2. 1898--Week 8: February 21-26

 by 

Samuel L. Leiter

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theatre

Brooklyn College and the Graduate School, CUNY

For an introduction to and explanation of this blog, as well as a list of contemporary Brooklyn theatres, click here.

Weeks 1-6 are covered on this blog's predecessor, STAGES IN BROOKLYN'S PAST, starting with weeks 1-2 here. 

For an introduction to and explanation of this blog click here:

Comedy, farce, extravaganza, and melodrama satisfied Brooklynites’ theatrical sweet tooths this week; additional entertainment at the vaudeville and burlesque houses served as the cherry on the sundae’s top. Comic star May Irwin was the week’s big name, but other notables were present as well, like Nance O’Neill, Wilton Lackaye. All eight legits were active, as were all four nonlegits.

Irwin, a versatile actress whose career really took off when she began to specialize in farce and comedy, headed the cast of The Swell Miss Fitzwell, by H.A. Du Souchet, author of the recent Brooklyn visitor, My Friend from India. The venue was Col. William E. Sinn’s Montauk, to which it came after a four-month run at New York’s Bijou Theatre (not to be confused with Brooklyn’s playhouse of the same name). The operative adjective describing her humorous ebullience was “jolly.” Supporting her were most of those who did so in Manhattan, most notably Ignacio Martinetti.

Although it wasn’t a musical, it did include, like so many such plays, a substantial number of songs, those given here examples of Irwin’s penchant for singing “coon” songs, so prevalent among both white and Black performers back then. Audiences loved her renditions of “The Frog Song,” “Syncopated Sandy,” “A Little Pinch of Salt,” “The Pickaninny’s Lullaby,” and “Honey on My Lips,” among others. “Nobody on the American stage sings negro songs like May Irwin,” enthused he Times Union, which added, “her rendering of these melodies has come to be so generally accepted as the nearest possible approach to the real negro voice, that one is prepared to believe she has made a life-long study of the subject.” The Canadian-born actress, however, herself denied any such study, crediting “intuition” to her success.

As per this blog’s practice of summarizing each week at least one plot new to the borough, here is how Brooklyn Life described the farcical three acts of The Swell Miss Fitzwell, which had premiered in Trenton, NJ, in September 1897 before moving to New York.

The story has to do with the efforts of the Count and Countess e4 Cagiac to keep the proverbial wolf from their door, The Count having been disowned by his aristocratic French father because of his marriage to a poor American girl, takes up his abode in the country. To support his new home he engages in the manufacture of face powder, and with the same laudable object in view the Countess opens a dressmaking establishment under the name of “Miss Fitzwell.” Each enters upon his vocation in secret, however, fearing that the other’s pride might be wounded. Now it happens that one of Miss Fitzwell’s customers is Mlle. Otello, a vaudeville performer who knew the Count in Paris. The two meet, and in order to secure from Mlle. Otello a testimonial for his face powder the Count gives her some valuable jewelry. This transaction occurs in the dressmaking parlors of Miss Fitzwell, who drops in upon the couple, and seeing more than she hears, puts two and two together and seeks a divorce. By the time that she has effected a legal separation she concludes that she does not want it, and all ends well, This is the main theme. Around it the author has built up numerous complications, some of which, by the way, he makes very little endeavor to straighten out.

Irwin’s good nature bubbled over as Miss Fitzwell, Martinetti was fine as the Count, and Marion Giroux served nicely as Mlle. Otello.

The Montauk’s chief rival, the Columbia, offered, for a second visit, a musical extravaganza (as the genre was called), The Strange Adventures of Jack and the Beanstalk, by R.A. Barnet with music by Baldwin Sloane. It wove a narrative around numerous “Mother Goose” and “Arabian Nights” characters, with, among many other liberties, Jack (Madge Lessing) being transformed into the son of Old Mother Hubbard. Also taking part were Sinbad the Sailor, Little Miss Muffett, Mistress Mary, Old King Cole, and the Forty Thieves. “The Birth of the Firefly” and “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” were the two ballets on view. The former had an effect whose description in the Eagle is worth repeating:

The stage is in dense darkness for an instant, when suddenly myriad little lights appear in diverse colors, which develop gradually until the outlines of a bevy [sic] of beautiful girls are revealed, moving gracefully to the strains of music. The process of development continues until finally the dancers appear to be a moving maze of rapidly moving maze of vari-colored lights unexpected and of much brilliancy. . . . The novelty of this device lies in the fact that the lights, over one thousand in number, are operated by a storage battery from behind the scenes. The cables, one of which is attached to each of the dancers, are not seen owing to the darkness of the stage. A man is employed for each dancer to pay the cable in and out during the progress of this scene, so there may be no danger of the dancers tripping up.

