The Business of American Theatre

William Grange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000074710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas y negocios

The Business of American Theatre is a research guide to the history of producing theatre in the United States. Covering a wide range of subjects, the book explores how traditions of investment, marketing, labor union contracts, advertising, leasing arrangements, ticket scalping, zoning ordinances, royalties, and numerous other financial transactions have influenced the art of theatre for the past three centuries. Yet the book is not a dry reiteration of hits and flops, bankruptcies and bamboozles.Nor does it cover "everything about it that's appealing, everything the traffic will allow" (as Irving Berlin did in the song "There's No Business Like Show Business"). It is instead a highly readable resource for anyone interested in how money, and how much money, is critical to the art and artists of theatre. Many of those artists make appearances in the book: Richard Rodgers and his keen eye for investment, Jacob Shubert and his construction of "the bridge of thighs" for his showgirls at the Winter Garden, the significance of the Disney Souvenir Shop near the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, and the difference between a Broadway showlosing millions of dollars or making billions in one night. Consider this book a go-to resource for readers, students, and scholars of the theatre business.

1

Introduction

Commercialism’s dominance of the American theatre was inevitable, given the absence of centuries-long feudal traditions in the New World. The motivation for founding colonies in North America was mostly mercantile, with the possible exception of some religious conviction among settlers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. American colonists furthermore tended to share a nascent suspicion of the feudal lord and any obligations he might traditionally have toward his subjects. That suspicion grew as the 18th century progressed, becoming outright hostility toward state involvement in the welfare of free citizens. The European practice of aristocratic responsibility for the educational improvement or cultural uplift of citizens was alien to most Americans. It contradicted the theory of “common rights,” those natural rights common to each individual, which the American Revolution embraced. Americans concomitantly embraced the theory that government is an inappropriate source of sponsorship or support for the arts. According to such theories, Americans viewed theatre in particular as an unsuitable recipient of favor or benefit, because theatre was a commercial enterprise with ample opportunity for profit. As such it enjoyed the freedom of finding and developing a market for its numerous offerings.

The initial developers of colonial markets for theatre were apparently active sometime in the 1740s, but the most well-known troupe of actors was the “London Company of Comedians” who arrived in 1752. Their leader was Lewis Hallam (1714–1755), whose efforts were desultory at best. After three years of struggle Hallam took his troupe (which included his wife and children) to Jamaica, where he died. That misfortune, however, turned into a benefit; Mrs. Hallam married David Douglass (1720–1789), a far more competent manager and businessman than was her late husband. Douglass led the troupe (which he renamed as the “American Company”) back to the colonies, and under his direction the group prospered. By some estimates he could realize over $7,000 (in current monetary value) a night for a full house. Douglass and company left the colonies again for Jamaica in 1775 because the Continental Congress had essentially banned all British “imports.” The company remained in Jamaica after the Revolution, and when Douglass died in 1786 he had accumulated an estate worth over $2 million (in current monetary value).

A victorious revolution left the new United States of America with numerous debts but abundant opportunities for theatre managers to renew efforts profitably. One of the major impediments all businesses encountered in the immediate postwar period, however, was money itself. Through the 1780s the Continental Congress authorized printing of essentially worthless scrip in small denominations, resulting in monetary chaos. Only in 1792 did the United States have anything like a legal tender, i.e., a valid currency. On the basis of the newly ratified Constitution of the United States (Article I, Section 8), the United States Congress began to coin money in 1792, which established the silver dollar as the unit of exchange in the United States. Congress pegged its value to the Spanish silver dollar and declared it to be lawful tender “throughout the several states.” The First Bank of the United States, chartered a year earlier, meantime began to stabilize currency fluctuations, assume state debts, and float government bonds.

The ensuing business expansion in the 1790s included theatre construction. Managers speculated on building theatres of brick and mortar rather than wood, because the market value of such structures acquired more capital value and gave the impression of lasting worth than if made of wood. Impressions were important to the task of seeking investors who might purchase stock in the theatre company. Along with stock certificates, which guaranteed investors a specified percentage of return on the initial investment, a stock purchase often included subscription tickets to performances and a portion of any rentals the manager might arrange for the building.

