’s son was Julian P. Mitchell, who worked as a stage director for Weber and Fields and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.
Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Thomas Mitchell became one of the most beloved and accomplished movie character actors in scores of films during the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in Lost Horizon (1937), Gone with the Wind (1939), The Long Voyage Home (1940), Our Town* (1940), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and High Noon (1952), among others. He won an Academy Award for Stagecoach (1939) and was nominated for an Oscar for Hurricane (1937). His roots, however, were in the theater, where he debuted with Ben Greet’s company in 1913 and toured in Shakespeare with Charles Coburn’s troupe. On Broadway, Mitchell appeared in Under Sentence (1916), Nju (1917), Redemption (1918), Dark Rosaleen (1919), and a 1921 revival of The Playboy of the Western World. Mitchell scored popular successes in Marc Connelly’s comedy The Wisdom Tooth (1926) and in Little Accident (1928), which he coauthored with Floyd Dell, and he returned to Broadway over the years until his death, including Clear All Wires (1932), Honeymoon (1932), Forsaking All Others (1933), Fly Away Home (1935), An Inspector Calls (1947), and the musical Hazel Flagg (1953), for which he won a Tony Award.* He also stepped into the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s* Death of a Salesman* during its run in 1950.
Along with his brother Addison Mizner (1872–1933), Wilson Mizner led a controversial but fascinating life, working as a shill in medicine shows, professional gambler, and fight promoter before turning to theater to write a failed play, The Only Law (1909), with George Bronson Howard. His later plays, cowritten with Paul Armstrong, were more successful, including The Deep Purple (1911) and The Greyhound (1912). He also assisted Armstrong with writing the hit Alias Jimmy Valentine (1910). Mizner wrote movie scripts and, along with his brother, was the subject of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Bounce (2003), later renamed Road Show.
Born Jadwiga Benda in Poland, she established herself as an actress there, first using the name Helena Opid, then Helena Modrzejewska. In 1876, she came to the United States with her second husband Karol Chlapowski (Count Bozenta) and bought a ranch in California, where she worked on her English in preparation for restarting her career in America. There she hired young Sophie Treadwell as her secretary. Modjeska made her English-language acting debut in San Francisco in 1877 and developed a repertory that included 16 Shakespearean roles (notably Rosalind and Viola) as well as provocative characters in contemporary plays, performing on Broadway in Magda (1894), Mistress Betty (1895), Marie Antoinette (1900), Mary Stuart (1900), and The Ladies Battle (1900). Modjeska’s memoirs, Memories and Impressions (1910), include vivid tales of her tour with Edwin Booth in 1899.
Born in New York, Philip Moeller attended New York University and Columbia University. He began his theater career as one of the founders of the Washington Square Players, staging several of the group’s productions. When the Players broke up during World War I, Moeller went on to become a distinguished director with the Theatre Guild, staging their first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest (1919), among many others. Admired for his skill at directing comedy, Moeller also staged important dramas. He used improvisational techniques to reach his desired ends. Among the plays he directed are The Guardsman (1924), Sidney Howard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama They Knew What They Wanted (1924), Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), The Second Man (1927), Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Strange Interlude (1928), Hotel Universe* (1930), Elizabeth the Queen* (1930), Mourning Becomes Electra* (1931), Biography* (1932), Ah, Wilderness!* (1933), and End of Summer* (1936). Moeller also directed movies before retiring in the late 1930s. As a playwright, Moeller wrote Helena’s Husband (1915), Madame Sand (1917), The Roadhouse in Arden (1917), Pokey (1918), Two Blind Beggars and One Less Blind (1918), Sophie (1919), and Caprice (1929), which he coadapted with Sil-Vara from his own novel.
Born in Romania, the Yiddish comedian Sigmund Mogulesko pleased Bucharest audiences as Shmendrik, a comic character created for him by Avrom Goldfadn. His talent rested a great deal upon the radiance of his personality. After 1886, he appeared in New York’s burgeoning Yiddish theater where he founded the Rumanian Opera House and worked successfully in the United States for the remainder of his career.
San Francisco–born Nina Moise had earned her degree in history at Stanford University, trained at the Cumnock School of Oratory in Los Angeles, and worked in stock before she began directing for the Provincetown Players in January 1917. The company had been floundering under its haphazard approach to directing, but she quickly proved herself and by the end of the season was appointed to the salaried position (one of only four in the company) of producing director. According to Cheryl Black in The Women of Provincetown, Moise owed her success not only to technical skill but also to her diplomacy in working with the assorted personalities of beginning playwrights. During her 18 months with Provincetown Players, she directed 17 plays—including Eugene O’Neill’s The Sniper, The Long Voyage Home, and Ile—and codirected others. From 1921 to 1925, she was company director of Santa Barbara Community Arts Players. In the 1930s, she coached actors on diction and deportment for Paramount Pictures.
