This blog is dedicated to preserving a record of Brooklyn theatre history and theatre-related images based largely on coverage in the nearly half-dozen daily Brooklyn newspapers and one weekly magazine (Brooklyn Life) of 1898-1908. It is a vastly expanded, upgraded, and corrected version of my blog, BROOKLYN THEATRE FROM 1898: AN ILLUSTRATED CHRONOLOGY, which is gradually being dismantled as this one is being constructed. It covers everything related to Brooklyn theatre, including plays, playhouses, productions, people, producing policies, scandals, law suits, fires, accidents, brawls, ethnic theatres, crimes, religious attacks, rivalry with Manhattan, and so on. The focus is on legitimate theatre but considerable attention is paid to developments in vaudeville and burlesque as well.

The main newspaper sources, using the names by which they were known during these years, were the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn Citizen, Brooklyn Standard Union, and Brooklyn Daily Times; occasionally, other local sources were called on. At first, only Brooklyn Life provided photos, but as time passed the newspapers, beginning with the Citizen, abandoned their photo-based engravings and line drawings for photos. Each entry is devoted to one or two months during the decade. A list of the month’s offerings precedes the illustrations, most of which are identified within the original image. The performers include both leading players and lesser ones, most of whose names are entirely forgotten today. Many depict burlesque and vaudeville acts who are often listed on the ads that begin each weekly group of images. The production lists designate titles of shows at the legitimate theatres only; burlesque and vaudeville theatres are listed only by name to show that they were active. If a theatre is missing it was either permanently or temporarily closed.

It is hoped that this blog will be a useful adjunct to a two-volume book of the same title I’m preparing for publication.

To find a specific item, please use the search box in the upper left corner. You ca also go to a particular month by searching for it, i.e., February 1905. The project hopes to be complete sometime in 2026 when it reaches 1908.

Samuel L. Leiter

Author: BROOKLYN TAKES THE STAGE: NINETEENTH-CENTURY THEATER IN THE CITY OF CHURCHES (McFarland: 2024).

NOTE: THIS FIRST ENTRY IS MUCH LONGER THAN THE OTHERS BECAUSE IT INTRODUCES AND EXPLAINS THE PROJECT.

PLEASE IGNORE FORMATTING INCONSISTENCIES, PRODUCED BY PROBLEMS WITH THE BLOG PROGRAM. THEY DON'T AFFECT THE CONTENT.

January 1898

Weekly Attractions

January 3–8

American: The Fast Mail
Amphion: Heartsease, with Henry Miller
Bijou: A Guilty Mother
Gayety: Who Is Who?, with Kelly and Mason
Grand Opera House: A Ward of France, with Maurice Barrymore
Montauk: An American Citizen, with Nat C. Goodwin and Maxine Elliott
Park (Stock Company): Incog (evenings); Little Lord Fauntleroy (matinees)
Vaudeville/Burlesque: Hyde & Behman's, Brooklyn Music Hall, Empire, Star

January 10–15

American: The Captain's Mate
Amphion: Cumberland '61
Bijou: Heart of the Klondike
Columbia: A Stranger in New York
Gayety: Hyde's Comedians
Grand Opera House: McSorley's Twins
Montauk: The Girl from Paris
Park (Stock Company): The Lights o' London
Vaudeville/Burlesque: Hyde & Behman's, Brooklyn Music Hall, Empire, Star

January 17–22

American: Shannon of the Sixth
Amphion: Never Again
Bijou: In Old Kentucky
Columbia: The Circus Girl
Gayety: The Pacific Mail
Grand Opera House: Superba
Montauk: The Girl from Paris
Park (Stock Company): The Lost Paradise
Vaudeville/Burlesque: Hyde & Behman's, Brooklyn Music Hall, Empire, Star

January 24–29

American: The Midnight Flood
Amphion: The Cat and the Cherub, with Anna Held
Bijou: The Great Train Robbery
Brooklyn Academy of Music: The Geisha
Columbia: The Circus Girl
Gayety: Superba
Grand Opera House: Who Is Who?, with Kelly and Mason
Montauk: The Senator, with William H. Crane
Park (Stock Company): The Streets of New York
Vaudeville/Burlesque: Hyde & Behman's, Brooklyn Music Hall, Empire, Star

Introduction

A Theatre Across the River

This is the untold story of an American theatrical decade in which Brooklyn and Manhattan—newly united within Greater New York on January 1, 1898—formed one of the most concentrated, competitive, and rapidly changing theatrical environments in the modern world. It was both a Gilded Age and a Progressive Age, a period in which extravagant wealth, political corruption, technological innovation, reform movements, and explosive urban growth existed side by side, all of them reflected on and off the stage.

This is not simply a history of Brooklyn theatre. It is a history of American theatre viewed from the only city that lived in Broadway's shadow while simultaneously sustaining a major theatrical culture of its own. Separated only by the East River, yet linked ever more closely by ferries, bridges, elevated railways, electric trolleys, and eventually the subway, Manhattan and Brooklyn existed in a relationship at once symbiotic and antagonistic. Manhattan, America's theatrical capital, generated the overwhelming majority of the nation's professional productions. Brooklyn, the country's fourth largest city before consolidation, became both Broadway's greatest neighboring market and one of its principal victims.

