Broadway Babylon (4 page)

Q
:
What is “Broadway”?

A
: Some say it’s as much an invention as a geographic entity. Broadway and 42nd Street is the center of a five-block circle comprising much of the “legitimate” theater district. Writer Damon Runyon described Broadway as “a crooked and somewhat narrow street trailing from the lowest tip of Manhattan Island to the city limits of Yonkers and beyond.”

“Broadway” stands for first-class theater, not that it has a monopoly on quality, and Off-Broadway—and more occasionally Off-Off-Broadway—are included in this book. Broadway was a farm with a manure dump in the early 1700s, at which time New York City already had two theaters. One represented the British Crown, the other Dutch settlers and those favoring home rule.

Q
: What’s the most unusual coincidence involving a famous actor?

A
: Possibly the eeriest or most ironic coincidence involved acclaimed tragedian Edwin Booth, an elder brother of President Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Edwin was at a railway depot in Jersey City, en route to Philadelphia near the end of the Civil War. The conflict caused habitual crowds at train stations, and as the vehicle started to move, Edwin suddenly dropped his valise to seize a tall young man by the coat collar as he fell off the platform. Edwin hauled him up to safety. The grateful youth, recognizing the celebrity, exclaimed, “That was a narrow escape, Mr. Booth.” The youth was Abraham’s son Robert Lincoln.

Q
: What is a thespian?

A
: It’s now a generic word for actor. But Thespis of Icaria (or Icarus) was an actual Greek actor who made his stage bow at a dramatic festival honoring the god Dionysus over 2,500 years ago and won the laurel-leaf crown. To honor this deity of wine and revelry, audiences attended plays while under the influence—even though Greek plays (and later, Roman ones) began in the morning.

Greeks called an actor “the answerer,” for he responded to the chorus. Our word “hypocrite” evolved from the Greek for acting, that is, playing a part. Greek moralists often criticized actors for telling
lies
—that is, saying lines. Thespis is considered the first individualistic actor. He shifted the emphasis away from the chorus and onto the actor. He focused on tragedies and created characterization. He accustomed Greeks to plots and conflict, where previously they’d listened to recitations.

Q
: Who was the first playwright?

A
: The earliest playwright whose work has survived is Aeschylus (525?–456 B.C.E.). He reportedly wrote some 22 tetralogies, of which four complete parts of some four-parters, three quarters of one, and a few assorted fragments of others remain. Aeschylus was the first of Greek tragedy’s Big Three; Sophocles and Euripides were more inclined to challenge theatrical conventions. However, before Aeschylus, Greek plays featured one actor, who played several parts in turn. This playwright initiated writing for two actors and the chorus—young Sophocles added a third actor.

Aeschylus also reduced the chorus from 50 to 12, added simple properties (“props”) and painted backdrops, and introduced oratorio into drama.

Q
: How big was the Greek influence on (our) theater?

A
: It can be gauged by such words of Greek origin as: theater, drama, tragedy, comedy, also scene, episode, character, dialogue, music, mime, and chorus. Athenians called a producer “choregos,” a provider of the chorus. Over the millennia, “choregos” became associated more with chorus lines and the dance. In the first half of the twentieth century choreographers were usually known as dance directors. Unlike modern producers, those of ancient Greece weren’t in it for the money. Wealthier citizens were tapped to produce plays at dramatic festivals, a nonprofit honor viewed as a civic duty.

Q
: Who was the first theatergoer among English-speaking rulers?

A
: Charles II (c. 1660–1685) was the first to attend public performances. Elizabeth I (c. 1558–1603) was a theatrical devotee but didn’t go public with her pleasures. From 1649 to 1660, Britain was without a monarch, ruled by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, religious fundamentalists who abolished the theater.

Q
: When did actors first get into trouble in the US?

A
: In 1665, three actors in the American colonies—in Accomac County, Virginia (named after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen)—were arrested for putting on a play.
Ye Beare and Ye Cubbe
was written by one of the trio, which was acquitted. Christianity generally frowned on plays; any entertainment not devised or controlled by the Church was suspect. Also, European Puritans didn’t move to America so much for religious freedom—which they usually had at home—as for the ability to impose their minority religious views on others.

P.S.Virginia was less fanatical than several other colonies, hence the acquittal on the potentially grave charge of mounting a play.

Q
: We know that colonial America, influenced by the Puritans, was anti-theater. Did this change after independence?

A
: Some. Henry Ward Beecher was a famous preacher and pamphleteer in 1870s America. In his thundering sermons he often denounced theatergoing as a “sin”—never mind that he became involved in an adultery scandal. But during one sermon, he admitted to the lesser sin, declaring, “Yes, I have been to the theater.” Jaws dropped. “Mr. Beecher,” he repeated, “has been to the theater. Now, if you will all wait until you are past seventy years of age and will then go and see Joseph Jefferson in
Rip Van Winkle
, I venture the risk that it will not affect your eligibility for heaven, if you do nothing worse.”

P.S. One of Beecher’s sisters became more lastingly famous: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Abraham Lincoln called her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”

Q
: When did performance spaces shift from outdoor to indoor?

A
: Greek and Roman amphitheaters were, of course, open air. And matinees meant just that: performances commenced in the morning. By the Elizabethan era, public theaters—like Shakespeare’s Globe—were partly open to the heavens, and performances began in the afternoon. Renaissance Europe favored the comfort of indoor shows, which no matter the time of day necessitated developing the art of stage lighting.