The murderer-turned-playwright Roland Burnham Molineux had his one-act Was It a Dream? produced at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre in 1903, following his acquittal, after mistrials and appeals, of the murder of Katherine Adams. Ten years later, his full-length crime drama, The Man Inside, was produced by David Belasco. Molineux married Margaret Connell, who had helped with the play, but he soon suffered a mental breakdown and spent his last four years in the New York State Hospital for the Insane.
Elmer Rice’s three-act play, adapted from Frances C. Fay’s translation of Hermann Bahr’s 1914 naturalistic play Der Querulant, opened at the Longacre Theatre on 15 December 1924 for 32 performances under the direction of Winifred Lenihan. Rudolph Schildkraut played Old Mathias, living alone in the forest with his dog and mourning the death of his son. Only his dog provides him comfort, so when a Forester accidentally shoots the dog, Mathias goes to court demanding justice. When he fails to get it, he plots a revenge killing of the Forester’s daughter. When Mathias learns that the girl is the only one saddened by the dog’s death and, more important, that she had loved Mathias’s son, the old man cannot enact his revenge. Critics found the play dated, but most applauded Schildkraut’s performance.
Louis N. Parker’s one-act play in three scenes, inspired by a W. W. Jacobs story, was written and first produced in London on 6 October 1903 with a cast including Cyril Maude and Lena Ashwell. In the United States, The Monkey’s Paw was produced at the Lyceum Theatre on a triple bill with Charles A. Kenyon’s The Flag Station and Gladys Unger’s The Lemonade Boy, which opened on 30 April 1907 for four performances, produced by the Arnold Daly Repertory, with Daly appearing in all three plays. The Monkey’s Paw was revived on Broadway for a single performance on 11 May 1923 as part of a Little Theater Tournament in association with the New York Drama League. On a stormy night, the White family and friends learn of a charmed monkey’s paw that can grant three wishes to three individuals. The friend telling of the paw’s history hurls it into the fire, but Mr. White rescues it, and he and his wife encounter a series of mystical experiences until Mr. White’s last wish ends it all. Movie versions appeared in 1919, 1923, and 1933, and there have been other adaptations of the Jacobs story filmed without use of the Parker play.
The daughter of Chicago lawyer Henry Stanton Monroe, Lucy Monroe proved herself an ardent champion of the Chicago arts scene in her weekly column, “Chicago Letter” (1893–1895), for the New York journal Critic.
Born in New York City (though some sources give Boston as his birthplace), James Montgomery acted for 12 years in stock companies and on Broadway, notably in The Fortune Hunter (1909) with John Barrymore. He then turned to playwriting and producing. Montgomery’s plays included The Aviator (1910), Take My Advice (1911), Ready Money (1912), Bachelors and Benedicts (1912), Nothing but the Truth (1916), Going Up (1917), Oh, Look! (1918), and the musical Irene (1919), which was adapted from his failed play, Irene O’Dare (1916). He contributed songs and lyrics to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1920, as well as Glory (1922), The City Chap (1925), Yes, Yes, Yvette (1927), and Brain Sweat (1934). In an interview in The Green Book Album, Montgomery provided a “recipe” for a successful play: “Plenty of well-known subject matter. Well-known types to present it. Some love. Seasoning of jealousy. Enough money involved to bring it up to date. Sift well together in the first act. Mix up thoroughly between first and last acts, and add the pièce de résistance, an unexpected situation leading up to a strong climax in the last act. Always have something really happen in the last act. It should never be made merely a convenience for the gathering up of threads.”
David Montgomery (1870–1917) and Fred Stone (1873–1959) began their 22-year partnership as a minstrel duo, then became acrobatic dancers in vaudeville, which led them to an engagement at London’s Palace in 1899. From 1901, they were on Broadway, livening up such shows as The Wizard of Oz (1903), The Red Mill (1906), The Lady of the Slipper (1912), and Chin-Chin (1914). After Montgomery’s sudden death in 1917, Stone became a solo performer, but he later appeared with his wife and daughters as the Stone Family. He was widely beloved in show business and enjoyed a close friendship with Will Rogers.
Born in Spencer, Indiana, William Vaughn Moody attended Harvard University. He taught there for a time, and also at the University of Chicago. Moody made his mark initially as author of A History of English Literature (1902) and some poetry. He also worked with Donald Robertson’s New Theatre and wrote two verse plays with Harriet Brainerd. When Moody switched to prose, he crafted one of the most significant dramas of the first decade of the 20th century. The Great Divide (1906), starring Margaret Anglin in a David Belasco production, employed melodramatic elements and provided depth of character and seriousness of theme well beyond other plays of its period. The success of The Great Divide, which was revived on Broadway in 1907 and 1917, led to a few other dramatic works by Moody, including The Death of Eve (1907) and The Faith Healer (1909), the latter another harbinger of modernism in American drama despite failure at the box office and a young John Barrymore’s presence in the cast. Moody married Brainerd in 1909, but his health rapidly declined and he died the following year of a brain tumor. The promise of his work for a serious American drama was left unfulfilled until the appearance of Eugene O’Neill a decade later.