Nowhere else in theatrical history can one find two major theatre communities so physically close—reachable first by ferry and then by bridge, whether on foot, by horse-drawn carriage, trolley, train, or automobile—and yet so economically and artistically intertwined. No history of New York theatre can truly be complete without Brooklyn, yet Brooklyn's theatrical life has remained surprisingly neglected except in scattered articles, blogs, local studies, and my own Brooklyn Takes the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Theater in the City of Churches (McFarland, 2024).

Across the River from Broadway traces Brooklyn theatre from January 1898 through December 1908, years that witnessed both extraordinary theatrical expansion and the unmistakable beginnings of decline. New theatres arose across the borough's Western and Eastern Districts; stock companies flourished and faded; vaudeville and burlesque multiplied; touring productions crossed the river weekly from Manhattan or arrived from elsewhere in search of audiences; and Brooklyn playgoers filled houses ranging from fashionable first-class theatres charging as much as $1.50 or even $2.00 to popular melodrama houses where admission cost only a dime.

Yet the very developments that enriched Brooklyn's theatrical culture also undermined it. Improved transportation made Broadway increasingly accessible, while moving pictures—initially little more than a novelty—rapidly transformed popular entertainment. Ironically, Brooklyn itself became one of the birthplaces of the American motion-picture industry. By the 1930s, despite its enormous population, the borough had lost almost every trace of the flourishing professional theatre culture that had once rivaled every American city outside Manhattan.

How This Project Is Organized

This project is a sequel of sorts to Brooklyn Takes the Stage, which concluded with December 1897. Unlike that volume, however, the present work follows a deliberately chronological design. Rather than organizing its material thematically, it reconstructs Brooklyn's theatrical life month by month, allowing readers to experience the decade as contemporaries did. As the seasons unfold, theatres rise and fall, managers come and go, stars appear and disappear, new plays replace old ones, controversies erupt, and audiences themselves become part of the story.

Each chapter opens with weekly listings of attractions at Brooklyn theatres, followed by accounts drawn from the borough's four daily newspapers and one weekly magazine. Productions, stars, stock companies, managerial changes, theatre construction, fires, scandals, crimes, lawsuits, accidents, audience disturbances, censorship battles, labor disputes, Sunday blue laws, standing-room controversies, ticket scalping, touring routes, female empowerment, and the continuing struggle between the Theatrical Syndicate and its opponents all find their place in the unfolding narrative.

With the exception of important revivals—especially of Shakespeare and other classics—only productions new to Brooklyn, the period's so-called "novelties," receive detailed treatment. The result is an anecdote-rich portrait not only of Brooklyn theatre but of American theatrical culture at the turn of the twentieth century.

Sources and Scope

Nearly all of the narrative rests on the contemporary Brooklyn press, supported where appropriate by the standard historical literature. The principal sources are the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn Citizen, Brooklyn Daily Times, Brooklyn Standard Union, and Brooklyn Life, each systematically examined across the entire eleven-year period. Much of what appears in these pages—often surprising, frequently entertaining, and occasionally astonishing—has not been discussed since its original publication more than a century and a quarter ago.

To preserve the flow of the narrative, citations are kept deliberately unobtrusive. Except where authorship is known, only abbreviated newspaper titles and publication dates are given. The most important bylined critic is Hamilton Ormsbee, dramatic editor of the Eagle, whose weekly Sunday column remains one of the richest surviving records of Brooklyn theatrical life.

Brooklyn's Place in American Theatre

Although historians have naturally concentrated on Broadway, remarkably little sustained attention has been paid to Brooklyn's managers, theatres, actors, stock companies, and audiences, despite the borough's crucial place within Greater New York's theatrical economy. Restored to prominence here are such figures as Col. William E. Sinn, Percy G. Williams, Hyde & Behman, Corse Payton, and Mrs. Mary Gibbs Spooner; theatres including the Montauk, Columbia, Amphion, Broadway, Majestic, Novelty, Park, Orpheum, Folly, and Gayety; and the constantly changing relationships among stock companies, touring combinations, vaudeville, and burlesque.

The book also traces the emergence of nickelodeons and the gradual displacement of live theatre by motion pictures, developments nowhere more revealing than in Brooklyn, which became to the early motion-picture industry what Hollywood would later become.

The decade covered here was one of extraordinary transition. Melodrama remained dominant, musical comedy expanded rapidly, vaudeville reached new heights of popularity, European drama introduced new artistic ambitions, stagecraft advanced dramatically, and commercial competition intensified. Brooklyn, directly across the river from Broadway yet retaining its own civic identity, offers a uniquely revealing vantage point from which to observe these transformations.

CHAPTER ONE

Half-Season of January to August 1898

Brooklyn Theatre in Transition

A Borough at the Crossroads

The first eight months of 1898 found Brooklyn at a historic crossroads. On January 1, the independent City of Brooklyn ceased to exist, absorbed into the newly consolidated City of Greater New York. For many Brooklynites, the event was less a celebration than a surrender. Proud of their city’s identity and traditions, they regarded consolidation with apprehension, fearing that Brooklyn’s interests would be subordinated to those of Manhattan. Yet nowhere was the new relationship between the former rivals more clearly visible than in the theatre.

