Scaled-down versions of successful Broadway productions, usually musicals but also multi-scene, large-cast dramas, were created for the purpose of touring. Not only might the text be shortened, but tab shows generally offered less ambitious scenery, effects, and costumes (and often reduced the size of casts) than audiences would have seen in the original version of the play. The term was later used to describe short musical entertainments offered in conjunction with movie showings in the “talkie” era.
Born on Staten Island, New York, the actor Robert Taber began his career in Helena Modjeska’s company as Silvius in As You Like It. A competent actor, he was good-looking enough to become a leading man, and his roles eventually included Romeo, Orlando, and Claude Melnotte. He is remembered largely for having been married to Julia Marlowe from 1894 to 1900, during which time she toured as Mrs. Taber.
This generic term refers to a scene (usually short) establishing location, atmosphere, or period, but a tableau is usually thought of as a picture or image presenting something like a living fresco. The expression “hold picture,” which literally indicates the idea of freezing action into an appealing image, is used interchangeably with the term tableau. A related term is tableau vivant, which involves performers frozen in decorous positions like a living painting. These were particularly popular in society, as described in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, as well as in musicals and revues† between 1880 and 1930.
This Denver theater opened in 1881, was converted to a movie theater in 1921, and was razed in 1964. Colorado’s Lieutenant Governor Horace Tabor had previously built a Tabor Opera House in Leadville and was determined to make the Denver venue unprecedentedly lavish inside and outside. Chicago architect William J. Edbrooke designed the five-story building with a 1,500-seat capacity. Equipped with 24 stage settings (as opposed to four or five stock sets at most playhouses), the Tabor Grand garnered national attention for its scene designs as well as the first-class attractions that played there. M. B. Leavitt, who built Denver’s Broadway Theatre intentionally to surpass the Tabor Grand, described the two playhouses in his book as “the two most beautiful theatres in the United States.”
Harry James Smith had his greatest success with this four-act comedy based on Gabriel Dregley’s German play when George M. Cohan produced it (and contributed rewrites) at the Cohan and Harris Theatre on 27 August 1917 for 398 performances. John Paul Bart (Grant Mitchell), a tailor’s assistant, is in love with Tanya, the daughter of his boss. He reads a book written by Tanya’s arrogant fiancé in which it is explained that success comes through elegant dress and personal charm. In a tuxedo appropriated from the tailor shop, John makes a social success, but his ruse is revealed. Tanya, however, has fallen in love with him, and John returns to his job at the tailor shop. A Tailor-Made Man was revived in 1929, and a 1922 silent movie version was remade as a “talkie” featuring William Haines in 1931.
Richmond, Virginia–born Edith Taliaferro was the child of theater workers and made her debut at age three in a stock production of Shore Acres. She acted for over 40 years, but her greatest success came early, with the title role of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1910). Her other credits include The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), The Evangelist (1907), Young Wisdom (1914), Captain Kidd, Jr. (1916), Mother Carey’s Chickens (1917), and The Hook-Up (1935). She was the sister of Mabel Taliaferro and married actor House Jameson.
Like her sister Edith, Mabel Taliaferro began her long acting career as a toddler, playing in a stock production of Blue Jeans at the age of two. She made her New York debut in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1899), after which she appeared in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1904), You Never Can Tell (1905), and Pippa Passes (1906) before scoring a notable success in the title role of Polly of the Circus (1907). Later credits include Springtime (1909), The Call of the Cricket (1910), Young Wisdom (1914), Luck in Pawn (1919), The Piper (1920), Back Fire (1932), George Washington Slept Here* (1940), and Bloomer Girl (1944). See also †CHILD PERFORMERS.
Opening on 8 January 1912 at the Harris Theatre, this women’s suffrage comedy written and directed by Marion Fairfax ran for 144 performances. Pauline Lord played the title role, supported by Tully Marshall (Fairfax’s husband). Henry B. Harris produced it. The press trumpeted the play as a portrait of the “new woman,” but Fairfax described her heroine as a woman who, as the critic for the Rochester Times wrote, “swings midway between the old woman who is happy and content in her home and fills an economical place in her world, and the new woman, who has had the courage to carve out a place for herself in the present business world.”
New York–born actor and writer Julius Tannen had no particular interest in the stage but was so successful as a salesman and entertaining at parties that he was encouraged to try vaudeville. On Broadway, Tannen appeared most notably in a 1906 revival of George M. Cohan’s The Governor’s Son and Abe and Mawruss (1915, one of the Potash and Perlmutter sequels). His other credits include Lifting the Lid (1905), Fritz in Tammany Hall (1905), The Judge and the Jury (1906), Her Family Tree (1920), Round the Town (1924), and Earl Carroll’s Vanities in 1925 and 1926. Tannen had his greatest successes in vaudeville, much appreciated for his improvisations, word games, and as a monologist. He played New York’s Palace Theatre, the vaudeville mecca, more often than most of his peers. With the advent of sound movies, Tannen appeared in character roles in such films as The Mortal Storm (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)—and winning laughs as an old actor introducing “talkies” in Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
A native of Salem, Massachusetts, Rose Elizabeth Tapley came from a family of sailors and attended Boston University. Her stage career was a brief one, beginning with the Myron B. Rice Company in 1900. Tapley teamed with Richard Mansfield for a time, acting with him in Beau Brummell, Beaucaire, A Parisian Romance, and First Violin. Tapley also acted in leading roles with Chauncey Olcott, E. H. Sothern, and J. H. Stoddard. Arguably, her most acclaimed role was as Mercia in The Sign of the Cross, and she appeared on Broadway in Robert Burns (1905). From 1905, Tapley worked in movies, continuing from the silent era into the first years of “talkies.” Her films, several drawn from theatrical sources, included A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1909), Vanity Fair (1911), As You Like It (1912), The Prince of Pilsen (1926), and Paris Bound (1929).
Best known for his novels, Newton Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis, Indiana, also wrote plays, and some of his novels were adapted for the stage. Twenty-one Tarkington plays were produced, and he was viewed as a romantic with an eye for the details of midwestern American life, past and present, although he occasionally departed from this formula. Tarkington’s plays include Beaucaire (1901), written with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, which starred Richard Mansfield, followed by The Man from Home (1908), Springtime (1909), and Cameo Kirby (1909). The Man from Home, written in collaboration with Harry Leon Wilson, failed, as did their subsequent collaborations, Your Humble Servant (1910) and Getting a Polish (1910).
With a similar fate for his solo effort, Beauty and the Jacobin (1912), Tarkington abandoned playwriting for several years, never quite shedding the notion that serious art was impossible in the theater. He created vehicles for Otis Skinner (Master Antonio, 1916) and George Arliss (Poldekin, 1920) and collaborated with others on The Country Cousin (1917, with Julian Steel) and Tweedles (1923, with Wilson). His greatest stage success, and perhaps his most characteristic work, Clarence (1919), provided early acting opportunities for Alfred Lunt and Helen Hayes. Later, Tarkington wrote The Intimate Strangers (1921), Rose Briar (1922), The Trysting Place (1923), Magnolia (1923), and Colonel Satan (1931), while a few of his novels were successfully dramatized by others, including Seventeen (1918), Penrod (1918), and The Plutocrat (1930).
Opening on 1 October 1923 at the Belmont Theatre, this drama by Gilbert Emery ran for 255 performances under John Cromwell’s direction. With a cast of six women and two men, the play deals with strong sexual themes. Tishy (Ann Harding), a decent young woman, works as a stenographer to support her sniveling, spendthrift parents. The bootlegger’s wife from upstairs lets slip that Tishy’s father was seen earlier in the day with a compromised woman, Nettie Dark (Fania Marinoff). It is New Year’s Eve, but Tishy nerves herself up to track down that woman in hopes of recovering the desperately needed money her father gave Nettie. Meanwhile, by a ruse, Nettie lures to her room a young man (Tom Powers) she used to know, who just happens to be the one courting Tishy. Tishy is distraught to discover her beau there and breaks off with him. But he truly loves Tishy, and the bootlegger’s wife counsels her that all men are somewhat tarnished and that a girl should settle for “one that cleans easy.”
George M. Cohan’s facile parody adapted from Cora Dick Gantt’s melodrama provided him an enduringly popular play. The leading role of the mysterious Vagabond was originally played by Arnold Daly but later acted by Cohan himself in a demonstration of his versatility. This spoof of melodramatic traditions is set in a small country inn where the guests complain of highwaymen plaguing travelers. Those stopping at the inn include the otherwise unnamed Vagabond, a mysterious woman, and the family of a governor. The daughter of the governor and the woman are both attracted to the charming Vagabond, who seems to be in control of the situation until the sheriff arrives to escort him back to the insane asylum from which he has escaped. First produced on 27 September 1920 at the Cohan Theatre, The Tavern won appreciative reviews and audiences for 252 performances. Cohan played the last couple of weeks of the run and returned in a 1930 revival. The Tavern became a staple of stock and touring companies. In his declining years, Cohan, eager for another stage success following a string of failures during the 1930s, crafted a sequel, The Return of the Vagabond (1940), but it failed to find favor and marked Cohan’s final Broadway appearance.