Philadelphia-born Florence Moore became a comedienne, singer, and vaudevillian who worked in partnership with her brother, Frank Moore (1880–1924), followed by her second husband, William Montgomery, early in her career. In March 1927, New York’s Palace Theatre employed her as its first female master of ceremonies, and she appeared there again at least twice in 1928. On Broadway, Moore performed in musicals, revues,† and farces, including Lew Fields’s Hanky Panky (1912), Hello, Broadway! (1914), The Cohan Revue of 1916, The Passing Show of 1916, Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1917), Breakfast in Bed (1920), The Midnight Rounders (1920, 1921), The Music Box Revue (1921, 1923), The Greenwich Village Follies (1925), Artists and Models (1927), The International Revue (1930), and Cradle Snatchers (1932). Moore also appeared in a few movies, including The Old Melody (1913), The Weakness of Strength (1916), The Secret of Eve (1917), and Apartment Hunting (1929).
Born in Hammonton, New Jersey, Victor Frederick Moore worked in virtually all forms, from vaudeville and Broadway musicals to movies, radio, and television, as an actor, director, and writer. Most remembered as a performer, Moore parlayed his small stature and pear-shaped body into an iconic comic persona he employed with uncommon success in every aspect of show business. Moore’s over 50-year career on Broadway was mostly spent in musicals and comedies, beginning with Rosemary (1896), followed by George M. Cohan’s Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway (1906), in which he costarred with Fay Templeton. Other roles included Cohan’s The Talk of New York (1907), Oh, Kay! (1926), Funny Face (1927), Hold Everything (1928), and the first Pulitzer Prize–winning musical, Of Thee I Sing! (1931), in which he memorably played befuddled Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom opposite his frequent stage partner, William Gaxton. Moore repeated his Of Thee I Sing! role in the show’s sequel, Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933). His later Broadway credits include Anything Goes (1934), Leave It to Me! (1938), Louisiana Purchase (1940), and revivals of On Borrowed Time* in 1953 and Carousel in 1957. Appearing in more than 50 films, Moore acted in such classics as Swing Time (1936), Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), and The Seven Year Itch* (1955).
The actress, playwright, and director Agnes Morgan was born in Le Roy, New York. After earning her B.A. and M.A. degrees at Radcliffe College, she participated in George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop at Harvard University in 1904. In 1910, her play When Two Write History was staged in Chicago. In 1912, she codirected, with Sarah Cowell Le Moyne, The Shepherd for the settlement house run by the Lewisohn sisters. On Broadway, Morgan acted in The Madras House (1921) and directed R.U.R. (1922) and Ruth Draper’s* 1929 New York appearance. She continued to serve as the resident playwright and director at the Neighborhood Playhouse for 12 years, directing 35 productions. She earned her greatest recognition for the satirical sketches she created for the annual Grand Street Follies for five years in the 1920s.
Born in New York as Francis Philip Wupperman to a wealthy family, actor Frank Morgan studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He had his first professional engagements in A Woman Killed with Kindness and Mr. Wu, both in 1914. Critics remarked on his handsomeness and refinement of manner, but he was most typically cast in dithering character roles in comedies and musicals, including Rock-a-Bye Baby (1918), Seventh Heaven (1922), The Firebrand (1924), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926), Rosalie (1928), Topaze (1930), and The Band Wagon (1931). In the early sound era of movies, Morgan became one of the best-loved character actors during Hollywood’s Golden Age, gaining screen immortality as the Wizard in the classic film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), a part in which his skill in befuddled roles served him to perfection. He was the younger brother of actor Ralph Morgan.
Born Ralph Wupperman in New York, Ralph Morgan worked as a lawyer before turning to the stage in 1908. He appeared in Clyde Fitch’s The Bachelor (1909), but his first notable Broadway success came in Avery Hopwood’s comedy Fair and Warmer (1915), which was followed by a succession of roles demonstrating his versatility, including Lightnin’ (1918) and Cobra (1924). He replaced Tom Powers in the important role of Charlie Marsden in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama Strange Interlude (1928). Much of the rest of Morgan’s career was spent in character roles in movies. He occasionally returned to the stage as late as 1952 in the musical Three Wishes for Jamie, but he was somewhat less celebrated than his younger brother, character actor Frank Morgan.