Brooklyn entered the year with a theatrical infrastructure unmatched by most American cities. Spread across the Western District, the Eastern District, and East New York, its theatres served audiences ranging from affluent patrons seeking the latest Broadway successes to working-class playgoers eager for melodrama, vaudeville, burlesque, minstrelsy, opera, and popular-priced entertainment. The borough’s playhouses formed a thriving network capable of attracting many of the nation’s foremost stars and productions. At the same time, however, Brooklyn’s managers faced a perpetual challenge: persuading local audiences not to cross the East River in search of the newest attractions in Manhattan.

This tension between independence and dependence became one of the defining themes of Brooklyn theatre in 1898. Broadway remained the unquestioned center of American theatrical production. Most major attractions originated there before embarking on national tours, and Brooklyn occupied a peculiar position within that system. It was neither fully provincial nor fully metropolitan. Touring productions frequently came to Brooklyn directly from successful Manhattan engagements, while stars such as Nat C. Goodwin, Julia Marlowe, William Gillette, Mrs. Leslie Carter, John Drew, and Sol Smith Russell appeared before Brooklyn audiences only days or weeks after their Broadway triumphs. Brooklyn thus enjoyed privileged access to the nation’s theatrical elite while simultaneously struggling to develop and maintain an identity distinct from Manhattan’s overwhelming cultural influence.

A Changing Theatrical Industry

The seasons covered here also reveal an industry in the midst of profound structural change. The old stock company system, once the backbone of American theatre, was increasingly under pressure from the touring combination system. Brooklyn witnessed this transformation firsthand through the difficulties and eventual collapse of the Park Theatre’s resident stock company. Its demise symbolized more than the failure of a single enterprise. It reflected a national shift away from locally based repertory companies toward centrally organized touring productions that carried their own actors, scenery, costumes, and managerial structures from city to city. As theatrical production became increasingly nationalized, local autonomy steadily diminished.

Closely related to these developments was the growing power of the Theatrical Syndicate/Trust. The debates that surfaced in Brooklyn newspapers over the syndicate’s influence exposed anxieties felt throughout the American theatre industry. Defenders viewed the organization as a practical mechanism for coordinating bookings and improving efficiency. Critics regarded it as a monopoly whose control over theatres and attractions threatened artistic freedom and economic fairness. In the half-season described below, controversy surrounding Helena Modjeska’s absence from Brooklyn and the public exchanges involving Col. William E. Sinn reflected a larger national struggle over who would control American theatre as the twentieth century approached.

The Changing Stage

The repertoire seen on Brooklyn stages during these first months of the new borough illustrates another significant transition. Imported British and Continental works continued to dominate many prestigious theatres, prompting complaints that American playwrights were being neglected. Yet American drama was increasingly asserting itself. William Gillette’s Secret Service demonstrated that native playwrights could produce works equal to any foreign import in craftsmanship, popularity, and international appeal. The debate over American versus foreign drama, recurring throughout the period, mirrored the nation’s broader search for cultural self-confidence as it emerged as a world power.

Brooklyn’s stages also reveal the extraordinary diversity of popular entertainment at the end of the nineteenth century. Shakespeare shared the spotlight with melodramas featuring exploding steamboats, train robberies, floods, and daring rescues. Musical comedies imported from London competed with German operettas, minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, and burlesque entertainments. Performers such as Anna Held, Bert Williams and George Walker, Julia Marlowe, and Lillian Russell appealed to very different audiences, yet all found enthusiastic support within the borough. The theatrical marketplace was becoming broader, more commercial, and increasingly democratic in its appeal.

Theatre and Civic Life

At the same time, theatre remained deeply intertwined with public life. Questions of Sunday performances, censorship, labor conditions, ticket prices, standing-room regulations, and municipal governance repeatedly entered theatrical discourse. Theatres were not merely places of amusement; they were institutions at the center of civic debate. Through them, Brooklyn residents negotiated questions of morality, class, religion, labor, and public policy. The arguments surrounding blue laws, actor working conditions, and audience safety demonstrate how theatrical issues often became public issues.

Brooklyn's Place in American Theatre

Perhaps most importantly, the opening months below reveal Brooklyn as a major theatrical center whose significance has often been overlooked. While Manhattan generated most of the nation’s theatrical products, Brooklyn provided a vast and varied audience eager to consume them. Its theatres formed an essential component of the American theatrical economy. They served as proving grounds, extensions of Broadway runs, homes for touring attractions, and gathering places for communities whose tastes and interests differed markedly from those found across the river.

The story that unfolds during these first months is therefore not simply one of individual productions and performers. It is the story of a city adjusting to the loss of political independence while retaining a vigorous cultural identity; of an industry moving from localism toward national consolidation; and of an American theatre poised between nineteenth-century traditions and twentieth-century modernity. In Brooklyn’s playhouses, these transformations were not abstract historical processes but living realities enacted nightly before thousands of spectators. As the decade progressed, the consequences of those changes would become ever more visible, shaping both the future of Brooklyn theatre and the broader course of American theatrical history.