A native of South Hadley, Massachusetts, Charles A. Taylor ran away from home, supposedly after reading a biography of P. T. Barnum.† He became a successful producer and playwright of second-rate melodramas intended for rural audiences, several of which starred his wife, Laurette Taylor. Among his plays to appear on Broadway were The Derby Mascot (1894), A Wife in Pawn (1900), The Queen of the Highway (1903), The Child Bride (1903), Through Fire and Water (1903), The White Tigress of Japan (1904), The Royal Chef (1904), Tracked around the World (1904), and Yosemite (1914).
Born Joseph Deems Taylor in New York, he became a critic and successful composer. His musical, The Echo (1910), won favor, and he also wrote an operatic version of Peter Ibbetson for the Metropolitan Opera. Taylor’s association with theater was mostly in providing evocative incidental music for several important plays, including Liliom (1921), The Adding Machine (1922), Casanova (1923), a 1924 revival of Fashion,† and Beggar on Horseback (1924).
Laurette Cooney was born in New York and made her stage debut in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as a child performer billed as “La Belle Laurette.” Her adult career began when she appeared at the Boston Athenaeum prior to her Broadway debut in From Rags to Riches (1903). She worked continually in various stock companies with her first husband, Charles A. Taylor, whose surname she took as her stage name. Taylor toured in a series of cheap melodramas written by Taylor and did not have a major success until 1910 in Alias Jimmy Valentine, which she followed by playing a Hawaiian princess in The Bird of Paradise (1912). She divorced Taylor in 1910 and achieved stage immortality in her signature role, the title character in Peg o’ My Heart (1912), written for her by her second husband, J. Hartley Manners. The sheet music of a popular song inspired by the play’s title featured Taylor’s portrait, and she frequently returned to this role on tour, in stock, on radio, and in a silent movie adaptation in 1922. The role of a sweet-natured young woman from the lower class forced to live with snobbish relatives suited the charm and wit typical of Taylor’s acting.
Following Peg o’ My Heart, Taylor performed in revivals of Sweet Nell of Old Drury (as Nell Gwyn) and Trelawny of the “Wells.” When Manners died in 1928, the grief-stricken Taylor retired from the stage and descended into alcoholism. After a long, dark, and mostly unemployed period, she returned to the stage in two legendary performances: Mrs. Midget in a revival of Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (1938) and Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s* The Glass Menagerie* (1944). A highly fictionalized musical biography of Taylor called Jennie (1963) starred Mary Martin* and had a short Broadway run.
Selwyn & Co. produced this three-act Roi Cooper Megrue comedy at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, where it opened on 19 September 1918 for 300 performances. The Husband (Frederick Perry) is jealous, so the Wife (Margaret Lawrence) and the Friend (Arthur Byron) stage a harmless tryst to teach the Husband a lesson. When the Husband believes the Friend has committed suicide, he comes to his senses and all are reconciled. The novel use of generic descriptives instead of specific character names gave the otherwise lightweight play a universal quality. The critic for Current Opinion called Tea for Three “a light, ironic, witty play.” A silent movie adaptation was released in 1927.
Born in San Francisco, this playwright and director began as an actor and assistant director under David Belasco. With George H. Jessop, he wrote The Great Metropolis (1889) and directed it. Produced by Abraham L. Erlanger, The Great Metropolis led to Teal’s position as director for Erlanger and his partner, Marc Klaw. In collaboration with Clay M. Greene, Teal also wrote the melodrama On Broadway (1896), starring Maggie Cline. Most of the 80 New York productions staged by Teal were musicals, but his legitimate stage successes included Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1900), The Mountain Climber (1906), and The Wanderer (1917). He also directed William Young’s hit stage adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s novel, Ben-Hur (1899).
A native of Spokane, Washington, Verree Teasdale, a cousin of writer Edith Wharton, trained for the stage at the New York School of Expression. On Broadway, she debuted in Philip Barry’s The Youngest (1924) and made her most notable appearances in The Constant Wife (1926) with Ethel Barrymore, Nice Women (1929), and The Greeks Had a Word for It (1930), as well as roles in The Master of the Inn (1925), Buy, Buy Baby (1926), Soldiers and Women (1929), The Royal Virgin (1930), Marriage for Three (1931), and Experience Unnecessary (1931). With the arrival of sound movies, Teasdale appeared in a range of supporting roles, including parts in Roman Scandals (1933), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1934), First Lady (1937), and Come Live with Me (1941). Teasdale’s second husband was actor Adolphe Menjou, with whom she performed on radio.
Between 1880 and 1930, technological advances in theatrical practice were significant. The shift from gas to electrical lighting was, perhaps, the major innovation. Use of electric lighting began in some American theaters as early as the 1880s, while many were built at the turn of the century with both gas and electricity. The catastrophic 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago accelerated the transition to all-electric lighting in theaters across the United States. Painted flat scenery, otherwise known as profile scenery, slowly gave way to three-dimensional and practical units. Improvements in stage machinery made scene-shifting and special effects more efficient, although until the early 20th century a style that might be described as painted realism dominated. Stage effects grew more impressive between 1880 and 1910, as producers of melodramas attempted to draw audiences with spectacular scenes of train wrecks, fires, waterfalls, and such. The New Stagecraft, heralded in Robert Edmond Jones’s design for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1915), led to more stylized, skeletal designs depending on sensitive lighting and carefully staged scenes.
Mrs. Nellie H. Bradley (d. 1927) published (by the National Temperance Society and Publication House) this largely musical “entertainment, or cantata, adapted to temperance organizations, schools, or social gatherings” in 1888. The entertainment “consists of songs, recitations, choruses, solos, duets, colloquies, etc., giving much temperance information in an entertaining manner.” Bradley, a temperance activist, wrote a number of such works, mostly one-act pieces, that were popular with local temperance and women’s organizations, but A Temperance Picnic with the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe seems not to have ever been staged professionally.
Plays (mostly melodramas) illustrating the evils of drink were mostly written during the decades before modernism and yet they proved surprisingly enduring. Thus, William H. Smith’s† The Drunkard† (1844), with its horrifying scene of delirium tremens, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room† (1858), with the child singing “Father, dear father, come home with me now,” were still finding audiences on the eve of Prohibition. Others included The Bottle, The Drunkard’s Warning, and Life; or, Scenes of Early Vice. George L. Aiken’s† Uncle Tom’s Cabin† (1852), the most popular and frequently produced melodrama of the 19th century, was still drawing audiences early in the 20th century, and it too conveyed the temperance message as St. Clare’s good impulses are overcome by his addiction to drink.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Fay Templeton, the daughter of the pioneering midwestern trouper John Templeton, grew up performing the child roles in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room,† East Lynne,† and other melodramas. Later she toured widely as Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore. She performed in legitimate drama, operetta, burlesque, and vaudeville, and she achieved Broadway stardom in 1906 in George M. Cohan’s Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway. She made her final Broadway appearance in Jerome Kern’s musical Roberta (1933) introducing the song “Yesterdays.”
This one-act 1894 temperance play by George M. Baker was just one of many he published as anti-alcohol sentiments were significantly expanding in the United States. A sailor, Harry Drayton, led astray by drink repents, vanquishes a villainous lawyer, Morton, who is exploiting his sister, Mary Drayton, by attempting to foreclose on a banknote on the family farm unless Mary acquiesces to his lecherous desires. At the final curtain, Harry offers the usual speech of repentance, stating, “You know not how much I have been tempted, Mary; but, thanks to that better influence which has once more championed me, I feel that I shall triumph, and gladden the hearts of the old farm again. So, Mary, let’s go home at once; we have that here which shall kindle a bright flame on the old hearthstone, and bring smiles to the anxious faces that have so long awaited the sailor’s return.”
This phrase was a slang term for popular-priced theater attractions—that is, any theater operation, whether an individual company or a whole circuit of theaters, for which the price of admission was 10, 20, or 30 cents, depending upon choice of seats. Melodrama dominated the ten, twent’, thirt’ movement. In her essay, “Why They Loved the Ten, Twent’, Thirt’,” Barbara M. Waldinger analyzes the entertainment needs it fulfilled for the working classes, who far outnumbered legitimate theatergoers. The heyday of the ten, twent’, thirt’ theaters was from the late 1890s until World War I; they declined as the competition from movies became too great with the wave of construction of opulent movie palaces that replaced storefront nickelodeons.
A popular entertainment tradition in the Midwest in the 1850s, tent shows featured plays and variety amusements staged inside tents of brown canvas (to distinguish them from the white of circus tents) illuminated by naphtha lamps. Tent shows, also known as tent repertoire, and Chautauqua programs may both be considered offshoots of the repertoire companies that played small towns and rural areas. The Chautauqua circuit grew after 1904. Major stars, including Minnie Maddern Fiske and Sarah Bernhardt, performed with tent shows when they battled the control of the Theatrical Syndicate. By World War I, with improvements in transportation options, there were as many as 400 tent shows operating throughout the United States, with admission prices topping out at $1. After 1930, as the Great Depression set in, audiences for tent shows declined.