The renowned producer was born Oliver Morosco Mitchell in Logan, Utah. After performing as an acrobat in his father’s troupe, he went into management in 1892 at the San Jose Theatre. By 1908, he was managing six California theaters. In 1909, he began his 20-year producing career. In 1917, after the Shuberts honored their West Coast producing ally by naming a new theater for him, Morosco began producing in New York. He leased the Morosco Theatre from the Shuberts and opened it with Canary Cottage, which starred Trixie Friganza and marked Eddie Cantor’s Broadway debut.
Morosco’s top hits were The Bird of Paradise (1912), Peg o’ My Heart starring Laurette Taylor (1912), Help Wanted (1914), The Unchastened Woman (1915), So Long Letty (1916), The Cinderella Man (1916), Lombardi, Ltd. (1917), and others until 1927. He would bill his attractions as having “a typical Morosco cast,” calling attention to his eye for performers who attained stardom. During the 1920s, his office on the top floor of the Morosco was legendarily well stocked with bootleg liquors, but the decade also marked his decline as he ventured into schemes outside of show business. Morosco died with only eight cents in his pocket after being hit by a streetcar on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Born Clara LaMontagne in Toronto, Canada, she was raised by her mother in Ohio. Their poverty meant that she received little formal schooling, but she was an avid reader. As a teen, she danced or acted small parts in Cleveland theaters. An invitation to join Augustin Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre† took her to New York, where she triumphed in her debut performance in Man and Wife (1870). During her three seasons with Daly, she established herself as the leading emotional actress of her day. Matinee girls and women in the 1880s flocked to weep with her as they watched the travails of her heroines. A New York Times review in 1882 analyzed her art: “It is sometimes hard to believe that Miss Morris’s presentments of sorrow and distress are, after all, mere artistic effects; there is about them a poignancy of truth which commands more than fictitious sympathy—an agony as black as that of life.”
Morris toured extensively until the 1890s, continuing to perform the old melodramas in which she used exaggerated gestures and vocal intonations. Audiences were spellbound at the intensity of her mad scene in Article 47, the pathos of her “Camille” in The Lady of the Camelias, and the whispered suffering of her Mercy Merrick in The New Magdalen. In New York, she appeared in Saratoga (1870), Jezebel (1871), and a revival of The Two Orphans† in 1904. Following her retirement from the stage, Morris wrote plays, novels, and memoirs.
Born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Mary Morris attended Radcliffe College and participated in George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop. The actress made her debut with the Washington Square Players in 1916. Her outstanding role was that of Abbie Putnam in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms (1924). Morris played Nina in the first Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1916, a hit revival of Anna Cora Mowatt’s† Fashion† in 1924, and such plays as Hidden (1927), Cross Roads (1929), At the Bottom (1930), Night Over Taos (1932), Within the Gates (1934), and other new plays and revivals. She performed less frequently after the mid-1930s, when she joined the drama faculty at Carnegie Tech. She also served on the boards of the American National Theatre and Academy,* National Theatre Conference, and Actors’ Equity Association.
Born in Boston, the actor William Morris is not to be confused with his contemporary (1873–1932), “the dean of the golden age of vaudeville,” of the same name. The actor Morris began his stage career in 1876 with the Boston Museum,† made his New York debut in 1882 with Augustin Daly’s company, toured with Minnie Maddern Fiske (1886–1887) and with Helena Modjeska (1887–1888), and performed in stock in San Francisco (1889–1890). Returning to New York, he played several major roles on Broadway in the 1890s and beyond, including Men and Women (1890), Is Matrimony a Failure? (1909), Cheating Cheaters (1916), Baby Cyclone (1927), and Dodsworth* (1934). He toured with Olga Nethersole in 1909. Morris continued his legitimate stage career in New York and San Francisco until 1932.
The actress-playwright Lillian Mortimer was active in theater by 1895. She wrote and produced her own material during her early career in melodrama and her later career as a headliner in vaudeville. The outstanding work in her long roster of plays is the 1905 melodrama No Mother to Guide Her, which she toured for a decade on the popular-price melodrama circuit, performing the comic soubrette role of Bunco. Mortimer’s other Broadway productions include A Broken Man’s Promise (1906), Bunco in Arizona (1907), and A Girl’s Best Friend (1908). During the 1920s, she wrote full-length comedy dramas, often spoofing ethnic types but always reaffirming strong moral values.
Born in New York City, the trailblazing woman playwright Martha Morton was well read and had traveled internationally when she tried to make a career of writing for the stage. Her self-produced initial effort, Helene (1888), failed, but it hardened her resolve. Submitting her next play under a male pseudonym, Morton won a playwriting competition and saw the work, The Merchant, produced at Madison Square Theatre, starring Rose Coghlan, in 1891. Augustus Pitou produced her next play, Geoffrey Middleton, Gentleman (1892), before she hit her stride in a series of plays she wrote for comedian William H. Crane: Brother John (1893), His Wife’s Father (1895), A Fool of Fortune (1896), and The Senator Keeps House (1911). For comedian Sol Smith Russell, Morton wrote A Bachelor’s Romance (1896). Unable to gain admittance to the American Dramatists Club, she organized the Society of Dramatic Authors, with a charter membership of 30 women, in 1907. When the two organizations consolidated as the Society of American Dramatists and Composers, Morton served as its first vice president.