JANUARY 1898

Consolidation and a New Theatrical Era

It is not my purpose here to discuss the complex business and political circumstances that led to Consolidation Day, the name given to January 1, 1898, which marked the merger of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island into Greater New York, a gigantic metropolis ruled by a single mayor, Robert Anderson Van Wyck. As might be expected, the day was celebrated with numerous joyous events, speeches, fireworks, parades, and so forth. But it should also be remembered that, while the new city was about to usher in a gilded decade of prosperity, Brooklyn leaders and citizens were not yet ready to celebrate, many of them having opposed the abandonment of the new borough's sovereignty as an independent city, a consummation tied to Brooklyn's financial weakness and need for access to Manhattan's overflowing coffers.

So glum, in fact, were many Brooklynites that "celebrating" the occasion was officially replaced by "fitting observance," and there even was the "serious suggestion," considered by Brooklyn Life (January 1) the "height of absurdity," "that Brooklynites should drape their houses in black, put all flags at half-mast, sing dirges, toll the bells and sit in sackcloth and ashes." Instead, said the writer, Brooklyn had to do all it could "to make the best of what in their opinion is a bad bargain."

Brooklyn Versus Broadway

Brooklyn's theatres, always alert to the magnetic pull of Manhattan's, had for decades contended with the problem of keeping local residents at home, attending the borough's own establishments, whose numbers had grown steadily since the Brooklyn Academy of Music opened in 1861. Although the Academy had reluctantly agreed, before the year was out, to allow drama on its sacrosanct stage—originally intended for opera, concerts, and lectures—it had long since been overshadowed, as an occasional legitimate theatre, by the conventional playhouses serving Brooklyn's rapidly expanding population.

One part of that population retained its puritanical aversion to the theatre, for which the "City of Churches" had gained notoriety, and local antitheatrical prejudice still simmered, as later episodes in these annals will reveal. But by 1898, when Brooklyn, had it remained a city, would have been America's fourth largest, the pro-theatrical contingent was ravenous for plays, musicals, vaudeville, and burlesque, enough to support at least a dozen theatres, whose numbers sometimes fluctuated. The problem was not the lack of a huge potential audience. It was keeping that audience from traveling "across the river"—words that will appear continually in these annals—to Broadway and other Manhattan districts, where the nation's foremost theatre activity was concentrated.

Simply stated, Brooklyn was in competition with Broadway. Broadway, not to mention other Manhattan theatre locales, was where the bulk of American theatre (including foreign imports) was generated before going on the road. New plays sometimes originated in other large cities, like Chicago and Boston, but it was the cachet of a New York run (and, like everyone else, I use "New York" as shorthand for Manhattan) that gave shows the boost they needed before touring. The basic model for countless productions, then, was simple: first, open in New York; second, when the run ended—even after only a week—go on tour. Such productions were marketed as complete packages of actors, scenery, costumes, and properties, and were known as "combinations."

To explain the complex system by which these combinations were booked into cities large and small, for one-night or longer engagements, would require too much space here, although it will be discussed in greater detail when issues involving the Theatrical Trust arise. Brooklyn's possession of numerous theatres made it an attractive destination for productions of every variety, each theatre generally catering to a particular audience, whether devoted to high-class drama or popular melodrama. In addition, theatres were distinguished by the prices they charged. There were high-priced, medium-priced, and popular-priced houses, the last famous for charging ten, twenty, or thirty cents. High-priced generally meant a top admission of $1.50, fifty cents below the leading Broadway theatres. Ticket prices became a recurring subject in Brooklyn's newspapers and will be an important one throughout these annals.

Brooklyn's non-stock theatres were homes for touring combinations, which usually played one or two weeks before moving on, often to another theatre elsewhere in Brooklyn. The length of a show's run was determined in Manhattan, not Brooklyn. The borough's dual geography made it especially attractive because a production could extend its stay by playing first in one district and then the other. Its proximity to Manhattan, where many performers lived, made the arrangement even more convenient. Numerous productions toured for years, becoming theatrical "perennials," among them Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Old Homestead, Way Down East, and Rip Van Winkle. Some, like those starring Denman Thompson or Joseph Jefferson, returned to Brooklyn year after year. Of course, there were also the stock companies, performing mainly revivals but occasionally mounting new works of their own. These companies form an essential part of Brooklyn theatre history, one whose importance I hope these annals restore, especially through the remarkable contributions of Corse Payton and Mrs. Mary Gibbs Spooner.

The Opening Week

What, then, precisely was happening in Brooklyn theatre during the first month of the borough's new political marriage? One answer was the unusually large number of novelties—plays not previously seen in Brooklyn—which generally numbered between eight and twelve each month. January 1898 offered even more than usual. A complete list of the month's attractions appears above.

Looking at the plays week by week—our modus operandi for the first few months—shows that the Montauk, one of the Western District's two high-priced theatres, opened the New Year with An American Citizen, a comedy by the British playwright Madeline Lucette Ryley, one of the comparatively small band of busy female dramatists. It starred the popular comedian Nat C. Goodwin, a regular Brooklyn visitor who had not appeared in the borough the previous year and was warmly welcomed, along with his beautiful wife, Maxine Elliott, herself climbing toward eventual superstardom. The play had just closed at Manhattan's Knickerbocker Theatre after an earlier Western tour.

