1. 1898: Week 7--February 14-19

by

Samuel L. Leiter

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theatre

Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

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

Amusement ads for week beginning Monday, February 14, 1898.

About This Blog

For a complete history of Brooklyn’s theatre history through December 31, 1897, see my book, Brooklyn Takes the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Theater in the City of Churches (McFarland, 2024).

Early in 2025, I began a blog called Stages in Brooklyn’s Past: 1898-? My purpose was to chronicle the week-by-week history of Brooklyn’s live, professional theatre activity once it gave up its status as an independent city to become the Borough of Brooklyn on January 1, 1898. My entries described the first six weeks of that year in relative detail, even providing plot summaries of many plays and offering occasional commentary.

But, for all their historical value, the entries tended to be too long to hold most general readers’ interest, no matter how important or interesting I thought them. I also realized that, given my age (mid-80s), I’d never proceed far enough to see what happened to Brooklyn’s theatres to bring about a situation that would lead to a 1935 Brooklyn journalist noting that the borough no longer had a single resident professional theatre, either producing its own work or presenting road shows.

I hoped to chronicle, week by week, not only the important details of each show seen locally, the vast majority being touring (road) shows, but to watch as old theatres were torn down and new ones put up as the profession struggled to survive. These were tumultuous times, during which the subway arrived, increasing the magnetic appeal not only of the easier-to-get-to theatres in Manhattan, but when theatre struggled to survive when faced by competition from the new medium of movies. Nor can we ignore the increasing rivalry with the legit represented by vaudeville, extravaganzas, and revues.

Realizing I needed a new approach, I decided to start all over again, modeling my entries on the less detailed method used by George C.D. Odell, whose massive, 15-volume Annals of the New York Stage covers every form of advertised entertainment, even ice-skating parties, from the beginnings of New York area theatre to 1894, when time finally took its toll on the writer and his project. Odell’s gigantic contribution, remarkably, also included activities in what would become the boroughs; his Brooklyn entries were of considerable help when I researched my Brooklyn theatre book.

My approach will not be precisely like that of Odell, however. I’ll still try to add important commentary where appropriate, and will also endeavor to provide at least one plot summary of an important play new to Brooklyn in each entry.

Thus was born Annals of the Brooklyn Stage, although I’ve no idea how far I’ll be able to go before time also catches up with me. I therefore suggest that, rather than my repeating here, in abbreviated form, what I’ve written about the first six weeks of Brooklyn’s theatre in 1898, interested readers check out Stages in Brooklyn’s Past: 1898- by clicking on the link.

A Note on Brooklyn’s Theatre Before 1898

As noted, on January 1, 1898, the independent city of Brooklyn, NY, incorporated in 1834, gave up its independence to be consolidated as a borough—along with Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island—into what was known as Greater New York. Apart from Manhattan, which formerly constituted most of New York City, only Brooklyn had a thriving professional theatre, one with roots in the late 18^th century. It did not become nationally significant as a theatre city, however, until the 1861 opening of the original Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was more a performing arts center—mainly concerts, opera, and lectures—than a venue solely devoted to theatre. In fact, so much antitheatrical prejudice existed in 1861 Brooklyn that it took nearly a year before the Academy’s largely Puritan-descended founders allowed plays to be shown on its pristine stage.

Soon, though, additional theatres offering different kinds of shows began to appear in the burgeoning city’s Western and Eastern Districts (a.k.a. Williamsburg[h]), eight in the former, four in the latter, with a single theatre in East New York. The number of theatres varied over the years, peaking in the mid-teens in the 1890s, but on January 1, 1898, there were 13, eight devoted (with occasional exceptions) to legitimate theatre (plays and musicals), and four (which we’ll call nonlegitimate) to vaudeville/variety and burlesque. By 1898, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which once included conventional theatrical performances among its annual presentations (the great tragedian Edwin Booth made his farewell performance there in 1891), was presented such shows infrequently, as will be seen in the following annals.

Two other venues existed, one doing cheap melodrama and the other variety, but as neither advertised nor was reviewed, the lack of available data forces me to ignore them.