The press suggested that women needing surcease from all the gayety on view and in need of a good cry trot on over to the Bijou for another dose of East Lynne, that never-failing source of tear floods, which only the previous week had been seen in another production, starring someone called Rachelle Renard. This was the play, wrote the Eagle, that “half the emotional actresses of the country have done their best to kill without succeeding.” The dual roles of Isabel and Mme. Vine were in the hands of the young, up-and-coming Nance O’Neil, seen only once previously in Brooklyn. Eventually, she would be a major star, sometimes billed as “the American Bernhardt.” She received glowing notices for her powerful emotionalism. Opposite her was distinguished leading man Wilton Lackaye as the villainous Frances Levison, with surprisingly strong supporting actors like Rose Eytinge and McKee Rankin (who directed) on board as well.

Johnny and Emma Ray were a popular, young, comic pair, husband and wife, who later made a number of silent films. Having first made their mark as “vigorous and popular comedians of the athletic sort on the variety stage,” they began using their farcical skills in the legit world, as represented by Edgar Selden’s musical farce, A Hot Old Time, seen in Brooklyn for the first time at the Grand Opera House this past week. It was suited to their style of energetic, frenetic laugh-making, lacking much that could be called a plot, but with plenty of action, gand buttressed by a cast of vaudevillians who had chances to strut their stuff.

 

The first play done at the Park after the dissolution of its stock company on Saturday, February 19, was Kit, the Arkansas Traveler, a five-act melodrama as tired a theatrical warhorse as East Lynne, having trod the boards for 22 years, first under the star power of Frank S. Chanfrau, and, of late, under the lesser aura of his son, Henry T.  Naturally, the play, set in the South, came equipped with the familiar levee scenery, steamboat explosion, and duels. Even plays like this felt it incumbent upon them to insert musical specialties, including dancing and tumbling.

Across town, at the Amphion, was Hoyt & Mckee’s Musical Comedy Company, with another visit from master farce writer Charles H. Hoyt’s A Stranger in New York, set in the Tenderloin district, which had made its Brooklyn bow in early January at the Columbia. Typically, it mixed its comical plot with enough comedy and musical specialties to fill a vaudeville bill. The “rotund and buoyant” Harry Conor led a cast including comedienne Maude Haslam (replacing the ailing Sadie Martinot), shapely Nellie Butler, exquisite Grace Freeman (formerly known as “the prettiest girl in Lillian Russell’s company”), graceful dancers the Angeles Sisters, tenor Arthur Pacie, and others. The original New York costumes and scenery were intact.

Another repeat production was In Gay New York, now at the appropriately named Gayety after its run the week before at the Grand Opera House on Brooklyn’s other side. Unfortunately, two of its performers, Eddie Foy and Gilbert Gregory, were too ill to perform and had to be replaced by understudies, which, considering the show’s many prior performances, came off smoothly enough. Sunday night at the Gayety, as lately had been the custom, was given over to a vaudeville “concert.”

Williamsburg’s American Theatre, usually the home of sensational melodrama, gripped theatregoers with an old favorite, David Belasco’s early melodrama, The Stranglers of Paris, starring George Wessels, who also directed. He boasted that he never once played Jagon, the villainous strangler, without being hissed.

Those seeking airier fare could find it at the nonlegits, like Hyde & Behman’s, where Pauline Hall sang many songs, including her hit lullaby, “Erminie.” The bill also provided something Brooklyn had seen elsewhere recently, a sing-along like those later popularized on screen with “follow the bouncing ball” animation displaying the lyrics. Here, though, it had a racist element, As the Eagle described it, it had “the heads of negroes represent the notes of songs in an immense sheet which fills the back of the scene and these men sing the chorus of the ditty.” Pretty singer Gerome Edwards, backed by a chorus of 30, was also present; Ely and Gardner did their sketch, “The Wife’s Stratagem”; blackface singer Lew Hawkins sang some ditties; Stanley and Jackson acted their sketch, “The German Music Teacher”; and so on and so forth.

Heading the bill at the Brooklyn Music Hall was J.K. Emmett, who used to star in his father’s “Fritz” comedies, but now offering “a high class comedy sketch,” while other acts included Sadie Cushman and Herbert Holcombe, dancer La Petite Adelaide, and the three Mangean Brothers, etc.

Finally, the Star was taken over by Fred Rider’s Night Owls burlesque company, on whose program we discover “Punch,” a burlesque inspired by the famous rescue from a Cuban dungeon in 1897 of Evangeline Cisneros by Karl Decker, and set in the Harbor of Havana. Others occupying the stage included a burlesque called “The Imperial Tokay Dancers,” along with May Clarke Van Osten, the Verlets trio, the Carmen Sisters, and so forth.