Like so many comedies of the period, the play revolved around a will. Its provisions required that the inheritance could be collected only if a young American lawyer (Goodwin) married his British cousin (Elliott). Predictably, their business arrangement blossomed into genuine love. The Brooklyn Eagle (January 2) called Elliott "probably the most photographed woman in the country."

The district's other high-priced house, the Columbia, offered a two-week engagement of Charles Hoyt's A Stranger in New York, fresh from its long run at Hoyt's Theatre. A Chicago visitor arrives in New York carrying a letter of introduction intended for a fashionable man-about-town. Unfortunately, the wrong man accepts it, and the unsuspecting Midwesterner never realizes the mistake. The resulting confusion carries the "stranger" into the city's social whirl while the genuine clubman tries to rescue him, creating a cascade of comic complications. Sadie Martinot starred as the leading lady, and songs by Richard Stahl and A. B. Sloan—only loosely connected to the story, as was customary—were interpolated throughout.

At the Grand Opera House appeared A Ward of France, by Franklin Fyles and Eugene W. Presbury, only a week removed from Wallack's Theatre. Maurice Barrymore, father of Lionel, John, and Ethel, starred as the swashbuckling pirate Jean Lafitte opposite Elita Proctor as Flower Moyne, a Creole fortune teller and Lafitte's love interest. Set in French Louisiana in 1803, the costume melodrama revolved around an inheritance and peopled its stage with pirates, smugglers, crafty courtiers, nuns, and soldiers representing Spain, France, and America.

The Bijou presented Arthur D. Hall's five-act, ten-scene English melodrama A Guilty Mother. Written by the author of the successful When London Sleeps, it earned notice for its unusual realism. Though not a sensation-filled thriller, it alternated pathos and humor through an intricate story of a misguided mother's abandonment of her daughter, a jewel robbery, a long-delayed reunion, and the eventual shooting of the villainous Frenchman responsible for the family's misery.

Williamsburg's Gayety offered Who Is Who?, a farce by Herbert Hall Winslow, supplemented, as usual, by variety acts. The touring production, which never played Manhattan, starred comedians Joe Kelly and Charles Mason and featured the obligatory chorus of pretty girls. The plot centered on a struggling young lawyer who invents an imaginary partner named Nemo, whose name appears on his office door and is used to order various goods and services. The harmless deception spirals into comic confusion as visitors insist on meeting the nonexistent partner, eventually leading to the lawyer's being accused of murdering him before the misunderstandings are untangled and the real villain receives his just deserts.

The popular-priced American, also in Williamsburg, continued its devotion to melodrama with Lincoln A. Carter's The Fast Mail, one of the Chicago playwright's trademark spectacles. Carter invariably provided audiences with some thrilling scenic effect, and in this instance the highlight was the spectacular explosion of a Mississippi steamboat before the audience's eyes.

The Comedy Craze Begins

Brooklyn's managers were increasingly convinced that audiences wanted laughter. A recent farce, The Governors, though hardly a masterpiece, had proved so successful at the Grand Opera House that crowds were turned away before it crossed the river to earn even larger profits at higher prices in Manhattan. Likewise, A Stranger in New York, now in its second week at the Columbia, had become, to that date, the most profitable Brooklyn engagement Nat C. Goodwin had ever enjoyed.

Seeking to capitalize on the public's appetite for comedy—whether straight or musical—Col. William E. Sinn, the distinguished veteran manager of the Montauk, booked The Girl from Paris for a two-week engagement immediately after its Herald Square Theatre run. This popular British musical trifle, "Americanized" for domestic audiences, was dismissed by the Eagle (January 9), which observed that it would never succeed in Paris, where "they have a prejudice in favor of art." Nevertheless, George Dance's lyrics and Ivan Caryll's music had already produced a Broadway success, and three touring companies were simultaneously presenting it around the country.

Its heroine was the charming French coquette Julie Bon Bon, played by Olive Redpath, who had grown up in Brooklyn's Eastern District in the role that first made Clara Lipman famous. The story concerned the efforts of Julie's various admirers to escape her romantic designs. Josie Hall remained in the cast as the comic "slavey," or household drudge, delighting audiences with "Sister Mary Jane's Top Note." Along with elaborate scenery came, according to the Eagle (January 11), "a chorus of girls who are said by the veracious press agent to have been practicing aesthetics to make them more fit for [the producer's] beauty show."

The Comedy Craze Continues

Those not in need of musical merriment could find something equally undemanding in straight melodramas like Scott Marble's The Heart of the Klondike at the Bijou. Fresh from a run at Manhattan's Star Theatre, the play capitalized on the ongoing gold-rush craze with spectacular scenic views of the far North, still unfamiliar to most audiences except through artists' imaginings. Romance and greed intertwined in a tale of prospectors searching for fortune in the Arctic Circle. Its timing was especially apt, as several ships were then being outfitted for the Klondike at Brooklyn's Erie Basin.