I

After the revolution the system of employment of actors and paying them salaries became standard, though within the system actors negotiated with managers on their salaries. Managers and their backers assumed all the risk and kept whatever profit there may have been. Running costs were correspondingly moderate. Salaries were generally low; there were no royalties to authors or composers, no agency fees, no commissions for booking. Since the theatre company in most cases controlled the theatre building, there was no division of receipts between the house and the company.

The English-born Thomas Wignell (1753–1803) was among the leading managers of the period; he, like other managers, raised money through stock offerings. He purchased a site on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia in 1794 and built the Chestnut Street Theatre, a venue that could accommodate about 2,000 paying customers, the largest such venue in America. With partners he built the Holliday Street Theatre six months later in Baltimore. Similar endeavors took place in Boston, where the Federal Street Theatre was capitalized in 1794 with $7,500 in stock offerings; the Haymarket Theatre opened in 1796 with offerings totaling $12,000. Alexander Placide (1750–1812) bought a brick market building in Newport, Rhode Island, and with business partner Joseph Harper (1759–1811) he converted it into a theatre. In New York City, joint management of William Dunlap and John Hodgkinson built the Park Theatre with offers to 113 investors at $375 each, amassing $42,375 to begin construction in 1796. But that sum went a short distance toward completing the edifice. Ultimately the managers had offered other shares to raise the $130,000 ultimately required. The Park opened in1798 and for many years remained the most luxurious theatre venue in the United States.

Boston witnessed the construction of eight houses. In 1819 a brick theatre arose in the public entertainment district of Washington Gardens, followed by the Tremont Street Theatre, the National Theatre, the Lion Theatre, the Boston Museum, and Gallery of Fine Arts in 1841, which featured a 1,200-seat auditorium. The new owners of the Millerite Tabernacle on Howard Street converted the venue into the Howard Athenaeum. In 1847 the Adelphia Theatre arose, and in 1852 the Boston Theatre Company issued stock offerings and collected $250,000; investors purchased a lot on Washington Street for $160,000 and constructed a 3,000-seat structure. The first theatre in St. Louis was a former salt warehouse, which became known as the “Salt Theatre.” Other efforts followed, most notably by the theatre entrepreneurs by Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith, who built several theatres in river port towns. In Chicago, theatre business started in a hotel dining room in the late 1830s; other theatres started in wooden buildings, largely because the timber business in Wisconsin had developed numerous means of delivering massive amounts of construction lumber at bargain rates to the city. Chicago’s first brick-and-mortar theatre arose in 1851, and in 1854 Chicago’s most well-known theatre entrepreneur, James McVicker, arrived from New York, and at a cost of about $85,000 built a theatre on Madison Street. These few instances exemplify the kinds of construction activities taking place in the pre-Civil War period in many American towns and cities.

A keen observer of the new republic and of its attitude toward the theatre was Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, Viscount de Tocqueville (1805–1859) whose De La Démocratie en Amérique (On Democracy in America) was published in 1835. He agreed with Shakespeare that theatre “held the mirror up to Nature,” that is, its chief validity lay in the reflection it cast upon the society where actors performed it. When social and political tendencies begin to make themselves felt in literature, he said, they generally manifest themselves first in drama, and “they always remain conspicuous there.” The vulgar taste of the unsophisticated mob was therefore everywhere to be witnessed, he noted—though that kind of ubiquity was not always a bad thing. He noted that the theatres of aristocratic nations “have always been filled with spectators not belonging to the aristocracy,” and the theatre was that singular institution in which the higher ranks mixed with the middle and lower classes; “there alone do the former consent to listen to the opinion of the latter.” At the theatre, men of cultivation and literary attainment have always encountered difficulty in making their taste prevail over that of the people. “The pits have frequently made laws for the boxes.” De Tocqueville was mostly echoing Dr. Samuel Johnson, who in 1747 wrote

Ah! let not Censure term our fate our choice,

The stage but echoes back the public voice;

The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give,

For we that live to please must please to live.

de Tocqueville continued,

In democracies, dramatic pieces are listened to, but not read. Most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind but the keen emotions of the heart. They do not expect to hear a fine literary work, but to see a play; and provided the author writes the language of his country correctly enough to be understood, and that his characters excite curiosity and awaken sympathy, the audience are satisfied. They ask no more of [stage] fiction and immediately return to real life. Accuracy of style is therefore less required, because the attentive observance of its rules is less perceptible on the stage.