Q
: Who was the most famous actress with the shortest career?

A
: Nell Gwyn (1650–1687), who acted for six years. Purportedly the daughter of a madam and possibly herself a prostitute, she was for a time an orange seller at London’s famous Drury Lane Theatre. At fourteen she debuted on stage. She earned fame playing fast women—for, as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, another English actress, said a few hundred years later, “A good woman is a dramatic impossibility.”

Gwyn also got laughs in comedy and excelled at “trouser roles” (wearing male clothing). But when Charles II chose her for his mistress, she left the stage for good (if not for good). Nell continued building her fortune, though on his deathbed Charles supposedly implored his brother, next in line to the throne, “Don’t let poor Nelly starve.” At Gwyn’s death, she was worth £100,000, or some $6 million today.

Q
: Did anyone ever become a Broadway star via a striptease?

A
: Of course it was a mock striptease, but dancer Joan McCracken, who’d appeared in
Oklahoma!
, became a star in choreographer Agnes de Mille’s 1944 hit
Bloomer Girl
. McCracken played a maid-of-all-work and performed a comical 1861-style striptease that audiences loved. A mock strip had also made a star of Mary Martin in the 1938
Leave It to Me
, via Cole Porter’s vampy “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”

P.S. McCracken was at one point married to Bob Fosse, later to fellow dancer and future novelist Jack Dunphy. When novelist Truman Capote met Dunphy, he was smitten and determined to have him. Capote theorized that anyone, if you concentrated on that person long and intensely enough, could be
had
. Dunphy left McCracken and the stage, and he and Capote became a couple for the rest of their lives.

Q
: Who was the oldest practicing playwright?

A
: George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), at ninety-three. But his 1949 play
Buoyant Billions
was not a hit.

Q
: Who was the father of the American musical?

A
: Don’t assume. Some would say the “father” was a mother: playwright-actress-novelist-lyricist Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824). Only one of her plays exists in its entirety. By age twenty, she’d failed as a governess, so being of a literary bent, she wrote
Victoria
, an epistolary novel. Her most popular book,
Charlotte Temple
, was continuously in print from 1795 to 1906, with two further printings after World War II. But though the novel had over two hundred editions, it didn’t make Ms. Rowson rich, for there were no copyright laws then, and royalties didn’t exist.

The Englishwoman eventually found herself on the stage in the new United States. That led to writing plays, one of which was
Slaves in Algiers; or, a Struggle for Freedom
(1794), a farce with music. Via this work, set on the Barbary Coast of what is now Libya and involving American sailors captured and enslaved by Muslim pirates, Rowson became—on June 30, 1794—the first female playwright to be produced professionally in America, and “the mother of the American musical.” (The musical’s events were based on real-life ones.
The pirates sent a demand for ransom to Congress; the US refused, and finally American forces headed “to the shores of Tripoli.”)

Susanna Haswell Rowson died in Boston in 1824, her theatrical successes long past, but her personally unprofitable novels still widely read. Sadly, her pioneering and musicals had never been held in high esteem; rather than being reviewed on their own merits they’d been treated as novelties, remarkable chiefly because of their distaff authorship

P.S. The first American actor to go into politics was, of course, a stage actor. John Howard Payne had also been a prolific playwright and was one of the first American actors to star in England, as Hamlet (age twenty-two). His play
The Fall of Algiers
was inspired by an incident in Susanna Rowson’s
Slaves in Algiers
, but he’s best remembered for the song “Home, Sweet Home,” from his play
Clari, the Maid of Milan
. Payne became American consul to Tripoli once it re-established diplomatic relations with the USA.

Q
: Since
Chicago
was based on a real story, why wasn’t this musical done sooner, especially since there had been a movie starring Ginger Rogers as
Roxie Hart
in 1942?

A
: The antics of two murderesses inspired a 1920s Broadway comedy and the ’40s film—not one of Rogers’s big hits—but wasn’t generally viewed as the stuff of musical comedy, which until
Cabaret
(1966) was a typically light and fluffy genre. Besides, rights to redo
Chicago
were held by
Chicago Tribune
reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, whose headline had read “Woman Plays Air Jazz as Victim Dies.” After she became a fundamentalist Christian she refused anyone seeking to resurrect her play,
Chicago
, which she felt glamorized and trivialized murder. When Watkins died a recluse worth $2 million in 1969, she had so faded from memory that the
New York Times
ran no obituary.

Of course the perfect composer-lyricist team to bring
Chicago
to Broadway in the 1970s was Kander and Ebb, who’d done the dark and acclaimed
Cabaret. Chicago’s
initial reviews during its out-of-town Philadelphia run were negative, but Philly audiences liked it, and it became a bigger hit after returning to the Great White Way in 1996—it’s currently the longest-running revival in Broadway history. (The film version won the Best Picture Academy Award in 2003.)

Q
: Do all composers accept that it goes with the territory when a song is dropped from a musical prior to its New York opening?

A
: Songs are routinely dropped. Some composers protest, most are resigned to it, and some seem to comply sweetly, like Jerry Herman. But some object vigorously, no one more so than lyricist Carolyn Leigh. She and composer Cy Coleman did the music for
Little Me
(1962), based on Patrick Dennis’s post—
Auntie Mame
novel. Coleman decided during a Philadelphia tryout to drop a song, whereupon the enraged Leigh left the theater, found the nearest
policeman, and dragged him backstage, where she demanded he arrest Coleman. (This, during a performance.) It was Coleman and Leigh’s last show together.