The Gayety, meanwhile, turned to straight vaudeville, including appearances by the great Black comedy team of Bert Williams and George Walker, who liked to joke that "they are not colored, they were born that way." Before long, the Gayety would abandon legitimate theatre altogether as the vaudeville boom swept Brooklyn.

The naughtiness associated with certain vaudeville and burlesque entertainments—this month a dancer named Karina was castigated for what today would be called a wardrobe malfunction—was becoming increasingly common. Broadway was already perspiring over productions like The Telephone Girl, The Conquerors, The French Maid, and The Ballet Girl, while Brooklyn audiences were responding enthusiastically to The Girl from Paris, A Stranger in New York, and the aforesaid Karina. The amount of female flesh on display would remain a favorite subject of sanctimonious journalism throughout the decade.

Readers may already have noticed the prevalence of the word "girl" in theatrical titles. Along with such words as "woman" and "daughter," it becomes so ubiquitous that the era's fascination with femininity as a selling point seems almost Freudian. Equally common was the word "gay," although, of course, its meaning had not yet acquired its later connotations.

What the Critics Saw

The Girl from Paris received both praise and rebuke from the Daily Times (January 11). Here, simply for the amusement of modern readers, is its assessment of the chorus girls, written in an age when newspaper critics felt perfectly free to comment on women's physical appearance just as casually as they employed racial language now rightly considered offensive:

"These girls cannot recite lines, a circumstance thoroughly well proved by their efforts in that direction, nor can they do much else beyond putting themselves on exhibition. There is not a single really unattractive girl in the whole collection... Mr. Edward E. Rice ought to let those girls of his who can talk, talk; those who can kick, kick; those who can sing, sing; and those who can only look pretty confine themselves to doing so."

Another English Musical Hit

Another "girl" arrived in Brooklyn when The Circus Girl, an English musical comedy produced by Charles Frohman, began a two-week engagement at the Columbia. It followed a lengthy New York run at Daly's Theatre, where it had been staged under Augustin Daly before Frohman, after a bitter dispute with Daly, secured the touring rights. Daly retained the New York rights, which apparently did not extend to Brooklyn.

Celebrated for its lively dialogue, catchy melodies, elaborate costumes, and handsome scenery copied from its two-year London success, the production was the collaborative work of six Londoners and two Berliners. Set amid the landmarks of Paris, its wafer-thin plot centered on Dora Wemyss, whose infatuation with circus performers prompts her sweetheart to disguise himself as an acrobat, eventually becoming the celebrated "Cannon King." His adventures, together with those of Dora's father, Sir Titus Wemyss, supplied most of the evening's comedy. The touring company numbered an impressive seventy-five performers.

More Melodrama—and Bigger Spectacles

The American Theatre continued its devotion to inexpensive melodrama with Edward E. Kidder's Shannon of the Sixth, starring W. H. Powers. Set in India, it revolved around the theft of the priceless jewel "Light of Heaven" from a Hindu temple. The story culminated in its spectacular climax, when the heroine Dora is tied to the mouth of a cannon by native soldiers. Shannon arrives "just in the nick of time," reported the Citizen (January 16), racing over the rocks to free her an instant before the cannon discharges "with a mighty roar." The similarity of this scene to one in the recent The Cherry Pickers soon led the two playwrights into a public quarrel over who deserved credit for the idea.

Saucy French chanteuse Anna Held, already living with Florenz Ziegfeld in what was then called a common-law marriage, crossed the river from Koster and Bial's to headline a week's bill at the Amphion in The Cat and the Cherub. Besides her familiar songs, she introduced "The Animated Chorus," in which enormous sheet music filled the rear of the stage while Black performers bobbed their heads to indicate the notes—a striking anticipation of the later movie-house "bouncing ball." Ironically, Held herself sang a repertoire of then-popular "coon songs," including "I Want Dem Presents." Even more curious, The Cat and the Cherub had been compressed into a thirty-minute vaudeville sketch, illustrating how even substantial dramatic works were routinely reduced to fit variety bills.

The one-act title piece, by Chester Bailey Fernald, dramatized the kidnapping of a Chinese boy from a San Francisco Chinatown alley by the keeper of an opium den. Brooklyn Life (January 21) praised its touching story and observed that, although tragic, it "is never gloomy." Like contemporary plays set in Japan, it reflected the era's fascination with the perceived exoticism of East Asian life, particularly when linked to opium, crime, and the urban underworld.

Meanwhile, the Bijou introduced Scott Marble's The Great Train Robbery, a rousing Oklahoma melodrama inspired by stories of outlaws such as the James and Dalton gangs. Its sensational train robbery, complete with exploding express car, dynamited safe, and spectacular scenery depicting Red River Canyon, foreshadowed the famous 1903 motion picture that borrowed its title and many of its situations.

Disasters also proved irresistible theatrical material. At the American, Louis Eagan's The Midnight Flood recreated the devastating Johnstown Flood of 1889 within a melodrama of love, intrigue, and false accusation. Eagan himself portrayed a lawyer imprisoned for murder who escaped drowning in one of the production's most thrilling sequences. Public fascination with the catastrophe remained so intense that Brighton Beach later mounted a massive outdoor spectacle, The Johnstown Flood, from 1901 to 1905, employing torrents of water and elaborate scenic machinery years before motion pictures took over the business of spectacular disaster entertainment.