Less perceptible, at any rate, to a semiliterate, largely unsophisticated audience present and growing in size in the United States.

Numerous “mining theatres” sprang up in northern California in the wake of the 1849 discovery of gold there. Almost all the structures there consisted of wood, and most of them were “multipurpose” arrangements. They featured gambling saloons, brothels, and theatres in the same building. Often a single structure served the purposes of numerous businesses at once. Construction time for these versatile buildings was usually about a week, and most of them contained remarkably large stages. Actresses in most plays were undifferentiated from “saloon girls” and they accommodated men with gold in their pockets in such buildings, either backstage, in private boxes, or in hotel rooms adjoining. The income from these theatres was enormous. Several reports indicate a nightly average gross earnings of $5,000, with receipts exceeding $10,000 on “special occasions.”

II

In 1810, the American theatre experienced an innovation that affected its development for the next fifty years. Its instigator was Stephen Price (1783–1840), manager of the Park Theatre in New York by 1808 and by 1810 an impresario of sorts, recognizing the market for celebrity in the United States. The stability of the American dollar allowed him to offer British actors lucrative contracts to tour the former colonies and realize unprecedented amounts of money. His first attraction was George Frederick Cooke (1756–1812), who had an established, three-decade-long career in London. Price arranged a tour for Cooke to appear in several stock companies, and audiences flocked to him. At the Park, Cooke initially earned $1,820; he remained on American tour for the rest of his life, appearing in Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island, and back to New York, earning upwards of $20,000. Scholars have estimated that theatre managers who booked him profited well over $250,000 from his presence.

Price and other managers soon began to book other British stars with similar results. The Panic of 1819 was an unforeseen reduction in the availability of credit from banks, but by 1822 recovery was underway and with it the expansion of theatre construction resumed. Price began to encounter additional competition in New York when the Chatham Gardens Theatre opened in 1823, and in 1825, Charles W. Sandford (1796–1878) built the Lafayette Theatre. In 1826, Price left for London to become the manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, and from there he controlled the supply of British stars available for American tours. By 1830, when he returned to New York, there were approximately 50 resident stock companies in the United States most of them eager to engage touring stars to perform in productions already in their theatres’ repertoires alongside local actors. Managers paid stars sometimes so much that there was often little capital left to maintain the theatre after the star’s departure. Sometimes a star played to packed houses under a contract that paid him a generous salary plus a substantial percentage of the house’ gross receipts. The result occasionally left managers in debt for the rest of the season. Yet some managers prevailed and profited greatly, while some stars likewise grew rich. The financial crisis such as the Panic of 1837 wiped out several theatre managers—but in many cases left their buildings available to others, attracting credit and financing for further expansion. One such manager was Phineas T. Barnum, who in 1841 took over a five-story edifice in New York and turned it into a museum with a theatre. The discovery of gold in California late in 1849 not only spurred economic activity, it opened several new opportunities for new theatre managers to enter “the show business.” By 1860 the theatre was a multimillion dollar enterprise in America, growing rapidly with the spread of several railroad networks throughout the country.

The growth of railroads had an enormous impact on theatre business, especially through the 1850s and the Civil War. Some historians credit two foreign-born actor-managers with deploying railroads effectively in the pursuit of expanding the theatre market, Laura Keene (1826–1873) and Dion Boucicault (1820–1890). Keene had established herself in London by 1851 and became a major star in America by 1852. The Irish-born Boucicault was a successful playwright in London by age 21 and arrived in America in 1854. Both were adept at expanding markets for their work in New York, where Keene staged Boucicault’s The Octoroon and The Colleen Bawn. She had built her own venue in 1856, called Laura Keene’s Theatre (located at 622 Broadway). About two years later Boucicault realized that instead of sending a star around to local companies, Keene could send out a second company of a successful production of his plays from New York and bill the plays themselves as attractions. Keene then sent productions out on trains “in combination” with modest scenery, musicians, and an entire cast of actors.

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, there were about 33,000 miles of railway. But seven years later there were more than 63,000, which meant a mile of railway to every 666 inhabitants in the United States. The Panic of 1873 called a virtual halt to most new construction, with a meager 5,000 miles completed that year. Among the business negatively affected by the financial crisis of the mid-1870s were stock companies in the larger cities, but during 1876–1877 the New York Dramatic Mirror reported that nearly 100 combination companies were on the road, playing in venues that formerly housed stock companies. A decade later the same publication listed 282 combination companies on the road. Combinations were a far more efficient means of providing theatre to American audiences, and combinations furthermore cultivated markets where previously no theatre company had ever existed. Another term for “efficiency” among combination companies is “centralization.”