The playwright Michael Morton was born in London and began his American career as an actor with Daniel Frohman’s company. Frohman produced Morton’s play Miss Francis of Yale (1897), and Morton thereafter wrote plays that were staged in New York, some of which he directed, until 1932. His plays include Resurrection (1903), Colonel Newcome (1906), The Little Stranger (1906), Detective Sparkes (1909), Woman to Woman (1921), and The Guilty One (1922).
Producer Morris Gest brought the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) to the United States, ostensibly to demonstrate the value of ensemble acting over the star-dominated Broadway theater. Many American actors, directors, and playwrights were dazzled by the quality of the MAT’s achievement under the direction of Constantin Stanislavski. The MAT’s first tour from 8 January to 31 March 1923 featured all Russian plays, including Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, The Lower Depths, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and A Provincial Lady. The engagement was a critical and commercial success despite the fact that the MAT performed only in Russian. Although Stanislavski reportedly felt that Anton Chekhov’s plays were no longer relevant, they were included in the repertory anyway and proved to be the more successful selections with American audiences. U.S. artists embraced the MAT’s dynamic ensemble playing, and the company’s influence long reverberated in American theater. The MAT returned for an eight-city tour from November 1923 to May 1924, with an expanded repertory: Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Carlo Goldoni’s The Mistress of the Inn, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, A. N. Ostrovsky’s Diary of a Scoundrel, and Chekhov’s Ivanov. Due to sociopolitical upheavals in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia, several MAT members chose to remain in the United States, including Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, Leo and Barbara Bulgakov, Akim Tamiroff, and Vera Soloviova.
New York–born writer Montrose Jonas Moses was educated at City College before he began writing children’s literature, ultimately moving toward books for an adult readership and essays and reviews for magazines, including Book News Monthly, Green Room Book, and Anglo-American Dramatic Register. He was also a drama critic and wrote several books on theatrical subjects, including Famous Actor Families in America (1906), Henrik Ibsen (1908), The American Dramatist (1911), Maurice Maeterlinck: A Study (1911), edited Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856–1911 (1920), and Clyde Fitch and His Letters (1924), coauthored by Virginia Gerson.
Clyde Fitch’s play first appeared as The Harvest at the Fifth Avenue Theatre† on 26 January 1893. Expanded and revised as The Moth and the Flame, and featuring a cast including Effie Shannon and Herbert Kelcey, it opened on 11 April 1898 at the Lyceum Theatre. The cast also included Sarah Cowell Le Moyne, W. J. Le Moyne, and Bruce McRae in a play in which a “new woman,” Marion Wolton (Shannon), a college-educated social worker who becomes involved with an unscrupulous young man, Fletcher (Kelcey), who has already failed to acknowledge an illegitimate child by another woman, Jeanette (played by Eleanor Gross). As Marion and Fletcher are about to marry, Jeanette interrupts the ceremony with news of the child, leading the confused Fletcher to shout, “No! You shall not write Bastard on the forehead of my child!” and he strikes Jeanette. In the play’s conclusion, Marion convinces Fletcher to marry Jeanette and take responsibility for his child. Another young man, Douglas (McRae), who loves Marion, arrives to help her in the aftermath of the aborted wedding. A movie version was released in 1915.
See MOVIES.
Thomas A. Edison’s 1887 invention of the kinetoscope drew upon ideas and inventions from numerous sources, and other inventors rapidly explored the creative possibilities of the new medium of moving pictures. Many actors in the legitimate theater and vaudeville at first remained aloof from the “flicks,” which they viewed as a passing novelty or beneath their status. Others braved it, as did two stage actors moonlighting from the Broadway musical The Widow Jones (1905) in one of the earliest short films to gain notoriety (and controversy), The Kiss between May Irwin and John C. Rice (1896). Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Dorothy Gish were child performers on the stage who easily made the transition to the 12-minute features that followed in the wake of The Great Train Robbery (1906).
Between 1905 and 1930, the movies became live theater’s greatest competitor. Before World War I, most storytelling films were shot in New York and New Jersey, thus allowing stage actors to work in the movies during the day while also appearing on stage at night. Minnie Maddern Fiske, James O’Neill, George M. Cohan, Laurette Taylor, James K. Hackett, and many others appeared in condensed film adaptations of their stage vehicles. In April 1912, theatrical producer Daniel Frohman, in partnership with Adolph Zukor and Edwin Porter, founded Famous Players Film Company with a goal of bringing noted stage stars to the screen in their iconic roles. That summer they arranged a gala showing of their first product, Queen Elizabeth starring Sarah Bernhardt. During the 1920s, John Barrymore became a particular cinematic favorite and retained his popularity as an early star of sound films. The new era in cinema was introduced by musical star Al Jolson in the partial “talkie” The Jazz Singer (1927), based on Samson Raphaelson’s popular stage drama from 1925.