Brooklyn’s Theatres as of January 1, 1898

Note: some had different names prior to and after the dates given

WESTERN DISTRICT

Brooklyn Academy of Music (both legitimate and nonlegitimate)

Legitimate

Columbia Theatre: Tillary and Adams Streets (1892-1904)

Montauk Theatre: Fulton Street, near Flatbush (1895-1905)

Bijou Theatre: Livingston and Smith Streets (1893-1911)

Grand Opera House: Elm Place, off Fulton Street (1881-1920)

Park Theatre: Fulton Street across from Borough Hall (1863- 1908)

Nonlegitimate

Hyde and Behman’s Theatre: Adams Street near Myrtle Avenue (1879-1908)

Star Theatre: Jay Street near Fulton Street (1890-1948)

EASTERN DISTRICT (Williamsburg[h})

Legitimate

Gayety Theatre: Throop Avenue and Middleton Steet (1892-1940)

American Theatre: Driggs Avenue near S. 4^th Street (1896-1898)

Amphion Theatre: Bedford Avenue and S. 9^th Street (1888-1907)

Nonlegitimate

Empire Theatre: Bedford Avenue and S. 6^th Street (1881-1908)

EAST NEW YORK

Nonlegitimate

Brooklyn Music Hall: Fulton Street and Alabama Avenue (1896-1901)

Herein, with the week beginning February 14, 1898, begin the annals of the Brooklyn stage.

Reminder: for reasons explained above, for the first six weeks of the year, click on STAGES OF BROOKLYN’S PAST, where they are described in considerably more detail than the chronicles that follow.

1898

Week 7: February 14-February 19, 1898

 

Eight legitimate theatres were busy this week. In the Western District, they were the Columbia Theatre, the Montauk Theatre, the Bijou Theatre, the Park Theatre, and the Grand Opera House, while the Eastern side of town saw shows at the Amphion, Gayety, and American.  Each of the four principal nonlegitimate theatres was jumping as well, with music, dancing, comedy, acrobatics, sketches, pretty girls, and so on.

The reason for visiting the Columbia was to see Julie Kopacsy (Karczag), a beautiful Hungarian singer of German comic opera, not well known when she arrived in New York earlier in the season, who gained fame and popularity at Conried’s German Opera Company, located at the Irving Place Theatre. This week saw her Brooklyn debut in a repertory of four different pieces. On Monday night, she was in a new comic opera, Die Lachtaube (The Cooing Dove), written for her by Eugene von Taund. It was repeated on Tuesday evening and at the Wednesday matinee, replaced on Wednesday night by Strauss’s popular operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat), with Thursday and Friday devoted to Strauss’s Waldmeister (in its Brooklyn debut). For both of Saturday’s shows she starred in Offenbach’s operetta La Belle Hèléne. Supporting her was Conried’s company.

At the Montauk Theatre, audiences laughed at A Bachelor’s Romance, a four-act comedy by Martha Morton, one of the leading female dramatists of the time. It starred Sol Smith Russell, an important comic actor-singer of the day, as David Holmes, the title role. The play enjoyed a profitable New York run earlier in the season at the Garden Theatre, and came to Brooklyn with several of its original cast members. The critics noted that Smith, who first appeared in New York as far back as 1871, was a fine character actor in search of the right play to match his unique personality, which A Bachelor’s Romance appeared to do.

The Eagle gave this plot summary:

David Holmes . . . is a middle aged editor of a magazine, much in love with his young ward, Sylvia. The girl loves David, of course—no girl could help it when David is Mr. Russell—but not at all as she loves young Harold Reynolds. David learns this and about the same time learns that Harold is a competitor for $10,000 prize which his magazine has offered. He is the judge and Harold’s manuscript is good. If he gets the prize he will be able to marry Sylvia; if he doesn’t there is a possible chance for the bachelor. The young man gets the prize and the girl—and the bachelor gets the audience.

Actually, Sylvia eventually decides in David’s favor. The cast included Orrin Johnson, Nannette Comstock and Edith Crane in the parts originally taken by Annie Russell and Blanche Walsh, Fanny Addison Pitt, Margaret Robinson, Sydney Booth, and others.

Several blocks away, at the Bijou, was Franklin Fyles’s Civil War melodrama set in Kentucky, Cumberland ’61, seen in two earlier engagements this season at the Montauk and Amphion. The original company was here, supplemented by two newcomers, Marie Shotwell, taking the heroine’s role recently played by Florence Rockwell, and Louise Galloway as Pink. Young Lionel Barrymore was back to play the young cadet, as was John E. Kellerd as the half-breed Indian. Producer-director Augustus Pitou’s production was up to the scenic standards of his glowing reputation.

