All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (53 page)

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Authors: Ethan Mordden

Tags: #Performing Arts, #Theater, #Broadway & Musical Revue

BOOK: All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959

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3
. This is a freighted compliment. Obviously, Hugo and O’Neill were top names, though the former’s plays were not Broadway fare. Hugo was performed only in adaptation from his fiction; we have tarried with Michael Strange’s version of
L’Homme Qui Rit,
and there had been stagings of
Notre-Dame de Paris
as
Notre Dame
(1902) and of
Les Misérables
as
The Law and the Man
(1906), written and directed by and starring noted Heavy Father Wilton Lackaye. Novelists Balzac and Dreiser presumably represent the sexual honesty with which they and West were famously associated—but who was Samuel Shipman? The most forgotten mass-market playwright in American theatre history, Shipman was prominent in the 1910s and ’20s, mostly for collaborations, at that in cheap crook plays. With John B. Hymer, Shipman made his name with the comedy
East Is West
(1918), on interracial romance in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A vast hit, it featured stereotyping and old-time construction that doomed it to the tiniest of heydays. Meanwhile,
Show Boat
buffs will be glad to learn that “dicty” (meaning “dress-up glam”), Oscar Hammerstein’s outstanding touch of ghetto slang, in Queenie’s “C’mon Folks,” turns up in West’s script as well.

4
. The following anecdote, a dinner-party piece for playwright Howard Teichmann, shows how closely Broadway audiences follow a play’s action. In the original
Three Men on a Horse,
Shirley Booth played the girl friend of one of the low lives, Sam Levene. One day, Booth’s husband came visiting backstage with their little dog, which somehow got off its lead and ran onstage during the performance. Levene helped it to a practical door and gave it an exit—handed it, in fact, to the assistant stage manager, who happened to be future playwright and director Garson Kanin.
He
promptly sent dog and master out through the stage door. Now, back to our play: except the audience, wondering what that dog business was about, stopped listening to the show and began to worry about the dog. Was it Shirley’s? Was it hungry? Wouldn’t it be lonely on the other side of that door? The house went absolutely dead—at one of the decade’s most popular comedies, mind you. Come back, little Sheba; and the frantic Kanin went hurtling outside to find the dog. In those days, the West Forties were dotted with bars (
Three Men On a Horse
was at the Playhouse, now demolished, on the north side of Forty-eighth Street just west of Sixth Avenue), and Kanin finally located Mr. Booth and canine in one of them. Kanin rushed them back to the Playhouse and signaled Levene: open the door and retrieve the dog. Levene did so, presumably with some ad lib such as “Had a nice walk, Kaltenborn?,” and the audience, reassured, began to follow the action again.

5
. Winwood underwent a remarkable journey, starting as an ingenue in her native England and coming to the U.S. in her early thirties to play the Pretty Little Thing in a wide variety of shows. These ranged from the first play to win the Pulitzer Prize,
Why Marry?
(1917), to Maugham and Coward; from chronicle, as the protagonist’s unfaithful wife in
Molière
(1919), to period adventure as arrogant Lady Elizabeth Neville, in love with Morgan the Pirate, in
The Buccaneer
(1925). As she aged, Winwood began to capitalize on an eccentric streak that made her helpfully creepy in Agatha Christie’s
Ten Little Indians
(1944) and an outright hag as one of the associate crazies in Jean Giraudoux’s
The Madwoman of Chaillot
(1948). In her last Broadway outing, a comedy called
Nathan Weinstein, Mystic, Connecticut
(1966), Winwood was a bit girlish for the part of a centenarian bootlegger at a mere eighty-three. The curious can catch Winwood between her enchantress and beldam phases in the Katharine Hepburn RKO of
Quality Street,
made two years before the
Earnest
revival.

7
. The importance of play over players in
Life With Father
is revealed in Lindsay and Stickney’s many replacements, mostly names of note only to indexers: Wallis Clark and Lily Cahill; Arthur Margetson (who with Irene Bordoni introduced Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” in
Paris
[1928]) and Nydia Westman; obscure Percy Waram with the redoubtable Lillian Gish; and the somewhat obscure Stanley Ridges with Lillian’s sister Dorothy, the Gishes hitting New York after heading touring companies. Lillian’s broke Chicago’s long-run record: sixty-six weeks at the Blackstone.
Tobacco Road,
on the other hand, boasted one very prominent replacement when James Barton took over Henry Hull’s Jeeter Lester for four and a half years—astonishing when one considers that Jeeter is the longest but by far the least interesting of
Tobacco Road
’s seven main roles. A sharp actor dwindles into cliché in such a part. But then, Jeeter marked a career transition for Barton, from hoofing and a drunk act into straight acting; after
Tobacco Road,
Barton played O’Neill. Barton’s uncle John played Jeeter on tour for well over eleven years.

8. We Are Not Here to Rehearse Your Play: The Political Stage

2
. Blackface today is commentative, reflecting critically on the characters who appear in it, such as Mandy Patinkin’s scary clown monster in Michael John LaChiusa’s
The Wild Party
(2000). In the 1920s, however, blackface was no more than makeup that had inhered in American performance practice for a century. Cartoonishly inflected features and white gloves comprised the look deemed appropriate for Mammy or Dixie songs, and an alternative “natural” blackface darkened white skin in straight plays, such as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1853). Curiously, most of the leading blackface singers of the early 1900s, such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Tess Gardella, were Jewish or Italian, suggesting a kind of minority-group solidarity in preparation for an informal takeover of show biz in the post-
Lightnin’
world.

5
. One wonders to what extent Cheryl Crawford personally urged
Johnny Johnson
on the Group, for in her later years as a producer she favored the odd item. She could also choose sagely—three of Tennessee Williams’ hits,
The Rose Tattoo
(1951),
Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959), and his one comedy,
Period of Adjustment
(1960). Crawford even tossed onto Broadway a commercial Frisbee of a play,
Oh, Men! Oh, Women!
(1953), with Franchot Tone as a Psychiatrist To the Stars in a comedy hit even further from Groupthink than Clare Boothe’s
Margin For Error
. But it was in the musical that Crawford made her reputation for judgment so poor it can only be called thrilling. She veered from sure ideas like
One Touch of Venus
and
Brigadoon
to shows so weird and doomed that, in heaven, when asked if she bore any earthly regrets, Crawford answered, “Why didn’t they offer me
Carrie
?”

9. Woman and Man: Susan and God and The Iceman Cometh

10. Dogs Are Sticking to the Sidewalks: The Early 1940s

12. It’s About This Doctor: A Streetcar Named Desire and The Crucible

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