Zoë Akins wrote this three-act comedy with a virtuoso role for Jobyna Howland. The title character is a bigger-than-life opera diva; originally a humble Texas girl named Hollyhock Jones, she had been coached and polished with European manners by her second of four husbands (by whom she has a grown son and who will probably take her back when the play ends). The play opened at the Empire Theatre on 20 November 1922 and ran a disappointing 32 performances. Akins originally titled the play Greatness, and she returned to that title when it was published with her two other full-length plays.
Charles H. Hoyt’s popular four-act farce (which Hoyt claimed to have written in five days) opened at the Madison Square Theatre on 8 January 1894. Based on Hoyt’s own experiences in politics, A Texas Steer satirized the collision of Washington, D.C., elitism with a populist legislator from Texas, Maverick Brander. Brander and his wife, Bossy (Florence Walsh), run afoul of political insiders but ultimately prevail. Tyrone Power Sr. acted in a 1915 movie version. Will Rogers starred in a 1927 remake.
From the time of the earliest permanent playhouses in the United States until the early 20th century, theater fires were a continual danger. Mostly due to dangerous gas lighting and highly flammable materials used in theatrical production, there were well over 100 major theater fires between the first serious one at Boston’s Federal Street Theatre in 1798 and a tragedy at the Brooklyn Theatre in 1876 during a performance of The Two Orphans† when 197 people were killed. The greatest disaster occurred on 30 December 1903 when Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre burned during a performance of the musical Mr. Bluebeard starring Eddie Foy. Despite Foy’s heroic efforts to calm the audience, over 600 people were killed. The tragedy was also a public relations disaster for the Theatrical Syndicate. It led to the end of gas-lit theaters and to newly stringent laws mandating safety exits from theaters and other precautions.
Founded by Sheldon Cheney in Detroit, Michigan, in 1916, Theatre Arts was a quarterly devoted to the art of theater, but it evolved into a monthly under its subsequent editors, Edith J. R. Isaacs* and Rosamund Gilder.* Its founding was perfectly timed to capture articles on all aspects of theatrical endeavor during the golden age of American drama. The influence of modernist European theater, the New Stagecraft, Broadway, and the emergence of a generation of significant American playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, Robert E. Sherwood, and Maxwell Anderson, were covered in considerable depth. Theatre Arts was lavishly illustrated and regularly included complete texts of new plays and musicals. Theatre Arts Monthly, as it became known, merged with the Stage, a magazine previously published by the Theatre Guild, in 1948, but changing times forced its discontinuation in 1964.
This was a popular name used for variety theaters across the nation in the 1870s. Although generally regarded as the breeding ground for the vaudeville theaters that later sprang up, the Comiques also launched the careers of some legitimate theater performers and writers. For example, J. K. Emmet, later renowned for his “Fritz” character, got his start at Philadelphia’s Comique, and Eddie Foy performed in a “two-act” at Kansas City’s Theater Comique. Although most of the entertainment was of the “free and easy” variety, full-fledged plays frequently got thrown into the mix. Out west, cowboys tended to refer to the “The-ay-ter Com-ee-cue.”
This producing organization started at the end of World War I, in part to replace the Washington Square Players, which had closed due to the war. The Theatre Guild was founded by Players board members, including Lawrence Langner, Philip Moeller, Rollo Peters, Lee Simonson, and Helen Westley, with Theresa Helburn* and Dudley Digges becoming important forces within the organization when they joined shortly after the founding. The Theatre Guild’s first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest (1919), with scene design by Peters who also starred, was a succès d’estime, but it was the acclaim accorded their second production, St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson (1919), that began a remarkable era of producing. The Theatre Guild continues to the present, although its significance declined after the 1950s.
In its heyday, the Theatre Guild produced some of the most important American plays of the mid-20th century, while staging many European works as well. The Theatre Guild’s productions prior to 1930 include Jane Clegg (1920), Heartbreak House (1920), Mr. Pim Passes By (1921), Liliom (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), Back to Methuselah (1922), R.U.R. (1922), The Adding Machine (1923), Saint Joan (1923), The Guardsman (1924), They Knew What They Wanted (1924), The Garrick Gaieties (1925), Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1926), The Silver Cord (1926), The Second Man (1927), Porgy (1927), Marco Millions (1928), Strange Interlude (1928), and Dynamo (1929). Among the important works mounted after 1930 were several plays by Eugene O’Neill, S. N. Behrman, and Maxwell Anderson, the first musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize–winning plays Idiot’s Delight* (1936) and There Shall Be No Night* (1940), the acclaimed Paul Robeson Othello (1943), Porgy and Bess (1935), and such varied plays as Reunion in Vienna* (1931), The Philadelphia Story* (1939), The Time of Your Life* (1939), and Come Back, Little Sheba* (1950).
Arthur Hornblow took over the pictorial Our Players, a quarterly that began publication in 1900, and transformed it into the monthly titled The Theatre beginning with its May 1901 issue. Later called Theatre Magazine or Theatre, it continued publication until 1931, ultimately eclipsed by its more serious-minded competition, Theatre Arts.
Established in 1912 by S. H. Dudley, this theater chain aimed at supplying year-round employment for African American performers, although they eventually came to see TOBA as an acronym for “tough on black actors.” By 1916, Dudley had 28 theaters in the chain. In 1919, theaters managed by whites were admitted. Dubbed the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” it was criticized for paying small salaries to all performers except headliners. The TOBA folded during the Great Depression.
The first known theatrical club in the United States is believed to be the Actors’ Order of Friendship, which was established in 1849 in Philadelphia. In 1868, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks arranged charitable efforts on behalf of performers, but its work was taken over by a New York lodge. Set up in 1888 and devoted to charitable efforts for members of the profession, this lodge, in turn, was supplanted by the Actors’ Fund of America, which quickly became the main source of assistance to indigent theatrical workers. The Lambs Club, a purely social club for theatricals, was started in 1874 but was rivaled by the Players, the most prestigious of the era, established in 1888 by Edwin Booth and others. Along with theater professionals, membership included celebrated literary and political figures such as Mark Twain† and Civil War hero General William T. Sherman. Because of its all-male membership (until 1992), actresses founded the Twelfth Night Club in 1891 and the Professional Women’s League in 1892. In 1907, the Charlotte Cushman† Club was founded in Philadelphia to provide housing for actresses and to preserve Cushman’s papers. Nonprofessionals founded theatrical clubs in support of the Little Theater Movement in the early 20th century. College and university students organized themselves into clubs to raise funds to produce plays on their campuses. See also *ACADEMIC THEATER; †CLUBS; THE FRIARS.
Theater artists developed their own lingo referring to backstage situations and life on the road. Some of it entered general usage, like winging it for doing something without a considered plan, just as actors sometimes had to go on stage in roles they had not learned and thus frequently popped off into the wings to consult the script. Other terms remained within the profession and are lost to posterity except for the occasional appearance in an old play or in vocabulary lists compiled by fans, like Judge Horton, who saved for us such terms as chesty for an actor who overrated his own ability, and knocker for one who would make unkind comments about a fellow performer. A big-name performer or headliner would get “top of the hangers,” meaning placement of the name near the top of the bills or posters that bill posters hung on walls about town. A shape actress was one who revealed the contours of her body by cross-dressing to play male roles; the term was mildly pejorative in that it implied a reliance on flaunting one’s physical attributes as opposed to genuine artistry. The term on with others designated a performer who had to appear in a scene without any dialogue to speak. The term choir snatcher described a manager whose quest for new talent would take him into local churches on Sundays to spot pretty faces and voices singing in the village choir.
Audiences, too, had popular phrases to describe their theatergoing activities. Carriage party was the term for a crush of horse-drawn carriages stopping in front of a theater a half hour before curtain, a sure indication that the play was drawing a fashionable audience. In the early 20th century, the term subway circuit referred to outlying theaters, as opposed to those conveniently located on Broadway. Line parties were groups of friends who bought their theater seats together, all in a row or “line.”
Variety and even general newspapers popularized words like ginger to mean risqué content or suggestive dialogue; a show with too much ginger could face difficulties from local authorities in some cities. A “jay town,” populated with “jays” or rubes, was so small that it could support no more than a one-night stand. See also CONWAY, JACK (1888–1928).
Also referred to as the Theatrical Trust, the Theatrical Syndicate was set up in 1895 during a secret meeting of major producers—A. L. Erlanger, Charles Frohman, William Harris Sr., Al Hayman, Marc Klaw, Samuel F. Nixon-Nirdlinger, and J. Fred Zimmerman—with the initial plan of better organizing the chaotic booking procedures of the day. This admirable goal evolved into a virtual monopoly over nearly all theaters in the United States. The terms the syndicate offered producers and actors grew increasingly harsh. A few notables fought back, particularly Harrison Grey Fiske and his wife, Minnie Maddern Fiske, who, like Sarah Bernhardt, opted to perform in tents before acquiescing to the syndicate’s terms. David Belasco also resisted. Even though the nationwide press assailed the syndicate’s practices, its stranglehold on American theater remained intact until the Shubert brothers established their own producing empire in competition. The syndicate ordered the Shuberts to cease acquiring theaters in 1905, but they fought back by building their own. By 1916, the syndicate’s last agreement expired, and the Shuberts became the major theater monopoly until 1930.