Trouble at the Park

While the touring attractions occupied most of Brooklyn's stages, the Park Theatre, home to the borough's only resident stock company, was facing a crisis. A scheduling problem first arose when the enormously popular children's favorite Little Lord Fauntleroy was supposed to give way to The Lights o' London. Because afternoon audiences remained packed with youngsters eager for Fauntleroy, manager Jack C. Huffman compromised by presenting it at matinees while substituting Charles Dickson's farce Incog for the evening performances. The arrangement required constant changes of scenery and extraordinary efforts from the actors, who already had to master new plays almost overnight.

Opened in 1863, the Park was Brooklyn's oldest continuously operating legitimate theatre. Under Richard Hyde and Louis Behman it had become a respected stock house, but it stood on the verge of abandoning the stock system altogether. Resident companies, once the backbone of American theatre, were rapidly giving way to the touring combination system, whose complete productions made permanent local companies increasingly unnecessary.

The strain finally became unbearable. During the preceding four months the actors had performed fifteen different plays. Daily matinees, nightly performances, and constant rehearsals for the following week's production exhausted even such accomplished performers as Henrietta Crosman and Howell Hansel. The company finally struck.

One exasperated actor summarized the situation for the Eagle (January 9):

"It was more than we could stand.... It was necessary for us to get down to the theater at 10 o'clock in the morning... We were due back at the theater at 7:30, and didn't leave until shortly before midnight. Some people may think it's fun being on the stage, but I wish those who are pining for histrionic distinction could have been in our places during the last week."

Crosman complained that the endless memorization had become intolerable, while Huffman himself confessed that the actors had become so confused "they didn't know if they were playing Hamlet or Uncle Tom's Cabin." His own workday stretched from nine in the morning until midnight, rehearsing not only actors but stagehands, musicians, and lighting crews. Finally, he confronted Hyde and Behman with an ultimatum: the daily matinees had to end. "We positively refuse to give a matinee every day in the week."

Before continuing the dispute, the Eagle summarized a stock actor's daily routine:

9:00 a.m. – Rehearse stagehands, musicians, and lighting crew.
10:00 a.m. – Company rehearsal.
12:30 p.m. – Lunch.
1:30 p.m. – Prepare for matinee.
2:00–5:00 p.m. – Matinee.
5:00–7:30 p.m. – Remove makeup, meet costumer, dressmaker, wigmaker, and shoemaker; prepare for the following week's production.
7:30–11:00 p.m. – Evening performance.
After 11:00 p.m. – Remove makeup, eat a Welsh rabbit, study ten to one hundred pages of dialogue for next week's play, and finally go to bed.

The newspaper concluded that, difficult as touring could be—with poor hotels and constant travel—it at least spared actors the burden of mastering a new play every week.

The Sunday Question

Another controversy already brewing involved Sunday entertainments. Although dramatic performances were forbidden under the blue laws, theatres increasingly sidestepped the restrictions by presenting Sunday evening "concerts"—thinly disguised vaudeville shows, sometimes advertised as "sacred concerts." These technically illegal entertainments, usually tolerated provided they avoided scenery and costumes, became one of the decade's recurring battlegrounds as managers, clergy, police, and city officials argued over how working people should spend their only day off.

A Lower East Side assemblyman, Harburger, introduced legislation that would have legalized Sunday theatrical performances outright. The measure failed, leaving theatres to continue operating in a legal gray area for years.

Interestingly, Col. William E. Sinn, despite his long theatrical career, vigorously opposed Harburger's proposal—not on religious grounds, but because he believed it would effectively force managers, actors, and theatre employees into a seven-day workweek. In a lengthy Eagle letter of January 20, he frankly admitted that his reasons were "selfish," insisting that six working days were demanding enough. He apparently never considered the now-familiar alternative of simply closing on another day of the week

His long experience in “certain Western cities” had taught him that the overwhelmingly large Sunday turnouts threw the rest of the week’s attendance off-balance, with a big drop off on Monday, and another large house not coming until midweek. It was much better to follow the current pattern of opening on Monday with a moderately sized but critically open-minded audience who could spread their “favorable opinion” by word of mouth, which would influence good business thereafter, allowing as much to be earned in six as in seven days.

Given that his entire argument is based on a seven-day schedule, one can understand his wish not to impose any more on the schedule of the overburdened actors and their need for a day of rest. In this regard, he stressed that the public had no idea of how hard, nerve-racking, and time-consuming rehearsals are.

He was willing to accept Sunday music performances, he wrote, so long as the music was appropriate to the day, elevating mind and spirit, but he rejected “popular” songs for being “stupid and senseless.” Besides, musicians didn’t work as hard during the week as actors, he claimed.

