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By Root 622 0

of the early years of the century, and the New Amsterdam was considered a building of the first importance—a building that might well “mark an epoch in the history of art,” as one penetrating if breathless account put it. This was also, of course, an era of opulence and show, and the New Amsterdam was intended to dazzle even the most blasé theatergoer. The gentlemen’s retiring room featured a “fireplace of Caen stone, floor of Welsh quarry tiling, wainscot of nut-brown English oak,” while that of the ladies was rendered “in tones of the tea rose, with decorations and carvings of conventionalized roses with leaves and stems entwined.”

Opening night was a magnificent affair, with carriages disgorging a steady stream of men in top hats and tails and women in furs and long gowns. The New Amsterdam’s owners, Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger, two of the most powerful men on Broadway, had chosen to open with A Midsummer Night’s Dream—an apt choice, for the architects had said that they intended to evoke that play’s sense of magic. And indeed, one critic who attended the opening described the theater as “the most airy, fairy beautiful thing in the way of a playhouse that the New York public has ever seen.” The play, on the other hand, received fairly poor reviews, and gave way after three weeks to Mother Goose, a Christmas pantomime. Soon the New Amsterdam was showing dopey musicals like Miss Dolly Dollars. In fact, nothing produced at the New Amsterdam during the first decade of its existence demonstrated anything like the creativity and daring of the building itself. Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow was a huge hit in 1907–1908, and set off a waltz craze that lasted for several years; but their other big successes were mostly harmless froth.

By 1910, the passion for playgoing had reached such a pitch that forty first-class theaters were operating in and around Times Square; and yet few, if any, of them showed more distinguished fare than the New Amsterdam. A combination of stifling Victorian respectability and the absence of a sophisticated urban culture ensured an endless tide of mediocrity. Though figures like Dreiser and Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Stephen Crane were forging a new kind of American literature at the time, Broadway showed no interest in their work. The art of playwriting, and for that matter the etiquette of theatergoing, remained stuck in the high artifice of the Gay Nineties. Audiences hissed the villain and shouted warnings to the endangered hero. Though Klaw and Erlanger had the courage to show Peer Gynt at the New Amsterdam, Ibsen, like Shaw and Strindberg, was generally considered either too difficult or too wicked for Broadway. Probably the most important theatrical development of those early years was the rise of George M. Cohan, a veteran of vaudeville who turned out the first truly American musicals—Little Johnny Jones, George Washington, Jr., and others, which featured rousing, foot-stomping tunes, among them “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Yankee Doodle Boy,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

Broadway in the early years of the century was a factory, just as Hollywood was to become several decades later. Theater—whether vaudeville, operetta, or melodrama—was the popular culture of the day, and people all over the country demanded performers and productions “direct from Broadway.” In the 1890s, managers of theaters from across the country would sit in the saloons of Union Square dickering with producers for the rights to put on shows. Often, to be on the safe side, they would book two shows for the same period; or the producers would promise the same troupe to two different managers. Out of this chaos came a centralized booking organization known as the Syndicate, a partnership among six of Broadway’s leading producers. The Syndicate’s members owned theaters in New York and elsewhere, but its real power came from its control over the contracts of Broadway performers. If you wanted to book a Broadway show, you had to pay court to Abe Erlanger and Marc Klaw, who dominated the organization, and thus