Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [911]
BEST OF BROADWAY
Those who left Madison Square Garden but stuck to the straight and narrow northward path found themselves in the heartland of the “legitimate” stage, which had fled the old Rialto to upper Broadway between 23rd and 42nd. The chain of theaters began with the Lyceum (1885), the first New York playhouse lighted by electricity, which had been personally installed by Edison. Augustin Daly, the first to gamble on a northward drift, had relocated his stock company to Broadway and 30th in 1879, and Lester Wallack had followed close behind in 1882. Then came the Bijou, the Abbey, the Casino (famed for its Moorish design and novel roof garden), and the Empire, at the very edge of Longacre (not yet Times) Square. By the early 1890s this once sparsely settled stretch of Broadway was ablaze with electric lights and thronged by crowds of middle- and upper-class theater, restaurant, and cafe patrons.
What kept these houses packed—even during the blizzard of 1888—was partly New Yorkers’ traditional devotion to the stage, partly a great surge in out-of-town tourists and businessmen who stayed at the nearby hotels, and partly the greatly improved transportation network of ferries, elevateds, and streetcars, which expanded the accessible theatrical hinterland. Communication technology helped: prosperous Manhattanites with call boxes connected by wire to the nearest telegraph office for summoning a messenger boy to pick up a telegram could also use their device to order tickets from Daly’s Theater, which then were delivered by hand.
For the most part, the content in these new playhouses was as respectable as their audiences. The Lyceum was the favorite haunt of the Four Hundred who, dressed in formal evening attire, took in its drawing-room dramas. Fashionable audiences packed Daly’s for its lavish productions of Shakespeare and mingled during the intervals in its richly furnished lobby. Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert’s H.M.S. Pinafore opened at the Standard in January 1879—they arrived for a visit and were given a gala reception at the Lotos Club—but the Casino became the city’s new temple of light opera, drawing many patrons clad in the new tailless evening coat, the “tuxedo.” Frohman’s did well with English and European comedies and dramas. While some of these offerings could approach the mildly risque, uptown promoters assured bourgeois audiences their plays met minimum standards of decency.
Edwin Booth, New York’s (and America’s) greatest tragedian, strove to make thespians as well as theater more respectable. Society packed the playhouses but kept players at arm’s length, even the most highly reputed. Sarah Bernhardt’s 1880 American debut at Booth’s Theater was the talk of the town a year before she arrived, and the haute monde paid up to forty dollars a ticket to see her, but ladies refused to invite her to their homes, and her Century Association reception was for men only.
Booth, impressed by London’s Garrick Club, where actors mixed with fashionable society, decided that a New York counterpart would help in “the elevation of the stage.” In 1888 he and his friends bought a stately 1845 house on Gramercy Park, had Stanford White remodel it, and reopened it as the Players Club. Actors flocked to its subdued and dignified precincts. Those of too bohemian a bent were blackballed; they could, however, betake themselves to the Lambs Club, a more uninhibited and convivial watering hole, or to Keens Chophouse, which Albert Keen, the Lambs’ manager, had opened on 36th Street in 1885.
This trend toward respectability was hailed by important voices in the larger theatrical community. The city’s leading trade paper, the New York Mirror (1879; later the Dramatic Mirror), urged players to attend church every Sunday. And the genteel drama critic at the Tribune exhorted the profession “to instill, to protect,