Opening on 24 November 1924 at the Garrick Theatre, the Pulitzer Prize–winning drama by Sidney Howard was produced by the Theatre Guild and directed by Philip Moeller. It ran for 192 performances and was made into the 1956 Frank Loesser musical The Most Happy Fella. With the California wine-producing country as local color, the poignant romantic triangle involves a waitress (played by Pauline Lord) who arrives to marry Tony (Richard Bennett), a wealthy Italian vintner who proposed to her by mail, having sent the photograph of his handsome younger overseer (Glenn Anders). Although incapacitated by an automobile mishap en route to the station to get his bride, Tony insists on going through with the wedding. In her confusion, the waitress turns to the younger man, and their brief fling results in her pregnancy. By the time Tony can walk again, she has come to love her husband and fears she will lose him when he learns of the child he could not have fathered. Sanford Meisner* appeared in the supporting cast. Revivals appeared in 1939 (featuring June Walker), 1949 (starring Paul Muni), and 1976 (with Louis Zorich, Lois Nettleton, and Barry Bostwick).
This four-act muckraking drama by Charles Klein opened on 1 February 1909 for 168 performances at the Hudson Theatre, produced by Henry B. Harris. Howard Jeffries is accused of murdering an unscrupulous art dealer who had been his mother’s old sweetheart. Howard’s wife Annie comes to his defense, but he is estranged from his wealthy parents because he married a poor girl. At Annie’s behest, an important lawyer takes the case and discovers the art dealer’s suicide note, thus clearing Howard and forcing the authorities to admit their rush to judgment. The cast featured Wallace Eddinger, Edmund Breese, and Helen Ware. Movie versions were released in 1913, 1919, and 1926.
Written by Bayard Veiller as a vehicle for his wife, actress Margaret Wycherly, this three-act thriller opened on 20 November 1916 for 328 performances presented by father-and-son producing partners William Harris Sr. and William Harris Jr. at the 48th Street Theatre. Wycherly played Rosalie La Grange, a medium engaged by Mrs. Crosby (Martha Mayo) to contact a murdered friend in hopes that his spirit will identify the killer. During the séance, Edward Wales (S. K. Walker), a friend of Mrs. Crosby, is stabbed, but no knife can be found. Helen Trent (Sarah Whiteford), who is engaged to Mrs. Crosby’s son, Will (Calvin Thomas), is suspected, particularly when it is revealed that she is the medium’s daughter. However, a second séance reveals the true killer. Wycherly appeared in the 1929 movie version, but there were two others, in 1919 and in 1937, with Dame May Whitty playing Rosalie in the last.
Produced by the Shubert brothers, this comedy by Rachel Crothers opened on 31 March 1919 for 160 performances, first at the Broadhurst Theatre, followed by part of the run at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre. The cast featured Henry Hull, Luis Alberni, Blanche Friderici, and Alison Skipworth in a theater-district boardinghouse, including an ingénue named Penny from a rural town who hopes to parlay her singing skill into a professional job to help pay for her brothers to attend college. Penny proves to be an outstanding performer and earns the tuition for her brothers, but gossips at the boardinghouse peg her, unjustly, as having loose morals. She befriends a young rake named Napoleon Gibbs (Hull), who makes a play for Penny, but she escapes his grasp, turning for comfort to O’Brien, a married man, who also tries to seduce her. Losing trust in men, she aims to go it on her own, but Napoleon realizes that he truly loves her and returns to win her love. A 1920 movie version found Alberni and Skipworth repeating their Broadway roles.
Born Albert Ellsworth Thomas in Chester, Massachusetts, he was educated at Brown University and worked in journalism before turning to a playwriting career. Among his more than two dozen modestly successful plays and musicals, Thomas had his longest run with an adaptation of an Alice Duer Miller story, Come out of the Kitchen (1916). Others were Her Husband’s Wife (1910), Little Boy Blue (1911), The Rainbow (1912), The Big Idea (1914), The Matinee Hero (1918), Just Suppose (1920), The Champion (1921), Only 38 (1921), The French Doll (1922), Our Nell (1922), The Jolly Roger (1923), Fool’s Bells (1925), Embers (1926), Lost (1927), The Big Pond (1928), Vermont (1929), Her Friend the King (1929), and No More Ladies (1934).
St. Louis–born Augustus Thomas worked as a railroad man and journalist, and he considered a law career before he adapted Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel Editha’s Burglar as a play for a local theater. Revised in collaboration with Edgar Smith, it had a successful Broadway run in 1889. He replaced Dion Boucicault as the resident play doctor at the Madison Square Theatre, and this led to a string of highly successful melodramas that were among the most acclaimed of the time, including Alabama (1891), In Mizzoura (1893), New Blood (1894), The Man Upstairs (1895), The Capitol (1895), The Hoosier Doctor (1898), Arizona (1900), Colorado (1901), Soldiers of Fortune (1902), The Witching Hour (1907), As a Man Thinks (1911), Rio Grande (1916), and The Copperhead (1918). He also wrote popular comedies, including On the Quiet (1901), The Earl of Pawtucket (1903), The Other Girl (1903), Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots (1905), The Education of Mr. Pipp (1905), The Embassy Ball (1906), and Palmy Days (1919). His plays were generally appreciated for his Americanizing of the enduring dramatic struggle of an individual against forces out of her/his control, and they were varied in subject matter. Thomas was a longtime president of the Society of American Dramatists. After Charles Frohman’s death in the Lusitania sinking, Thomas managed Frohman’s interests. See also *DRAMATISTS GUILD INC.
Born Briche Baumfeld-Kaufman in Tarashche, Ukraine, Bessie Thomashefsky immigrated to the United States with her family in 1879 and, after moving around a bit, settled in Baltimore. Thomashefsky attended school for a time, but by age 12 she was laboring in a stocking factory sweatshop. In 1887, she attended a performance of a Yiddish theater troupe and met her future husband, Boris Thomashefsky. The following year, she left her family home to join the Thomashefsky company and was cast in the ingénue part in Abraham Goldfaden’s Shulamith. Bessie and Boris had a child together in 1889 and were married. Thomashefsky’s greatest roles included melodramas like The Kreutzer Sonata, The Broken Fiddle, and The Yeshiva Boy. The Thomashefskys’ audience called for American plays in Yiddish, so they obliged with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.† Boris composed popular songs in the style of Irving Berlin, including “Der Yidisher Yankee Doodle” and Der Yidisher Baseball Game.”
In 1911, Bessie starred in a Yiddish version of The Girl of the Golden West, and Boris wrote Di Sheyne Amerikaner in which she played an emancipated woman. Her most applauded vehicles supported women’s rights and suffrage, including Minke, the Housemaid, Chantzie in America, and Jennie Runs for Mayor. The Tomashefskys’ theater succeeded, but at the cost of their relationship; she was overburdened by the acting demands and children while he began an affair with Regina Zuckerberg, a young actress who patterned her acting and persona on Bessie. The Thomashefskys separated in 1911, and she started her own company, taking over management of the People’s Theatre in 1915. On her own, Thomashefsky played some of Boris’s roles, including a Yiddish Hamlet. She also appeared in Suzi Bren, a role that emulated Sophie Tucker’s “Red Hot Mama” persona and is believed to have influenced many Jewish women entertainers, from Fanny Brice to Molly Picon. A year later, the theater was named for her. Thomashefsky’s approach to theater emphasized contemporary social and political issues, especially related to women’s lives. Her name became synonymous with the golden age of the Yiddish theater in the United States.
Boris Thomashefsky was born in Kiev, Russia; he immigrated to the United States in 1881 and found work in a shirt factory. He began acting in Yiddish theater in a revival of Avrom Goldfadn’s The Witch on the Lower East Side of New York. He tried his hand as a producer, playwright, and theater owner but lacked the ambition to provide the sort of challenging dramas his colleague Jacob Adler regularly offered.
Known for his good looks and melodic voice, Thomashefsky starred in numerous Yiddish operettas, including Moshe Zeifert’s The Little Spark of Jewishness (1909). The romanticized roles he played onstage, enhanced by his frequently publicized offstage love life, elevated him to stardom. His wife, Bessie Baumfield-Kaufman (1873–1962), often costarred with him in Yiddish versions of literary classics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin,† Hamlet, Faust, Hedda Gabler, and Parsifal. Thomashefsky occasionally performed on Broadway, notably in The Singing Rabbi (1931). He also acted in Yiddish-language movies.
Pennsylvania-born Denman Thompson grew up in New England and performed in circus and stock without gaining much attention. When he developed a vaudeville sketch about the definitive rube, a good-natured New England farmer, the character proved so popular that Thompson wrote a play about him called Joshua Whitcomb† (1878), which did well on tour. Thompson then collaborated with George W. Ryer on a second Whitcomb play, The Old Homestead (1887), which achieved 160 performances at New York’s Fourteenth Street Theatre, phenomenal success on the road, and returns to New York in 1899, 1904, 1907, and 1908. Following Thompson’s death, a 1913 revival featured Edward L. Snader as Whitcomb. Despite attempts at other roles, Thompson’s audience demanded Joshua Whitcomb; he played the iconic character for the rest of his career. With Ryer, Thompson also wrote The Sunshine of Paradise Alley (1896) and Our New Minister (1903).