The early sound era was a financial boon for stage actors. Some silent stars had little experience with dialogue or were hampered by inadequate voices or foreign accents. Stage workers went to Hollywood in droves, to act, to provide vocal coaching, and to write and direct. Not surprisingly, many of the most popular films of both the silent and sound eras were adaptations of plays. Once sound films became popular, both major theaters and the “road” diminished. Many cinema houses combined films and live performances of tab plays and vaudeville, but the rise of film was the death knell for vaudeville, which virtually expired in the early 1930s. Live theater began to make use of cinematic elements in plays, a trend that continues into the 21st century. Although films harmed live theater, they also provide tangible evidence of the talents of stage actors. Many theater stars appeared in early sound films, including Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Jeanne Eagels, Marilyn Miller, Walter Huston, Mae West, Helen Hayes, Tallulah Bankhead, Alice Brady, Billie Burke, Ruth Chatterton, Paul Muni, George Arliss, and all three Barrymores, John Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, and Lionel Barrymore. Others, like Katharine Cornell, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne, avoided the screen.
Harrison Rhodes and Thomas A. Wise’s unsuccessful comedy produced by English manager Charles Dillingham opened on 9 September 1918 for 24 performances at the Criterion Theatre, with Wise playing the legendary showman P. T. Barnum.† The play features scenes from the life of Barnum and, particularly, his involvement in the evolution of circus in America. A critic for the New York Herald pointed to the aspects of Barnum’s persona that held interest, noting that Barnum’s “name has taken a permanent place in the language as the synonym of trickery and bombast [. . .] American brag and bluff; our love of clever trickery and our passion for all the old moralities; our remorseless calculation in matters of business and our astounding personal kindliness and generosity—they were all there in Barnum.” Unfortunately, Mr. Barnum failed to find favor with Broadway audiences.
The prototypical expressionist drama by Channing Pollock opened on 17 October 1928 at the Liberty Theatre under Richard Boleslavsky’s direction and ran for 62 performances. A bank clerk dissatisfied with the daily grind makes a pact with Mr. Moneypenny to pursue wealth above all else, even sacrificing faith and loyalty. His ruthless pursuit of money is set in contrast with his daughter Molly’s willingness to enjoy the simple happiness of marriage to a professor. The professor defends the arts against the pervasive jingle of coin that seduces so many to the fast life on Broadway and even to crime. The large cast included Margaret Wycherly, Hale Hamilton, and Donald Meek.
William Gillette’s three-act farce, based on Alexandre Bisson’s Feu Toupinel, opened at Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre on 20 March 1891 for 140 performances. The risqué French source was sanitized in Gillette’s depiction of the discovery that Mrs. Dickerson and Mrs. Perrin, both recently remarried widows residing in the same boardinghouse, were married on the same day to the same man. Comic confusion over the situation is amplified by supporting characters, particularly Major Mallory, who labors to resolve the dilemma. Critics admired the performances of Henrietta Crosman and Louise Thorndyke Boucicault as the two confused widows.
Opening on 3 April 1911 at the Lyceum Theatre, this satirical comedy by Harry James Smith ran for 72 performances. The play is memorable as one of Minnie Maddern Fiske’s vehicles, which she also toured successfully. She played a woman of humble midwestern origins who goes to England and acquires a well-born husband in order to gain her family’s entrée into New York’s higher social circles. It was produced and directed by Mrs. Fiske’s husband, Harrison Grey Fiske. Mrs. Fiske performed more broadly than usual, but appropriately so, according to the New York Times review: “She is delightfully skillful in making the passages from the speech and manner of the artificial English type—beautifully characterized in her playing—to the more natural, if somewhat vulgar American type—equally true in her suggestion of a common origin and unrefined surroundings. Her sudden deflections from the purity of the English speech to the true-blue ‘Ammurican,’ as, for instance, in the scenes where she is alone with her female parent and addresses her as ‘Maaw’ are side-splittingly funny.” Stella Mayhew, Sidney Toler, and Fuller Mellish were among the supporting cast.
This comedy of mock innuendo by Augustus Thomas, produced by Charles Frohman, opened 11 January 1905 at the Savoy Theatre and ran for 123 performances. The play was hailed for its originality, ingenuity, and the eliciting of steady laughter throughout the action that hinges upon the discovery of the blue silk “boots” belonging to the respectable title character (Margaret Illington) in the bedroom of a notorious bachelor (William Courtenay). The risqué complications, generating a great deal of explanation, culminated in a satisfactorily sentimental ending. A movie version starring Constance Talmadge opened in 1918.