The previous stock company arrangement had been decentralized, connected to other companies only when a touring star made a stop at one company on his way to another. The rationale of the combination regime was its centralization, which made New York City the producing center for the entire country. New York had since the 1820s more theatres than any other American city, and by the 1870s it also contained more manufacturing centers of theatre components. Prior to that time stock companies employed scenery they stored in whatever space might be available in house. Subtleties in scenery were largely absent, since painters needed to use fairly bright contrasts in color for a “scene” to appear convincing. In any case, audiences generally anticipated their favorite productions in each season’s repertoire, so it was convenient for managers to fill their stages with components they had stored somewhere. During the last quarter of the 19th century, audiences had come to expect higher scenic quality than hitherto, because improvements in electrified stage lighting allowed audiences to discern more nuanced scenery, with fewer of the flaws that went unnoticed under gaslight. The result was more theatre craftsmen began to manufacture finely crafted stage components than at any time previous.

Due to its wealth, the readier availability of credit to tour operators, the number of playscript publishers, the growing number of businesses that specialized in stage components, and the rapid influx of acting talent to New York hoping to appear in a New York production, the city quickly became both the incubator and supplier for virtually every manager desirous of utilizing the combination system. It was the logical place to develop a production, find actors to appear in it, rehearse it, run it howsoever briefly, then book it on a tour and send it throughout the country.

Success of the combinations spawned a new personality in the American theatrical industry, namely the booking agent. By the 1880s, most agents operated out of offices in New York’s Union Square, which developed the distinction of being New York’s first theatrical center. It was situated at the junction of Broadway and the Bowery, thoroughfares that had been prominent sites of theatre and theatrical activity. Its location on a major cross town route (14th Street) guaranteed accessibility from all directions, a factor that spurred hotel and restaurant development to settle in the area. In the 1870s, the construction of elevated railroad lines on Third and Sixth Avenues, to the east and west of Union Square, respectively, further increased Union Square’s convenience as a show business focal point. The first agencies made their presence felt by 1874 when Horace Wall’s Dramatic Agency and Morris Simmonds’ International Dramatic Agency merged. Yet, it dissolved two years later because both men recognized they could make much more money as single, independent agents. The enormous popularity of the combination system was creating new opportunities for operations such as the Dramatic, Equestrian, and Variety Bureau and the Managers and Stars Agency, both located directly on Union Square. C. R. Gardiner is said to have been among the first agents to gain control over what attractions were booked into what theatres. By controlling the routes of a combination company and the venues where it performed, Gardiner was able to force the theatre owner to deal directly with him in order to sign attractions. By the mid-1880s, an agency called Taylor’s Theatrical Exchange claimed to represent over 100 “first-class” theatres (those who could charge between $1.00 and $2.00 for single admissions) charging both parties involved in the transaction, namely the theatres who booked a production and the manager of the production for fees ranging from $25 to $250. Booking agencies provided the impetus toward making the combination system a more rational means by which touring could most profitably take place. The first significant development was the formation of circuits. A circuit, as Alfred Bernheim described it, was “a group of theatres so related to each other geographically that they form a logical route for a touring theatrical company.” One circuit might have only a half dozen theatres in it, while another might have dozens. To be effective, a profitable circuit needed

a definite, though somewhat shifting numerical limit. That number was determined by the cohesive power of its constituent theatres; that is to say, by the ability of these theatres to function efficiently as a unit in their relationship with attractions.

The theatre industry by the late 19th century began to grasp the need for what is now termed “economies of scale.” Groups of theatres could bargain more effectively than could a single theatre. The economy of scale dictates the advantage of any buyer who purchases products in volume. On the supply side, as Bernheim noted,

the sale of theatre productions was a matter of delivery more than it was the actual price of the product. A production’s merchandisers could readily ignore a single theatre in planning its itinerary, but they could not lightly overlook a group of purchasers, even though each one in the group might itself be a slight significance.

Booking offices addressed themselves to both buy...