Quo Vadis, sometimes given as Quo Vadis?, is a play in six acts by Stanislaus Stange that is based on Henryk Sienkiewicz's 19th century novel of the same name. It should not be confused with the play of the same name by Jeannette Leonard Gilder which also was staged on Broadway in the year 1900 during the same period of time. [1]
Quo Vadis premiered in Chicago at McVicker's Theater's on December 12, 1899. [2] [3]
The play's New York premiere took place at Broadway's New York Theatre on April 9, 1900. This production was directed by Max Freeman and produced by F. C. Whitney. The cast included William V. Ranous as Vitellius, Joseph Haworth as Vincius, Arthur Forrest as Petronius, Maude Fealy as Eunice, Margaret Fealy as Pomponia, and Lucia Moore as Paulina among others. In its production on Broadway, the production utilized incidental music by Julian Edwards. [4] After the original Broadway production closed in July 1900, a revival was mounted just five months later at the Academy of Music where it opened on New Year's Eve 1900 and ran through the month of January 1901.
The United Kingdom premiere of the work took place at the West End's Adelphi Theatre on May 5, 1900; closing on June 1, 1900, after 28 performances. [5]
After the Chicago premier, The Chicago Tribune said the play needed to be revised and shortened. [2]
After the Broadway opening, The New York Times also said the play was too long, but was well acted and well staged. [3] A review of the Broadway production in The Sun said the acting was mostly good, but criticized the rest of the production, including what it called "ineffective music" and "garish" scenery. [6]
Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero is a historical novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Polish.
Charles Francis Coghlan was an Irish actor and playwright popular on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Maude Fealy was an American stage and silent film actress whose career survived into the sound era.
Edith Taliaferro was an American stage and film actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was active on the stage until 1935 and had roles in three silent films. She is best known for portraying the role of Rebecca in the 1910 stage production of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Sag Harbor, sub-titled An Old Story, is an 1899 comedy, the last play written by American author James Herne. It has four acts and three settings, all within Sag Harbor, New York, while the action covers a two-year time span. The play is a rural comedy, with two brothers competing for the same girl, and an older widower wooing a shy spinster. The play avoids melodrama, emphasising the realistic nature of its characters, though as one critic pointed out they occasionally do unreal things.
Robert Wesley Addy was an American actor of stage, television, and film.
Ben-Hur was an 1899 theatrical adaptation of the novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) by Lew Wallace. The story was dramatized by William W. Young and produced by Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger. The stage production was notable for its elaborate use of spectacle, including live horses for the famous chariot race. The hippodrama had six acts with incidental music written by American composer Edgar Stillman Kelley. The stage production opened at the Broadway Theater in New York City on November 29, 1899, and became a hit Broadway show. Traveling versions of the production, including a national tour that ran for twenty-one years, played in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. By the end of its run in April 1920, the play had been seen by more than twenty million people and earned over $10 million at the box office. There have been other stage adaptations of Wallace's novel, as well as several motion picture versions.
Virginia Earle was an American stage actress remembered for her work in light operas, Edwardian musical comedies and vaudeville over the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century.
Jean-Charles Nouguès was a French composer of operas.
Harold Robertson Heaton was a newspaper artist whose work focused on cartoons. His prodigious body of work contributed to the development of political cartoons. He also illustrated books and produced sketches and paintings. He left newspaper work in 1899 to begin acting on the stage, and later wrote plays as well. He returned to cartooning for six years beginning in 1908, but continued acting while doing so. He appeared in many Broadway productions through 1932. A brief retrospective on his employment with the Chicago Tribune, from October 1942, mentioned his obituary had been printed "a few years ago".
Stanislaus Stange (1862–1917) was a playwright, librettist and lyricist who created many Broadway shows in the fin-de-siecle era and early 20th century. After minor success as an actor, Stange made his career as a writer in the musical theatre, moving towards more varied theatrical work before his death.
Kirke La Shelle was an American journalist, playwright and theatrical producer. He was known for his association with such successful productions as The Wizard of the Nile, The Princess Chic, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, Arizona, The Earl of Pawtucket, The Virginian, The Education of Mr. Pipp and The Heir to the Hoorah. La Shelle's career as a playwright and producer was relatively brief due to an illness that led to his demise at the age of forty-two.
Kolb and Dill was the stage name of the vaudeville team founded by Clarence Kolb and Max Dill.
Max Freeman was a German actor, theater director, theater manager, playwright, and producer who was primarily active in the United States. After beginning his career in his native city of Berlin in 1868, Freeman eventually moved to the United States in 1871 where he began his career in America as the theatre manager for the Germania Theatre in New York City. He had a lengthy stage career as an actor in America from 1873 until his death in 1912. Known as the "godfather of comic opera", he particularly excelled in performances in roles from light operas and musical comedies, and was also responsible for directing and producing works from this genre on Broadway. He also directed and played parts in straight plays as well. His adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's Orfée aux enfers was performed for the grand opening of Broadway's Bijou Theatre in 1883, and his original musical play Claudius Nero, based on Ernest Erkstein's novel Nero, premiered at Niblo's Garden in 1890.
Roselle Knott, was a Canadian actress.
The Garden of Allah is a play written by Robert Hichens and Mary Anderson. It was based on Hichens 1904 novel of the same name. It consists of four acts and an epilogue, with a medium-sized speaking cast and slow pacing. The play is concerned with the romance between a wealthy young Englishwoman and a half-Russian, half-English man of mysterious background. The settings are various locales in French Algeria and French Tunis around 1900, particularly the oasis town of Beni-Mora, a fictional name for Biskra. The title stems from an Arabic saying that the desert is the Garden of Allah.
Ernest Albert, born Ernest Albert Brown, was an American painter, illustrator, muralist, and scenic designer. He was a prolific scenic designer, first in St. Louis and Chicago and then on Broadway. He is considered a major American landscape painter and was elected the first president of the Allied Artists of America in 1919.
William D. Corbett, known professionally as 'Will' Corbett, was an early American silent film and stage actor, who appeared in over a dozen silent movies from 1911 to 1929. He is best remembered by film historians and enthusiasts for his portrayal of 'Uncle Sam' in the 1920 political drama film, Uncle Sam of Freedom Ridge, directed by George Beranger.
Marie Pavey, also known as E. Marie Pavey, was an American stage actress and vaudeville performer who had an active career in the United States during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Trained as an actress in Chicago, she began her career in that city in 1900. In her early career she toured widely in vaudeville as a stage partner to Bert Coote.
Paul Armstrong was an American playwright, whose melodramas provided thrills and comedy to audiences in the first fifteen years of the 20th century. Originally a steamship captain, he went into journalism, became a press agent, then a full time playwright. His period of greatest success was from 1907 through 1911, when his four-act melodramas Salomy Jane (1907), Via Wireless (1908), Going Some (1909), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1909), The Deep Purple (1910), and The Greyhound (1911), had long runs on Broadway and in touring companies. Many of his plays were adapted for silent films between 1914 and 1928.