Basing her three-act play on popular stories by Alice Hegan Rice, Anne Crawford Flexner crafted this good-natured comedy for a Liebler & Co. production. It opened on 3 September 1904 for 150 performances at the Savoy Theatre after a yearlong national tour featuring Madge Carr Cook as the kindly Mrs. Wiggs, who brokers a relationship between a newspaper editor and a local girl, as well as the romance of her son Billy and an orphan girl. When her errant, alcoholic husband returns home after a long absence, the forgiving Mrs. Wiggs takes him back. Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch became a perennially popular touring vehicle during the first two decades of the 20th century and proved remarkably durable in movie adaptations, leading to no less than five versions between 1914 and 1942, notably the 1934 version, with Pauline Lord, W. C. Fields, and ZaSu Pitts.
Of the multiple scenarios explaining the evolution of musical theater, one possibility is that of the Broadway entertainments starring Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart between 1878 and 1884, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by David Braham, who happened to be Harrigan’s father-in-law. Having developed their Mulligan Guard characters in vaudeville, in 1878, they expanded the act to a 40-minute sketch called The Mulligan Guards’ Picnic that drew large audiences to the Theatre Comique for a monthlong run. The successful The Mulligan Guards’ Picnic was a musical farce featuring Harrigan as Dan Mulligan, a saloon keeper in the poor Irish section of Manhattan, Hart playing a range of broadly comic roles, included a blackface laundress named Rebecca Allup. The Mulligan Guards’ Picnic was followed by sequels, including The Mulligan Guards’ Ball (1879), The Mulligans’ Surprise (1880), The Mulligans’ Silver Wedding (1883), and Cordelia’s Aspirations (1883).
A native of Lemberg, Austria, Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund immigrated with his parents, Yiddish theater actors, to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1902. He made his debut in Yiddish theater in 1908, often cast as a female or old man, but in 1920 Muni was hired as leading man by the Yiddish Art Theatre to appear in Sholom Aleichem’s Hard to Be a Jew. Muni began acting on Broadway in 1930, appearing in two failures, This One Man (1930) and Rock Me, Julie (1931), before scoring a major success as Jewish lawyer George Simon in Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-at-Law* (1931), after which he embarked on a distinguished Hollywood career in such classic movies as Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Good Earth (1937), and The Life of Emile Zola (1937), for which he received a Best Actor Academy Award. Muni returned to the stage periodically, notably as army deserter King McCloud in Maxwell Anderson’s Key Largo* (1939) and as Henry Drummond, the character based on Clarence Darrow, in Jerome Lawrence* and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind* (1955).
The eminent actor-manager James E. Murdoch was born in Philadelphia. He made his debut in 1829 at the Arch Street Theatre† in a single performance underwritten by his hesitant father. His long slow rise in the profession culminated in star engagements in the Union states during the Civil War. His 1880 book The Stage recalls anecdotes from 50 years in the theater.
Born in Quincy, Michigan, the playwright Jane Murfin enjoyed four Broadway hits before she moved to Los Angeles as a producer and movie writer. Her plays, all written with actress Jane Cowl, were Lilac Time (1917), Daybreak (1917), Information Please (1918), Smilin’ Through (1919), and Stripped (1929). She was married to actor Donald Crisp.
During the heyday of touring companies, most opera houses maintained their own orchestras to perform incidental music during the action of the play as well as two or three set pieces during an interval. According to a November 1908 playbill, for example, when Alla Nazimova played Nora in A Doll’s House at the Willis Wood Theatre in Kansas City, the musical program was “Overture: Des Marionettes” by C. Gurlitt, “Norwegian Dances Nos. 1 and 2” by Edvard Grieg, and “Poeme Erotik” by Edvard Grieg. Thus the musical selections echoed the play in spirit, even to equating the doll and the marionette. In a city with several opera houses, the orchestra would be a factor in a given theater’s local following. Often, the conductor emerged as a local personality.
David Warfield found one of his most enduring vehicles in this three-act Charles Klein melodrama, produced by David Belasco, which opened on 26 September 1904 for 627 performances at the Belasco Theatre. Warfield played Anton von Barwig, a formerly admired Viennese conductor who abandoned his career to search for his daughter. The baby had been taken to New York by his wife when she deserted him for another man. In New York, Barwig subsists by giving music lessons to wealthy girls. Barwig discovers that one of them, Helen Stanton (Minnie Dupree), is his daughter. Before he can reveal himself to her, the girl’s stepfather intervenes, threatening to ruin Helen’s forthcoming marriage unless Barwig gives up all contact with her. The music master selflessly assents for the sake of the girl’s happiness. Of course, the action culminates in an emotional father-daughter recognition scene. The play’s phenomenal popularity on the road led to the publication of a novelized version. Jane Cowl and Leon Kohlmar were also in the cast. Warfield revived it in New York in 1916 for 159 performances. A movie version was released in 1927.