London-born Lydia Thompson toured to New York in 1868 with her “British Blondes” and generated major excitement with a series of burlesque musicals, including Ixion (1868), Ernani (1868), The Forty Thieves (1869), and Sinbad the Sailor (1869), in which Thompson played the breeches role to show off her well-contoured figure, winning fame as a shape actress. Some critics found her performances scandalous, but others commented favorably on her beauty and skill at comedy. The popularity of Thompson’s entertainments led to American imitators; she toured frequently to the United States, making her last New York appearance in The Crust of Society (1894).
Born in Pittsburgh, Woodman Thompson was a prolific scene designer from the 1920s until the 1940s, teaching design at Columbia University on the side. His scenery graced the original Broadway productions of Beggar on Horseback (1924), What Price Glory (1924), The Firebrand (1924), The Cocoanuts (1925), The Wisdom Tooth (1926), The Desert Song (1926), Deep River (1926), The Barretts of Wimpole Street* (1931), The Warrior’s Husband (1932), The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (1937), and The Magnificent Yankee (1946). He also designed Winthrop Ames’s popular revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, both in 1926, and Katharine Cornell’s Romeo and Juliet (1934).
Son of actor-manager Charles R. Thorne Sr. (1815–1893), he apprenticed to a silversmith before beginning his acting career in San Francisco. In 1854, he played George Shelby in an Uncle Tom’s Cabin† company, beginning a long learning curve with various ensembles. After returning to San Francisco to act two seasons under Tom Maguire, Thorne formed his own company for a tour to China and Japan. Back at Maguire’s in 1866, he achieved leading man status, which impelled him to theaters in Boston and New York. He spent much of his remaining career under A. M. Palmer’s management. Palmer acknowledged Thorne’s rough, opinionated personal manner but praised the “manly sincerity” he could bring to the right characters.
Anthony Paul Kelly’s three-act thriller, heavily rewritten by producer-director George M. Cohan, opened at the Cohan and Harris Theatre on 31 August 1918 for 335 performances. German spies enlist the aid of Fraulein Helene to take the place of a dead English woman and to contact Franz Boelke, who aims to plant a bomb at a cabinet meeting in London. However, the plan is foiled when Helene is revealed as a British counterspy and, in the process, falls in love. A silent movie version appeared in 1926; it was remade as a “talkie” in 1930.
Rachel Crothers had her first Broadway success when this four-act drama opened on 17 October 1906 for 227 performances at the Madison Square Theatre. The play focuses on Rhy Macchesney (Carlotte Nillson), who, with her two brothers, owns the rich “Three of Us” mine in Nevada. Rhy’s fiancé, Stephen Townley (Frederick Truesdell), hears of a richer load and tells Rhy. One of Rhy’s brothers overhears the conversation and hands the information over to a speculator. Stephen thinks Rhy has betrayed him, but he eventually learns otherwise. Jane Peyton was in the cast. A silent movie adaptation was released in 1914.
Three one-act plays written by poet Ridgely Torrence between 1914 and 1917—Grammy Maumee, Simon the Cyrenian, and The Rider of Dreams—made up a 5 April 1917 bill called Three Plays for a Negro Theatre at New York’s Garden City Theatre, where it ran until 14 April, when it moved to the Garrick Theatre until 24 April. Torrence’s goal was to present African American life with more realism than had been portrayed in American drama up to that time. The bill was the first to feature all-black casts on Broadway. Partly due to America’s entry in World War I, Three Plays for a Negro Theatre had a short run, but Torrence published the plays under the same title.
Austin Strong’s drama, doctored by coproducer Winchell Smith, received mixed reviews but became a long-running success due to marketing efforts by its other coproducer, John Golden. Golden released unsold tickets through Leblang’s Ticket Office, and enormous signs touting the play’s merits were placed outside the Criterion Theatre where Three Wise Fools opened on 31 October 1918. It subsequently racked up 316 performances despite its slight story of three old bachelors reminiscing about a lost love shared by all three. The woman married a man falsely convicted of a crime, and she has since died. The bachelors are rejuvenated by the appearance of Miss Fairchild, the grown child of their old sweetheart, who attempts to take the blame for the crime that convicted her father. Gordon Schuyler, a nephew of one of the bachelors, is able to prove the innocence of the girl, as well as of her father, and they are subsequently married. Harry Davenport and Helen Menken were among the cast. Golden produced a 1936 revival featuring legendary actor-playwright William Gillette in his last Broadway appearance, but the production managed only nine performances. Movie versions of Three Wise Fools appeared in 1923 and 1946, with Lionel Barrymore appearing in the last.
T. S. Arthur wrote the source story for this temperance play published in 1888 but apparently completed in 1872. Arthur had previously authored the temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There† (1854), which was subsequently dramatized and became one of the most produced of the anti-saloon plays responsible for creating a cottage industry of temperance melodrama, of which Three Years in a Man-Trap is one.
Bills posted to advertise a show were sized by the number of sheets measuring 28 by 42 inches. A three-sheet, three of those sheets placed one above the other in vertical format, was the size that might be posted on a board (called a “stand”) in front of the theater and was for many years considered the standard for theatrical purposes. During the 1880s, most touring companies would need 5,000 sheets to adequately cover a city. Posters became gradually larger in the 20th century, increasing to the eight-sheet, the 12-sheet, the 16-sheet, and even the 24-sheet.
Born in Atlantic City, Cleon Throckmorton began as a scene designer with the Provincetown Players for whom he famously created the sky dome first used for The Emperor Jones. Later Throckmorton designed for the Theatre Guild, the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Civic Repertory Theatre, and the Group Theatre.* Among the plays and musicals designed by Throckmorton were All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), Burlesque (1927), Alien Corn* (1933), Threepenny Opera (1933), and Another Language. Throckmorton also owned a scenic supply company and supervised technical direction for the Federal Theatre Project.*
David Belasco produced this three-act melodrama by Willard Mack (who also appeared in the cast) at the Lyceum Theatre on 3 October 1917, where it ran for 384 performances. Lenore Ulric scored a success playing Rose Bocion, a French Canadian temptress, sought after by several men, including a Mountie, Devlin (Mack), and Bruce Norton (Calvin Thomas), who commits a justifiable murder. Devlin seizes on this as a way to eliminate Norton as a competitor for Rose’s affections, but she stands by Bruce until he can exonerate himself. Critics found the play less than exceptional, but Belasco staged a spectacular thunderstorm and other effects, all of which attracted audiences. Ulric starred in a 1923 silent movie version, and Lupe Velez played the role in a 1929 “talkie.”
Originally known as Longacre Square, this area of Manhattan was renamed in honor of the New York Times building, a huge structure housing many employees necessitating a subway stop to this part of the city in the early 20th century. The area became synonymous with Broadway theater as the rowdier amusements that had been part of Longacre Square’s rambunctious history receded and the area was revitalized. Many theaters were built in the vicinity. By World War I, it had become the center of New York’s theatrical activity. Times Square remains the geographic center of the Broadway community into the 21st century. In the midst of Times Square, a statue (designed by Georg John Lober) of George M. Cohan, the actor, director, producer, composer, and lyricist who was a major force in creating the idea of Broadway as the center of New York theater, stands marking his career achievements and as a reminder of his song, “Give My Regards to Broadway.” The statue was erected in 1959 and arranged through the efforts of many, led by Oscar Hammerstein II.
This term, purportedly coined by composer Monroe H. Rosenfeld, identifies two blocks of 28th Street between Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Sixth Avenue where many song publishing companies operated beginning in the late 19th century, thriving just prior to World War I. The distinction between the Tin Pan Alley songwriter, whose creations were mostly for vaudeville and burlesque performers, and the Broadway songwriter, whose compositions were featured in musicals and revues,† did not hold for long as many of the leading composers and lyricists moved freely between both categories. Despite the fact that many of the song publishing firms eventually moved to New York’s Brill Building, “Tin Pan Alley” remained the way their business was described.
In the popular mind, songs were often more associated with a leading performer than with the composer; thus a composer who performed his own material, as did George M. Cohan, achieved the peak of recognition. Irving Berlin also wrote both words and music. Jack Norwoth, best remembered for “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” worked with various collaborators, notably singer Nora Bayes. Rida Johnson Young wrote hundreds of songs that entered the popular vernacular. Her “Mother Machree,” for example, like many of the Irish songs she wrote for Chauncey Olcott and other stage Irishmen, was widely believed to be an authentic Irish song. Edward Harrigan and David Braham scored hits with songs they wrote for Harrigan and Hart’s lively comedies. Other songwriters whose work was frequently heard from the stage include Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, Richard Carle, Paul Dresser, Charles K. Harris, Eddie Leonard, Edgar Selden, Harry Williams and Egbert Van Alstyne, Joseph Tabrar, Harry Kennedy, and Will S. Hays. The most successful African American songwriting team was Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson with hits like “Under the Bamboo Tree.” Others whose songs won both black and white singers include Ernest Hogan, James A. Bland, Will Marion Cook, and Sam Lucas.†
Opening on 20 February1922 at the Liberty Theatre, this comedy by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, directed by Howard Lindsay, ran for 128 performances. Helen Hayes played the wife who unassumingly manipulates her husband’s success at his job. As the self-important but clueless husband, Otto Kruger helped keep the laughs coming. A movie version appeared in 1923, featuring Louise Dresser, Theodore Roberts, Arthur Hoyt, and Edward Everett Horton.