While we are in Col. Sinn’s company, it would be useful to introduce his position vis à vis the Theatrical Trust or Syndicate, whose power over theatrical production was a persistent source of contention and will crop up continually in these annals. The syndicate, which had begun to gain its power about two years earlier, was the powerful alliance of theater owners and booking manager run by six men, usually paired as Nixon and Zimmerman, Frohman and Hayman, and Klaw and Erlanger, that, from the late 1890s into the early 20th century, sought to control American theatrical production and touring by monopolizing access to first-class theaters and attractions across the country. Those working in its productions—from stars to stagehands—were expected to abide by its rules, especially in matters involving salaries and profits. Before long, it would be challenged by independent parties. Its position in Brooklyn theatre requires an airing of the discourse printed in the Brooklyn press between Sinn, a syndicate apologist and the Eagle, which used the opportunity to do some muckraking.

In the Eagle review (January 25) of the Montauk’s mounting of The Senator, starring William H. Crane, a play seen in Brooklyn before, the reviewer claimed,

Just now, when the syndicate controls most of the actors and supplies them with plays, which have had a trial either in London or Paris, and thus reduced the risk of production, when we are getting a succession of plays with foreign motives, even when the text has been stained over with American local color in an attempt to give it a native atmosphere and it seems as if the development of the American drama had been temporarily arrested, “The Senator” is doubly welcome.

Sinn wrote another long letter to the Eagle (January 30) angrily disputing both the claims of syndicate control of actors and that American theatre was overrun with foreign plays forced upon the actors to the detriment of American ones. He called these points “ridiculous,” insisting that the syndicate did not control American stars or their choice plays, and that its mission was the benign one of making “engagements and arranging routes of companies, in which they have not as a syndicate got a dollar’s worth of interest.” Listing the names of some of the biggest stars, he scoffs at the idea of any being forced to do only plays forced on them by the syndicate. He also cannot conceive of what value it would have for it to do so.

He concedes there was a time when American managements needed foreign works to supplement the meager and undeveloped American output, but argues that American drama, on American themes, was now stronger than ever, on a par with any country, and even being in great demand in Europe, with three examples presently doing well on London stages, and translations being seen in France and Germany. Defending the syndicate, he emphasized that “It has a business mission to fulfill and it accomplishes that with as little friction as possible, giving the public such attractions as offer themselves to the syndicate for engagements.”

In the same Eagle issue an editorial responded, commending the colonel for his forthrightness in defending his interests but rebutting his statements about the syndicate’s fostering theatrical prosperity, especially during the current season, by listing syndicate-backed plays and their national origins. Twenty English, Scotch, German, and French plays are given, the majority English, along with their stars, not one of them by an American author. As for approving the syndicate’s practices, the Eagle said it came down to “a matter of taste.” Sinn profited by his arrangement with it, so he has his view. Many approved the syndicate’s offerings, so that, too, is fine. Others dislike “the moral and intellectual tone of its plays,” said the writer, adding, “The general average of the stage has been more trifling, not to say indecent, this season and last than for some time previous.” Whether that could be laid at the syndicate’s doorstep the writer refused to say, but the response concluded that “if the tone or our stage was notably high does anyone doubt that it would claim the credit?” Meanwhile, the Eagle did not bring up the accusation of its having been incorrect in the syndicate’s interference in the career choices of the actors it supported. Much more about the syndicate lies in wait in future annals.

At least one aspiring American playwright trying to get his work produced had grounds to complain publicly about the Park Stock Company. His irritation arose after he spotted an item in the Eagle of January 16 reporting that he—Octavus Cohen, mistakenly identified as “Augustus” Cohen—believed his new play, Santee, was destined for a Park production. In a letter to the Eagle (January 23), Cohen explained that manager Huffman had promised him a staging “immediately after the holidays.” When another production opportunity arose elsewhere and Cohen inquired about the Park’s intentions, Huffman reaffirmed his commitment to produce it at the appointed time

Seeking confirmation of an actual production date, however, Cohen said he was given only evasions. Huffman blamed delays on Hyde and Behman, the Park’s proprietors, citing the expense of preparing the necessary “lithographs, stand work and plenty of paper” for advertising and billing. He added that the Park was concentrating on revivals rather than new plays and that Santee would be the first original work attempted should the policy change. When Cohen appealed directly to co-proprietor Louis Behman, he was told simply that the theatre was not producing new plays at present. Cohen then requested a letter from Huffman releasing him to pursue other stock-company opportunities, but Huffman did not even acknowledge the request. Unwilling, as he put it, to appear “ridiculous,” Cohen asked the Eagle to publish his complaint

What initially seems like a minor theatrical squabble becomes more intriguing on closer inspection. Octavus Cohen was almost certainly the father of the future novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Octavus Roy Cohen, who in January 1898 was only six and a half years old. Cohen, Sr., was himself no obscure figure but a South Carolina journalist and attorney married to Rebecca Ottolengui Cohen. Why he happened to be in Brooklyn in 1898 remains uncertain, especially since the family was living in Charleston a decade later. The connection may have involved his wife’s family, however, since the manager of Brooklyn’s Amphion Theatre during the same period was Lee Ottolengui, likely a relative of Mrs. Cohen, who left Brooklyn for Newark in May 1898 after being honored for his services there. Nothing else appears to survive from Octavus Cohen’s own literary ambitions beyond this frustrated letter to the Eagle, yet his fleeting encounter with Brooklyn theatrical life now unexpectedly links him to the borough’s stage history.

JANUARY 3-8