The Henry Jewett Players (c.1910s–1930s) was a repertory theatre troupe established by actor Henry Jewett in Boston, Massachusetts. The group operated from the Boston Opera House (c.1915); the Toy Theatre and Copley Theatre on Dartmouth Street (c.1916–1924); [1] and the Repertory Theatre on Huntington Avenue (c.1925–1930). [2] [3] Performers included Peg Entwistle and Conway Wingfield. [4] A contemporary critic explained how the players worked: "Mr Jewett ... considers the term 'Stock Company' beneath the just merits and present ambitions of his organization, and insists that it be dignified by the name 'Repertory,' instead. There is justification for this to the extent that no member regularly plays 'leading' parts, but all are moved around in the cast from week to week, from important to minor roles. But the company is nevertheless not run on the European Repertory system by means of which several plays are put on within the week, but instead, follows the usual American fashion of playing each play for a week or more at a time." [5] The Jewett Players continued until around 1930. [6]
Among the group's productions:
Copley Square, named for painter John Singleton Copley, is a public square in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, bounded by Boylston Street, Clarendon Street, St. James Avenue, and Dartmouth Street. Prior to 1883 it was known as Art Square due to its many cultural institutions, some of which remain today. It was proposed as a Boston Landmark.
Alan Crosland was an American stage actor and film director. He is noted for having directed the first feature film using spoken dialogue, The Jazz Singer (1927).
Huntington Avenue is a thoroughfare in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, beginning at Copley Square, and continuing west through the Back Bay, Fenway, Longwood, and Mission Hill neighborhoods. Huntington Avenue is signed as Route 9. A section of Huntington Avenue has been officially designated the Avenue of the Arts by the city of Boston.
Gregan McMahon, CBE was an Australian actor and theatrical director and producer.
Thomas Meighan was an American actor of silent films and early talkies. He played several leading-man roles opposite popular actresses of the day, including Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. At one point he commanded $10,000 per week.
Michael Bradshaw was an English actor.
The Boston Museum (1841–1903), also called the Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts, was a theatre, wax museum, natural history museum, zoo, and art museum in 19th-century Boston, Massachusetts. Moses Kimball established the enterprise in 1841.
Philip Asheton Tonge was an English actor. Born into a theatrical family, he was a child actor, making his stage debut at the age of five. Among the stars with whom he performed while he was a boy were Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Ellen Terry and Johnston Forbes-Robertson. His colleagues as child actors included Hermione Gingold, Mary Glynne, Esmé Wynne-Tyson and Noël Coward.
Fighting Odds is a 1917 American silent drama film produced and distributed by Goldwyn Pictures and starring stage beauty Maxine Elliott. The film is based on the play Under Sentence by Irvin S. Cobb and Roi Cooper Megrue. The picture was amongst Goldwyn's first productions as an independent producer. It was directed by veteran Allan Dwan and is a surviving film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Gosfilmofond in Russia.
The Park Theatre (est.1879) was a playhouse in Boston, Massachusetts, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It later became the State cinema. Located on Washington Street, near Boylston Street, the building existed until 1990.
The Park Square Theatre was a theatre in Park Square in Boston, Massachusetts, designed by architect Clarence Blackall. It opened January 19, 1914, as the Cort Theatre, named for impresario John Cort. It was his first theatrical venue in Boston.
The Plymouth Theatre (1911–1957) of Boston, Massachusetts, was located on Stuart Street in today's Boston Theater District. Architect Clarence Blackall designed the building for Liebler & Co. Performers included Henry Jewett, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, 8-year-old Sammy Davis, Jr., and Bette Davis. In October 1911, the touring Abbey Theatre presented Synge's Playboy of the Western World at the Plymouth; in the audience were W. B. Yeats, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The Fenway Theatre (1915–1972) of Boston, Massachusetts, was a cinema and concert hall in the Back Bay, located at no.136 Massachusetts Avenue at Boylston Street. Architect Thomas W. Lamb designed the building; its interior was "marble and velvet." The auditorium sat 1,600. In the early 1970s Aerosmith used the theatre for rehearsals. In 1972 the Berklee College of Music bought the property; the remodeled Berklee Performance Center opened in 1976 and continues today.
The St. James Theatre (1912–1929) of Boston, Massachusetts, was a playhouse and cinema in the Back Bay in the 1910s and 1920s. It occupied the former Chickering Hall on Huntington Avenue near Massachusetts Avenue, adjacent to Horticultural Hall. For some years Loew's theatre chain oversaw the St. James. In 1929 the theatre "became part of the Publix (Paramount) chain, and was renamed the Uptown."
Lillian Lawrence was an American theatre and silent film actress. Her daughter Ethel Grey Terry was also an actress.
Eric Bagot Maturin was a British actor whose acting career began in 1905 and whose first film appearance was in 1919 during the era of silent films.
Vera Michelena was an American actress, contralto prima donna and dancer who appeared in light opera, musical comedy, vaudeville and silent film. She was perhaps best remembered for her starring roles in the musicals The Princess Chic, Flo Flo and The Waltz Dream, her rendition of the vampire dance in the musical Take It from Me and as a Ziegfeld Follies performer.
Alberta Gallatin was an American stage and film actress active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During her near forty-year career she acted in support of the likes of Elizabeth Crocker Bowers, James O’Neil, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Thomas W. Keene, Richard Mansfield, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Otis Skinner, Maurice Barrymore, Joseph Adler, E. H. Sothern and James K. Hackett. Gallatin was perhaps best remembered by theatergoers for her varied classical roles, as Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen's domestic tragedy Ghosts and the central character in the Franz Grillparzer tragedy Sappho. Counted among her few film roles was the part of Mrs. MacCrea in the 1914 silent film The Christian, an early 8-reel production based on the novel by Hall Caine.
Percy Thomas Carne Waram was a British-born stage and film actor who spent much of his career in the United States. His career lasted 55 years on the American stage, and he had memorable roles in The Shanghai Gesture, Elizabeth the Queen, Mary of Scotland, Pride and Prejudice, and Anne of the Thousand Days. He starred in the Chicago production of Life With Father for three years, setting box office and attendance records, after which he took the production on the road for another 38 weeks. He starred in the Broadway production of The Late George Apley for a year, and then spent another 80 weeks with the show's national tour.
Gwendolyn Pates, also billed as Gwendoline Pates, was an American actress in silent films and on stage.