Best remembered as one of those familiar movie and television character actors, George Tobias was born in New York to a Jewish family and began his career in theater at the Pasadena Playhouse.* He played many “friend of the hero” roles during his long career, usually blue-collar types with a distinct ethnic flavor and genial persona, though he occasionally played villains. His auspicious debut on Broadway came in a supporting role in Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stalling’s What Price Glory (1924), and he appeared in such noted plays as Robert E. Sherwood’s The Road to Rome (1928), a 1929 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s S.S. Glencairn, and as Boris Kolenkhov, the flamboyant ballet teacher, in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s* Pulitzer Prize–winning You Can’t Take It with You* (1936). Tobias’s other credits included The International (1928), The Grey Fox (1928), Fiesta (1929), Red Rust (1929), Sailors of Cattaro (1934), Black Pit (1935), Paths of Glory (1935), Hell Freezes Over (1935), Star Spangled (1936), Good Hunting (1938), and Silk Stockings (1955). Tobias appeared in more than 60 films, including classics like Ninotchka (1939), City for Conquest (1940), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Sergeant York (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Between Two Worlds (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Seven Little Foys (1955); he repeated his Broadway role in Silk Stockings (1955). Tobias also appeared in dozens of television programs, including as Abner Kravitz in the long-running comedy Bewitched from 1964 to 1971.
Born in New York, Genevieve Tobin debuted in 1912 in a revival of Disraeli. She proved to be a winsome ingénue in Oh, Look! (1918), Palmy Days (1919), Little Old New York (1920), Polly Preferred (1923), The Youngest (1924), Dear Sir (1924), This Woman Business (1926), Murray Hill (1927), Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), and as Cordelia in a 1923 production of King Lear. Tobin married actor and movie director William Keighley.
A subcategory of the tent show or tent repertoire, the Toby show featured a young, red-haired, and freckle-faced rube character named Toby, often accompanied by a pigtailed soubrette named Susie. The character seems to have originated around 1909 as a means of injecting comedy into a standard play. Toby quickly became a ubiquitous and popular figure among the small troupes that played rural America, particularly in the midwest and south. Toby was a silly bumpkin, but he always managed to save the situation in the end. Among the last of the Toby show tent performances were the Schaffner Players of Iowa, featuring Neil and Caroline Schaffner as Toby and Susie.
George H. Broadhurst collaborated with Abraham S. Schomer on this four-act drama produced at the 48th Street Theatre on 6 October 1913 for 280 performances. Emily Stevens scored a personal success as Lily, a spoiled, difficult wife who cannot learn to live on a modest income when her husband’s business fails. To keep the luxuries she feels she must have, Lily goes to work in a high-class brothel. When her husband, working as agent for the brothel’s landlord, arrives and finds Lily there, he is understandably shocked and leaves her. Conrad Nagel starred in a 1930 movie version of Today.
Hooper G. Toler Jr. was born in Warrensburg, Missouri, finding his way into theater in childhood playing the lead in Tom Sawyer. He pursued a professional career, finding employment in a touring company in the 1890s that led to Broadway. From the start, Toler demonstrated versatility in a wide range of roles in various genres. His Broadway credits included his first in The Office Boy (1903), but he ultimately worked under the auspices of David Belasco from 1918. His post–World War I credits included Some One in the House (1918), On the Hiring Line (1919), Sophie (1920), Poldekin (1920), Deburau (1920), Kiki (1921), The ’49ers and The Love Girl (1922), The Exile (1923), Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1923), The Dove (1925), Canary Dutch (1925), Tommy (1927), a 1929 revival of Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh starring Mrs. Fiske in one of her signature roles, and It’s a Wild Child (1929). In the area of musicals, Toler wrote, acted in, composed, and directed How Baxter Butted In (1905), Golden Days (1921), and Bye, Bye, Barbara (1924). In 1930, he wrote and directed a nonmusical comedy, Ritzy, which starred Miriam Hopkins and Ernest Truex but managed only a short run. With the coming of sound movies, Toler appeared in 80 films from 1929. His movie credits included Madame X (1929), Blonde Venus (1932), The Call of the Wild (1935), and If I Were King (1938), but his most enduring legacy was playing Charlie Chan, a clever Chinese detective, in a long series of films (he replaced actor Warner Oland, who had originally played the role). Toler was not Asian (he was of Scottish heritage), but he continued a long and now controversial tradition of white actors portraying various racial and ethnic types, often in a broadly stereotypical way. Toler gave Chan dignity and intellectual humor, and the series had a long run.
Actors who made a career of appearing in the innumerable productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin† that toured the United States from its first performances in Troy, New York, in 1852 well into the 1930s were Tommers. These productions, often referred to as “Tom shows,” were enduringly popular; but being called a “tommer” was tantamount to being called a ham.
Frank Craven’s three-act comedy, in which he also starred and codirected with John Cromwell (who was also in the cast), was produced by William A. Brady at the 39th Street Theatre, opening on 24 February 1914 for 223 performances. An engaged couple, Albert Bennett (Craven) and Alice Cook (Inez Plummer), plan to marry and build a little bungalow on a piece of property Albert has purchased with his modest savings. Unfortunately, family and friends intrude to offer suggestions on the house plans and cause Albert and Alice to fight. The couple breaks up, and Albert sadly finishes building the house himself after the carpenters go on strike. He is about to sell it when Alice returns just as he notices a flower she has planted. The couple is reconciled, vowing to keep their families at bay. Craven later adapted the play into a hit musical, Up She Goes (1922), collaborating with Tin Pan Alley songwriters Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney.
William Gillette’s three-act comedy opened on 26 November 1894 at the Standard Theatre for 216 performances, produced by Charles Frohman. Based on a French play, La Plantation Thomasin, Too Much Johnson starred Gillette as Augustus Billings, a confirmed philanderer, who dallies with his French mistress in New York while his wife and disapproving mother-in-law are told he is in Cuba managing a plantation. When the women insist on accompanying him on a trip to Cuba, he is forced to take them and pulls off the subterfuge by borrowing a friend’s hacienda and befriending an irascible old man, Johnson, whom Billings presents as his overseer. After a few close calls, Billings manages to convince his wife and her mother. Gillette appeared in a short-lived Broadway revival in 1910. A movie version appeared in 1919, and budding filmmaker Orson Welles* made another version on a shoe-string budget in 1938; this film, thought to be lost, was found and restored in 2013.
Opening on 29 August 1922 at the 48th Street Theatre, the hilarious send-up of little theaters by George Kelly (who also directed) ran for 128 performances. Mary Boland played the charming young society woman who is recruited as a last-minute replacement in the leading role of a play to be performed for charity. Act 1 shows the rehearsal at her home. Act 2 is set backstage during the disastrous performance when someone in the audience faints. In act 3, after the show, the wife learns that it was her husband who fainted in horror at the artistic travesty on stage. Will the marriage survive? Alison Skipworth had a scene-stealing character role as Mrs. J. Duro Pampinelli. Oddly enough, the target of the play’s satire—amateur theater groups—produced this play regularly for decades. A 1939 television movie adaptation was filmed by the BBC.
Born in Xenia, Ohio, as Frederick Ridgely Torrence, he was educated at Miami University and Princeton University. He worked as a librarian and editor after graduating, but he spent most of his career writing poetry, books, and occasional plays, including Grammy Maumee (1914), Simon the Cyrenian (1917), and The Rider of Dreams (1917), which made up Three Plays for a Negro Theatre (1917); this trio of plays was produced at New York’s Garden City and was the first to feature an all–African American cast on Broadway. In 1904, he was briefly engaged to playright Zona Gale.
A touring company on the road between 1880 and 1930 might perform a single play or several plays in repertory in opera houses with 2,000-seat capacities or in small-town theaters seating 100 or so. Touring was arduous but highly lucrative and did not decline until World War I, when sound movies, radio, and automobiles took audiences away from live performances other than vaudeville, which continued touring until the 1930s. Tours of recent Broadway hits and out-of-town tryouts of new works continue today, but these are rare compared to the golden age of the road when live theater was a constant in American cities and towns. African American performers toured on their own circuits of theaters, continuing well into the mid-20th century. See also THEATRE OWNERS BOOKING ASSOCIATION (TOBA); TRAVEL.
Born in Streatham, England, J. Ranken Towse came to the United States in 1869 and made his career in New York without ever becoming an American citizen; he died in England. After four years in various positions on the New York Post, he became drama critic in 1874 and continued until 1927, when he retired. Despite his conservative tastes, he was respected for his high standards and seen as one of the most influential critics of the era.