The theories of the origin of the American musical are foggy at best, complicated at least. Music and drama have been inextricably linked since the dawn of theater, but the American musical, as it came to be recognized in the 20th century, undoubtedly emerged from a range of 19th-century cultural traditions including folk music, minstrel shows, vaudeville, burlesque, European opera and operetta, and sundry other entertainments. Many historians identify the 1866 production of the melodrama The Black Crook† as an inciting event, since the play, set in an enchanted forest, featured ballet sequences with dancers in pink fleshings playing wood nymphs. The influence of English operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan had an impact after 1870, but by the 1880s United States audiences had developed a taste for European-style operettas.
These entertainments took on a decidedly “American” character after the mid-1890s, particularly through the contributions of George M. Cohan, who wrote, composed, and starred in a series of musical comedies featuring simple plots about “Broadway” wise guys, country bumpkins, and one-dimensional villains, all bundled together with mainstream values and the infectious patriotism typical of the varied ethnic groups crowding into the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The melodic tunes featured witty, colloquial lyrics celebrating the vigor and inventiveness of Cohan’s stage persona as a brash, good-natured, proud Irish American.
The vitality springing from the immigrant experience produced a generation of Jewish American composers and lyricists led by Irving Berlin (1888–1989), a remarkably prolific songwriter who preferred writing for musical revues† but who also composed scores for notable “book musicals” late in his career, including Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Call Me Madam (1950). That same generation produced Jerome Kern (1885–1945), whose Princess Theatre musicals in the 1910s brought greater sophistication, cohesion, and wit to the musical comedy prototype Cohan had created. In this period, Al Jolson soared to stardom under the Shubert producing banner, and he dominated musical comedy into the late 1920s when he moved to Hollywood to star in the first feature-length “talkie” movie, The Jazz Singer (1927).
The definitive star-maker of this era was Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., who produced an annual revue called The Follies beginning in 1907 (and continuing, with some interruptions, until 1932). His earliest stars included his first wife, French soubrette Anna Held (1873–1918), for whom he also produced some European-style musical vehicles. The stars of the Ziegfeld Follies have endured in the cultural memory since many moved from Ziegfeld to stardom in book musicals, films, and radio and television, including Will Rogers, Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn, W. C. Fields, and others. Virtually every important songwriter of the period contributed material to the Follies, but in association with Kern, Ziegfeld produced book musicals Sally (1920) and Sunny (1925) for Marilyn Miller, who introduced Kern’s “Look for the Silver Lining” in the former. These “Cinderella” musicals typically featured a spunky young woman working her way up from poverty to success. Ziegfeld also produced the book musical Whoopee! (1928) to star Eddie Cantor, and its score featured several enduring hits, including “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Love Me or Leave Me” by the songwriting trio of B. G. De Sylva (1895–1950), Lew Brown (1893–1958), and Ray Henderson (1896–1970), whose collegiate musical Good News (1927) became one of the biggest hits of the era.
Ziegfeld’s most enduring production was the 1927 musical drama Show Boat, adapted by Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) from Edna Ferber’s novel of the same name, with a score by Kern and lyrics by Hammerstein (who also directed the original production). The result was a milestone in the evolution of the musical form, featuring a mix of comedy and drama (with tragic overtones) in a story of itinerant performers working on a Mississippi River showboat between the 1880s and the 1920s. Although some of its elements are typical of musical entertainments of the time (including minstrel shows and operetta), Show Boat’s fully dimensioned characters and a dramatic story daring to explore the previously taboo subject of miscegenation were boldly adventurous by popular entertainment standards of the time. An uncommonly cohesive book providing a strong framework for a rich score well integrated into the plot and the personas of the characters were matched by standout songs, including “Make Believe,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “You Are Love,” and the show’s leitmotif “Ol’ Man River,” which attained classic status. In the late 1920s, Show Boat demonstrated that the musical stage could present serious stories, well-dimensioned characters, and important themes, but its model did not immediately inspire imitators. Show Boat’s original production was not a popular success despite a cast including legendary “torch singer” Helen Morgan (1900–1941) as Julie La Verne, the black-passing-for-white tragic catalyst of the plot.
Most musicals before 1930 remained lighthearted, loosely constructed amusements, although the period produced a generation of composers and lyricists destined to perfect the musical theater form and expand its content and the variety of its form, including composer George Gershwin (1898–1937) and his lyricist brother, Ira (1896–1983); Cole Porter (1891–1964); Richard Rodgers (1902–1979); and Lorenz Hart (1895–1943). Their contributions, as well as the continued achievements of Berlin, Kern, Hammerstein, and others, created a golden age of American musicals from 1930 to 1970.