The Park Theatre Stock Company ended its artistically successful, financially unsuccessful activities with a revival of Bartley Campbell’s The Galley Slave. The sad story of the stock company’s demise was laid out in the final entry of my earlier blog, Stages in Brooklyn’s Past. Ironically, this last production was precisely the kind of melodramatic claptrap that had brought the company to this point. By this time, though, it was simply too late to change course. Howell Hansell, wrote the Eagle, played “Sidney Norcott, the poor art student who sacrificed himself for the honor of a woman, becoming a galley slave.” Henrietta Crosman, her career about to bloom, was the emotional heroine.

“Fun, music and nonsense” were on view in a familiar revue (spelled “review” back then) called In Gay New York at the Grand Opera House, around the corner from the Abraham and Straus department store on Fulton Street. Created several years earlier at New York’s Casino, and already seen in Brooklyn, albeit not at the popular prices now being offered, it had been much revised with new bits, songs, dances. and performers. Heading the cast was soon-to-be major vaudevillian Eddie Foy, playing Walter Jones’s old role of a stranded actor. Lee Harrison and Gilbert Gregory were also involved.

In Williamsburg, E.E. Rice’s production of A Girl from Paris, a recent two-week hit at the Montauk, now played the Amphion. The two companies that had been touring with it were now consolidated, requiring a number of cast changes. Local girl Olive Redpath had moved on to another show, for example, and was replaced by Georgia Caine, while Josie Hall was replaced by Anna Buckley. Others on board included Andree Lorraine, Fred Lennox, and D.L. Don.

The Gayety, increasingly leaning toward nonlegitimate shows, hosted Primrose and West’s minstrels, seen at the Grand Opera House the week before. The company included the same comic and musical performers, and it was announced that “all the jokes will be new.” Sunday night variety concerts at the Gayety continued.

The American Theatre presented a repertory company headed by “emotional actress” Rachelle Renard, new to Brooklyn but said to have established a good reputation out West. She starred in a repertory of three roles, one being Parthenia in Ingomar, seen here in Julia Marlowe’s repertory only a week earlier. She also presented Leah the Forsaken and East Lynne, hoary dramas never long from the stage.  

Variety and burlesque were in place at Hyde & Behman’s, the Empire, the Brooklyn Music Hall, and the Star. Headlining at Hyde & Behman’s was the Russell Brothers Company, the eponymous siblings being famed for their Irish servant girl comedy. Also on the bill were Lizzie B. Raymond, (“whose lungs rival those of Marguerite Cline”), O’Brien and Havel, Montgomery and Stone, Staley and Birbeck, the Dillon Brothers, the Fremonts, and Nestor and Bennett.

Irwin’s Venetian Burlesquers played at the Empire, their show featuring an “international ballet,” including 16 coryphees choreographed by Arnold Kiralfy. In the olio, audiences appreciated the comedy and acrobatics of Lee and Chapman, soubrette Dot Davenport, descriptive singers Harlan and Marsh, the dancing Monroe Sisters, the Manhattan Comedy Four, and O’Dell and Russell, acrobats. “Startling and picturesque” masks appeared in the burlesque, “A Trip to Venice.”

Russian ballerina Catherine Bartho headed the bill at the Brooklyn Music Hall, a once-popular light comedy called “The Man Up-Stairs” featured Mr. and Mrs. Dunstan; buck dancers Collins and O’Brien; soubrette Nellie Nichols; the Mortons (Sam, Kittie, and Clara Louise) in a sketch; Baron and Ashley, with a burlesque cakewalk; blackface acrobats Collins and Brien, and several other lively entertainers. On Thursday night, the second anniversary of the Music Hall was celebrated with souvenirs and “a high old time.”

The Vaudeville Club Burlesquers ruled at the Star, with a concluding burlesque called “The Girl from China,” starring Clara Sonora as the titular heroine, and Charlotte Hay as Lord Broadway. Comics Jim Crook, Dave Lewis, Bob Harris, and Nat Fields were on hand, and the olio introduced the Walker Sisters, singers; Douglas and Ford, dancers; Lewis and Field, comedians (“the two peaches”); the Pantzer Brothers, acrobatic; and Cook and Sonora in an acrobatic sketch that had Cook trying to break a high jump record.