A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Lee Tracy moved freely between stage and movie acting, making his theatrical debut as the inventor brother Joe in George Kelly’s The Show-Off (1924). Tracy really made his mark in Philip Dunning and George Abbott’s Broadway (1926) as hoofer Roy Lane and in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s* The Front Page (1928) as crack newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson. His Broadway appearances included The Book of Charm (1925), Glory Hallelujah (1926), Oh, Promise Me (1930), Louder, Please (1931), Bright Star (1935), Every Man for Himself (1940), The Traitor (1949), Metropole (1949), Mr. Barry’s Etchings (1950), and, most notably, The Best Man* (1960), in which he played a fictional president of the United States. Tracy also appeared in numerous films, including the reprisal of his stage role from The Best Man on screen in 1964.
Born in Milwaukee, Spencer Bonaventure Tracy spent time in the U.S. Navy during World War I, after which he attended Ripon College where, at the suggestion of one of his professors, he decamped for New York to enter the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA). After a year at AADA, Tracy landed a small role as a robot in the Theatre Guild’s production of Karel Čapek’s expressionist drama R.U.R. (1922). During the 1920s, he continually found acting roles on Broadway, including A Royal Fandango (1923), starring Ethel Barrymore, and Yellow (1926). Mentored by George M. Cohan, who cast Tracy in a leading role in his comedy Baby Cyclone (1927), Tracy continued in weak plays like Conflict (1929) and Nigger Rich (1929), but he finally caused a sensation with his electric performance as merciless “Killer” Mears, a death-row inmate, in John Wexley’s* prison drama The Last Mile* (1930). This led to Tracy’s long Hollywood career as a major movie star. He returned only once to Broadway in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Rugged Path (1945), winning strong reviews, although the play’s run was brief.
The visual effect of one spectacular scene fading into another constituted a basic appeal of the fairy extravaganza, a type of production in which scenic effects trumped coherent narrative. Beginning with The Black Crook† in 1866, transformation scenes found their way into burlesques, pantomime spectacles, and musical revues† for three decades or more.
These are openings cut into the stage floor or in the scenery to allow scenic effects or unusual appearances by actors. Throughout most of the 19th century, the trapped stage floor was a standard feature of the well-equipped theater, but their gradual neglect in the early 1900s paralleled the passing of melodrama and its cheap thrills. According to the Kansas City Star in 1906, a modern stage of the 1890s had five traps: two quarter traps, one Hamlet trap, one star trap, and one vampire trap. The Hamlet trap, used in the gravedigger scene, was generally about seven feet by two-and-a-half feet and located slightly upstage of center. The two quarter traps, one at stage right and one at stage left, a little farther downstage than the Hamlet, were useful for emergencies as well as for pantomimes and extravaganzas with lots of special effects.
In Faust, Mephistopheles always made his entrance from the vampire trap, near the footlights at stage right, as did any infernal or unpleasant characters. Some traps were named for the manner in which the doors were hinged to close behind the actor; thus “vampire trap” might also indicate two spring flaps in a piece of painted scenery, which allowed the illusion that an actor had materialized through a solid wall. The star trap was used for the sudden entrance down stage left of a good fairy, who would shoot up through segments that spread open in a star pattern, but which also snapped shut so quickly that hapless fairies were sometimes scratched, caught, or injured. Occasionally, theaters would install the ghost glide (known in England as the Corsican trap) by which the actor would rise into view as he moved parallel to the footlights, an effect achieved by having him ride a wagon up an incline beneath a long opening in the floor.
From its beginnings, American theater seemed to be situated in a few East Coast cities, but as the United States expanded, actors and productions took to the road with great frequency. During the first half of the 19th century, rivers served as highways into the wilderness, and some troupes—like that with which Joseph Jefferson III toured as a child—made their way by a combination of boat and overland wagon, and sometimes even by using the wagon as a sleigh on frozen rivers. After the Civil War, railroad travel rapidly replaced river travel. By the late 1880s, a vast network of trains connected the nation, and theatrical chains or circuits were formed to facilitate bookings along given railroad lines. Traveling was often arduous, particularly when it involved long jumps and one-night stands. Unknown actors built their reputations on tour, while a waning star could extend a career by touring. A few top stars—Sarah Bernhardt, Joseph Jefferson, Richard Mansfield, and Adelina Patti, for example—could afford private railroad cars.
Circuses made use of entire trains to transport performers, equipment, and animals. Showboats—floating theaters—on the Mississippi River and elsewhere continued until the 1930s. The Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.–produced musical drama Show Boat (1927) offered a theatrical valentine to the era of touring by boat just as the tradition was dying away.
Harry B. Harris produced this four-act James Forbes comedy at the Liberty Theatre, where it opened on 10 August 1908 for 280 performances. Forbes also directed a cast including Frank McIntyre, playing traveling salesman Bob Blake, who falls in love with Beth Elliott (Gertrude Coghlan), a local girl in a rural small town. When her family farm is auctioned for taxes, Beth believes that none of her neighbors will bid against her. She is manipulated into thinking Bob has cheated her out of the land by some con men who want to cheat her out of the farm, but Bob finds a satisfactory solution, and the lovers are reunited. Edward Ellis was also in the cast. A movie version appeared in 1916.
Born Travers John Heagerty in Prudhoe, England, Henry Travers studied for a career in architecture but soon turned to acting. In the United States, he had a 35-year career on Broadway during which time he was associated with an impressive number of important contemporary American and European plays and classical revivals. He began with The Price of Peace (1901), a short-lived melodrama, but he subsequently appeared in The Betrothal (1918); The Faithful (1919); The Rise of Silas Lapham (1919); Jane Clegg (1920); Heartbreak House (1920); Liliom (1921); He Who Gets Slapped (1922); From Morn to Midnight (1922); R.U.R. (1922); Saint Joan (1923); revivals of Caesar and Cleopatra, Arms and the Man, and Androcles and the Lion in 1925; The Chief Thing (1926); a revival of Pygmalion in 1926; The Brothers Karamazov (1927); Right You Are If You Think They Are (1927); a revival of The Doctor’s Dilemma in 1927; and Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions (1928).
After 1930, Travers acted in a revival of Getting Married in 1931, Reunion in Vienna* (1931), The Good Earth (1932), and in the Pulitzer Prize–winning You Can’t Take It with You* (1936) in the role of Grandpa Vanderhof. Travers appeared in 52 movies, garnering a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for Mrs. Miniver (1942). On screen, Travers also acted in a significant number of classic films, including Reunion in Vienna (1933), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935), Dark Victory (1939), On Borrowed Time* (1939), High Sierra (1941), Ball of Fire (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Yearling (1946), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the latter providing him with the memorable role of Clarence, Angel Second-Class.
Born in Stockton, California, this playwright served briefly as secretary to Helena Modjeska, then became a reporter. She traveled to France to cover World War I. In 1921, she achieved a major coup by getting an interview with Pancho Villa in Mexico, and she drew upon that experience for her play Gringo (1922). She ultimately wrote 54 plays, including O, Nightingale (1925), Ladies Leave (1929), Lone Valley (1933), For Saxophone (1934), Plumes in the Dust (1936), and Hope for a Harvest (1941). Her significant success was Machinal (1928), a classic of expressionist drama in America, depicting the dehumanizing effects of a mechanized society and the sexual oppressions faced by women, inspired by the Judd Grey–Ruth Snyder murder trial. In her later years, Treadwell wrote novels and often directed or produced her own plays.
Jules Eckert Goodman adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular novel with the intention of presenting it as a Christmas treat for children, but the adaptation proved so popular that it ran for 205 performances at the Punch and Judy Theatre, where it opened on 1 December 1915. With music by Maurice Rumsey, Treasure Island was produced and directed by Charles Hopkins, with Edward Emery codirecting. The play also featured Hopkins’s wife as young Jim Hawkins searching for pirate treasure and contending with the duplicitous pirate Long John Silver (Emery). Treasure Island had a long life on stage in numerous adaptations and movie incarnations.
Bayard Veiller’s three-act courtroom melodrama, produced by A. H. Woods, opened on 19 September 1927 for a hefty 437-performance run at the National Theatre. The murder trial of beautiful Follies entertainer Mary Dugan (Ann Harding) is going badly until her younger brother, Jimmy (Rex Cherryman), takes over Mary’s defense from the experienced attorney Edward West (Cyril Keightley). Mary’s admission of affairs with several men is mitigated by testimony that the spoils of these affairs financed Jimmy’s law degree. It turns out to be well-spent money when Jimmy proves that West, in love with the murdered man’s wife, framed Mary and provided a weak defense to guarantee her conviction. The large cast also included Arthur Hohl, Robert Cummings, Louis Jean Heydt, Barton MacLane, and Merle Maddern. Norma Shearer scored a hit in the 1929 movie version, her first “talkie,” and Laraine Day reprised the role in a 1941 remake.
