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Authors: Boze Hadleigh
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and there was a building boom. Over seventy-six “legit” theaters were in operation, with more coming. During the hot and humid summers Broadway all but closed down, except for girl-and-comedy revues like Florenz Ziegfeld’s
Follies
. Yet in 1927 alone, there were 268 openings. Tickets ranged from fifty cents to five dollars, and a show was a hit if it passed one hundred performances—producers and investors had a one-in-three chance of success. Plays and musicals didn’t have much to fear from movies, which were still silent.
But Broadway differed from other U.S. theatrical venues due to being part of Manhattan Island’s expensive real estate. From way back, theaters have had to compete with other sorts of land use. Thus Broadway was and is primarily a commercial theater. Its acknowledged goal is profits first, art second.
Regarding art, it was in the ’20s that plays and musicals moved into the modern era. Stage realism and naturalism in acting developed rapidly, partly thanks to the enormous impact of the visiting Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski, the “Method,” Russian actors who remained in America to coach, and American disciples like Lee Strasberg would influence Broadway (and also Hollywood) acting for decades to come, and still do.
By Any Other Name
• The record-breaking hit
Abie’s Irish Rose
was presented in Los Angeles, pre-Broadway, as
Marriage in Triplicate
.
• Joseph Kesselring’s comedy hit
Arsenic and Old Lace
was earlier titled
Bodies in Our Cellar
and was a thriller before producers Howard Lindsay and Russel [sic] Crouse helped give it a lighter touch.
• After terrible reviews greeted Nunnally Johnson’s Broadway play
The World Is Full of Girls
, he reportedly sent a telegram to producer Jed Harris: “Change title immediately to
Oklahoma!
” Except that “Girls” opened some nine months earlier!
•
Oklahoma!
would likely have been a smash hit whatever its title, but it began as
Away We Go!
(after the square-dance call, not Jackie Gleason’s catch phrase); based on a non-musical poetically titled
Green Grow the Lilacs
—not a hit—“experts” believed it was doomed because it featured a murder and was the maiden effort of the new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The latter had experienced a string of failures, but collaborating with Rodgers completely changed lyricist Hammerstein’s luck.
• The title
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was a graffito found in a Greenwich Village men’s room by playwright Edward Albee; he did seek widower Leonard Woolf’s permission to use the late writer’s name. (Early on, producer Richard Barr overheard one playgoer telling another after the show, “Well, I loved it. But why did they call the wolf Virginia?”)
•
The Seagull
features a stuffed seagull perched on a bookcase, per the playwright’s stage directions; Noel Coward, no fan of Chekhov and particularly not of
The Seagull
, once said, “I hate plays that have a stuffed bird sitting on the bookcase screaming, ‘I’m the title, I’m the title, I’m the title!’ ”
• “My
last
show was
Everybody Loves Me
(1956). I shouldn’t have set myself up like that. Hardly anybody loved it. That was
the end
.”—producer M AX G ORDON in 1970 (he produced
Born Yesterday
in 1946 and had four concurrent hits during the 1933–34 season)
Fatal Thespians
E VERYONE KNOWS ACTOR J OHN W ILKES B OOTH assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865 in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. For many years he was the only actor to have murdered somebody in a theater. The only actor to have been murdered just outside a theater was William Terriss, popularly known as Breezy Bill, a hero of melodramas. He was killed in 1897 outside the stage door of London’s Adelphi Theatre by a small-part actor with an imagined grievance against the star.
Terriss’s friend, the even more popular Henry Irving—the first actor to be knighted, in 1895—bitterly and accurately predicted, “Terriss was an
Follies
. Yet in 1927 alone, there were 268 openings. Tickets ranged from fifty cents to five dollars, and a show was a hit if it passed one hundred performances—producers and investors had a one-in-three chance of success. Plays and musicals didn’t have much to fear from movies, which were still silent.
But Broadway differed from other U.S. theatrical venues due to being part of Manhattan Island’s expensive real estate. From way back, theaters have had to compete with other sorts of land use. Thus Broadway was and is primarily a commercial theater. Its acknowledged goal is profits first, art second.
Regarding art, it was in the ’20s that plays and musicals moved into the modern era. Stage realism and naturalism in acting developed rapidly, partly thanks to the enormous impact of the visiting Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski, the “Method,” Russian actors who remained in America to coach, and American disciples like Lee Strasberg would influence Broadway (and also Hollywood) acting for decades to come, and still do.
By Any Other Name
• The record-breaking hit
Abie’s Irish Rose
was presented in Los Angeles, pre-Broadway, as
Marriage in Triplicate
.
• Joseph Kesselring’s comedy hit
Arsenic and Old Lace
was earlier titled
Bodies in Our Cellar
and was a thriller before producers Howard Lindsay and Russel [sic] Crouse helped give it a lighter touch.
• After terrible reviews greeted Nunnally Johnson’s Broadway play
The World Is Full of Girls
, he reportedly sent a telegram to producer Jed Harris: “Change title immediately to
Oklahoma!
” Except that “Girls” opened some nine months earlier!
•
Oklahoma!
would likely have been a smash hit whatever its title, but it began as
Away We Go!
(after the square-dance call, not Jackie Gleason’s catch phrase); based on a non-musical poetically titled
Green Grow the Lilacs
—not a hit—“experts” believed it was doomed because it featured a murder and was the maiden effort of the new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The latter had experienced a string of failures, but collaborating with Rodgers completely changed lyricist Hammerstein’s luck.
• The title
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was a graffito found in a Greenwich Village men’s room by playwright Edward Albee; he did seek widower Leonard Woolf’s permission to use the late writer’s name. (Early on, producer Richard Barr overheard one playgoer telling another after the show, “Well, I loved it. But why did they call the wolf Virginia?”)
•
The Seagull
features a stuffed seagull perched on a bookcase, per the playwright’s stage directions; Noel Coward, no fan of Chekhov and particularly not of
The Seagull
, once said, “I hate plays that have a stuffed bird sitting on the bookcase screaming, ‘I’m the title, I’m the title, I’m the title!’ ”
• “My
last
show was
Everybody Loves Me
(1956). I shouldn’t have set myself up like that. Hardly anybody loved it. That was
the end
.”—producer M AX G ORDON in 1970 (he produced
Born Yesterday
in 1946 and had four concurrent hits during the 1933–34 season)
Fatal Thespians
E VERYONE KNOWS ACTOR J OHN W ILKES B OOTH assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865 in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. For many years he was the only actor to have murdered somebody in a theater. The only actor to have been murdered just outside a theater was William Terriss, popularly known as Breezy Bill, a hero of melodramas. He was killed in 1897 outside the stage door of London’s Adelphi Theatre by a small-part actor with an imagined grievance against the star.
Terriss’s friend, the even more popular Henry Irving—the first actor to be knighted, in 1895—bitterly and accurately predicted, “Terriss was an
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