This one-act drama by Susan Glaspell opened on 8 August 1916 at the Wharf Theatre, the Little Theater used by the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod, after which the Washington Square Players produced it at the Comedy Theatre, where it opened on 30 August 1916. Based upon an actual case that Glaspell covered as a young reporter in Iowa, the tightly crafted play, which Glaspell adapted from her short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” remains a perennial favorite. Two women (Alice Hall and Glaspell) explore small pieces of domestic evidence to discover that the absent woman must have murdered her abusive husband. The local authorities, all men, are unable to recognize clues among typical household items, nor are they able to decipher the emotional complexities of women’s lives. The turning point comes when the law-and-order-respecting sheriff’s wife decides not to reveal to her husband what the women have discovered. Glaspell’s husband, George Cram Cook, played Lewis Hale. Trifles was briefly revived by the Manhattan Little Theatre Club in 1928. Movie adaptations were filmed in 1930 and 2009.
Paul M. Potter adapted George du Maurier’s novel into this popular four-act drama. It opened on 15 April 1895 for 208 performances at the Garden Theatre. Wilton Lackaye was acclaimed for his performance as Svengali, who molds Trilby, a beauty played by Virginia Harned, into an opera diva. Billee, an artist, wants to marry Trilby, but she chooses to continue performing under Svengali’s guidance. When Svengali dies, Trilby’s vocal talent dies with him. Billee reunites with her, but Trilby dies without the influence of Svengali. Lackaye appeared in well-received 1905 and 1915 Broadway revivals, as well as a 1915 silent movie version, but a 1938 revival with Walter Hampden proved most successful. Trilby also provided the source for a failed musical, The Studio Girl (1927), and the novel and/or play inspired at least a dozen film treatments, including a 1931 classic with John Barrymore retitled Svengali.
Charles H. Hoyt’s popular three-act play with music (Hoyt wrote lyrics to Percy Gaunt’s music) opened on 9 November 1891 at the Madison Square Theatre and ran for a staggering 657 performances. “Chinatown” is a fake destination posited by a lively group seeking an evening out at a restaurant, and there mishaps do occur. The plot involved a widow who ends up at a fashionable big city restaurant where she helps bring some young couples together and finds romance for herself. Up to that time, A Trip to Chinatown was the longest-running musical play of the era until the 1919 musical comedy Irene ran longer. Scholars have pointed to similarities between the show’s plot and that of Hello, Dolly! (1964). The cast featured vaudevillian Trixie Friganza and comedian Harry Conor, who introduced the show’s hit song, “The Bowery.” Other songs were interpolated during the show’s long run, including Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball,” which also scored a hit. In 1912, an adapted version of the show, under the title A Winsome Widow, had a successful run. A movie version was released in 1926.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the actress Sarah Truax studied the Delsarte system of expression in her teens and later joined the Chicago Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art. She made her debut with Otis Skinner’s company in 1894 and toured with him for three seasons. She became a respected stock actress. Her memoir A Woman of Parts (1949) recounts a demanding and colorful career.
Born in Rich Hill, Missouri, Ernest Truex made his stage debut billed as a child prodigy in 1894. His career spanned nearly 70 years. After acting in stock for several seasons, he made notable appearances in comedies and musicals, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1910), A Good Little Devil (1913), The Dummy (1914), Very Good Eddie (1915), Six-Cylinder Love (1921), The Fall Guy (1925), Whistling in the Dark (1932), and his biggest hit, George Washington Slept Here* (1940). He also spent a season with the American Repertory Theatre* in 1946 and appeared in many movies and television.
This comedy by Clyde Fitch opened on 7 January 1907 at the Criterion Theater and managed only 34 performances despite its critical assessment as Fitch’s finest play. Some have seen the play’s action as similar to that in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, although Fitch provided a happy ending. The title refers ironically to the web of deceit spun by Becky Warder, a congenital liar who loses her husband’s respect. She wins it back only upon repairing the damage done by her lies. Clara Bloodgood, the play’s star, who had previously appeared in several Fitch plays, was a success on tour with the play during 1907. However, during her Baltimore engagement with the play, Bloodgood shot herself. It was speculated that her suicide was prompted by the play’s triumphant London production starring Marie Tempest and exacerbated by Fitch’s dedication of the published play to Tempest. Some rumored that Bloodgood was in love with Fitch, a closeted homosexual. Fitch denied any connection in the torrent of newspaper coverage of Bloodgood’s death. In 1914, The Truth was revived for 55 performances on Broadway, starring Grace George.
Born in Nevada City, California, he graduated from the University of California. His first important play, the romantic melodrama The Bird of Paradise (1912), was produced by Oliver Morosco. Tully was sued for plagiarism, but he won on appeal and went on to write The Rose of the Rancho (1906), Omar the Tentmaker (1914), and The Flame (1916). He directed some of his own plays, as well as works by others, including John Hunter Booth’s The Masquerader (1917) and Keep Her Smiling (1918), and Ernest Hutchinson’s The Right to Strike (1921).
Turkey is slang term used to describe a flop or an uninteresting play or movie. This term seems to have come into the parlance of the stage in the 1920s, perhaps deriving from the fact that actual turkeys cannot fly. Dud is another word used to describe a failed production.
John Golden and Winchell Smith produced Smith and John E. Hazzard’s three-act comedy on 18 August 1916 at the Gaiety Theatre for 435 performances. Joe Bascom (Forrest Winant), recently released from prison for a crime he did not commit, returns to his mother’s peach farm with two fellow prisoners, Muggs and Gilly (William E. Meehan and Frank Nelson), who are determined to go straight. However, when Joe learns that villainous Deacon Tillinger (Samuel Reed) is planning to foreclose the mortgage on his mother’s struggling farm, he prevails upon Muggs and Gilly to help. They crack Tillinger’s safe, steal enough money to pay off the mortgage, pickpocket the cash from Tillinger’s pocket and return it to his safe. June Mathis adapted the play for a 1922 silent movie. A 1981 musical adaptation failed out of town.
This three-act Salisbury Field and Margaret Mayo farce opened on 14 August 1914 at the Fulton Theatre for 411 performances. Drunken Italian tenor Signor Monti (Charles Judels) wanders by mistake into the hotel room of Blanche and Harry Hawkins (Madge Kennedy and John Westley). He has disrobed for the night when Blanche arrives, initiating considerable confusion since the maid has sent Monti’s clothes to be cleaned and Harry arrives in a fury. When Monti’s wife (Ray Cox) turns up as well, confusion reigns. There were no less than three movie versions (1920, 1929, 1942), the last starring Joan Bennett and George Brent.
Opening 9 September 1926 at the Little Theatre, this light romantic comedy with corporate skulduggery ran for 324 performances. John Golden produced, with direction by Winchell Smith. Gladys Unger wrote the play about two sisters who live in a cheap rooming house and work for rival companies. They relinquish their secretarial jobs to become parlor maid and cook at a swanky country house, which turns out to be the scene of machinations between the two companies. The sisters save the situation, and one of them wins the man she fancies. A 1927 movie version starred Janet Gaynor.
George Clouse Tyler was born in a small town near Chillicothe, Ohio, and worked as a reporter before becoming James O’Neill’s manager. In 1897, he joined producing forces with Liebler & Co., which, under the guidance of Theodore A. Liebler and Tyler, emerged as an important turn-of-the-century producing organization, presenting such notable plays as The Christian (1898), Sag Harbor (1900), The Squaw Man (1905), The Man from Home (1908), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1910), and The Garden of Allah (1911). Liebler & Co. also produced tours of such international stars as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Eleonora Duse, and Gabrielle Réjane. After several failures, just prior to World War I, Leibler & Co. folded, and Tyler briefly worked for Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger before striking out on his own as a producer with Clarence (1919), Dulcy (1921), To the Ladies (1922), Merton of the Movies (1922), Young Woodley (1925), and The Plough and the Stars (1927). From the mid-1920s, Tyler produced a series of revivals including Diplomacy and Jim the Penman, as well as classics such as She Stoops to Conquer, The Beaux’ Stratagem, and Macbeth, the last featuring the only scene designs by theatrical visionary Edward Gordon Craig to be seen on American stages. Tyler’s later productions include a 1929 revival of Sherlock Holmes, titled It’s a Grand Life (1930); a 1930 revival of The Rivals, titled Mr. Samuel (1930); Colonel Satan (1931); a 1931 revival of The Admirable Crichton; and For Valor (1935). Tyler retired from the stage to write his autobiography, Whatever Goes Up (1934).
Born in Augusta County, Virginia, Elizabeth Tyree studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She became a member of Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Stock Company under the name of Bessie Tyree. In 1890, she acted on Broadway as understudy to Effie Shannon in The Charity Ball. Tyree subsequently appeared in The Home Secretary (1895), The Courtship of Leonie (1896), The Mayflower (1897), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898), The Manoeuvres of Jane (1899), The Ambassador (1900), Twelve Months Later (1900), The Man of Forty (1900), Unleavened Bread (1901), Sweet and Twenty/The Romanesques (1902), Captain Molly (1902), Gretna Green (1903), The Earl of Pawtucket (1903), and Tit for Tat (1904). Tyree was married to drama critic James Stetson Metcalfe, who wrote for the Wall Street Journal and Life magazine.