| The College Widow | |
|---|---|
 Frederick Truesdell and Dorothy Tennant in a scene from the play | |
| Written by | George Ade |
| Date premiered | September 20, 1904 |
| Place premiered | Garden Theatre |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Comedy |
The College Widow is a 1904 American comedic play by George Ade, which was adapted to film multiple times, and also into the popular 1917 musical Leave It to Jane .
In the latter nineteenth [1] and early twentieth centuries, the trope of a "college widow" was spoken of on college campuses, usually meaning an attractive unmarried woman near campus who would date college students, moving on to new students as the years passed. [2] Playwright George Ade first used the trope for a poem he wrote in 1900 (later published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1905), and as the inspiration for a play in 1904.
American football also drives the light plot of the play, loosely based on the football rivalry between DePauw University and Wabash College, which is now known as the Monon Bell rivalry. [3]
After initial warm up performances at the Columbia Theater in Washington, D.C., [4] the play successfully ran at the Garden Theatre on Broadway for 278 performances, from September 20, 1904, through May 13, 1905, and then toured the United States with three different touring companies. [5] [6] The play was produced by Henry Wilson Savage and directed by George Marion. [7] [8] [9] [10] At the end of the run and tour, Ade is said to have earned $2 million from the play. [10]
In 1911, baseball star Ty Cobb starred in a touring production of the play. [11]
The play is a cheerful and lightweight comedy. Set at fictional Atwater College, Jane Witherspoon (played by Dorothy Tennant) is the daughter of the college president, and she works to prevent star football player Billy Bolton (Frederick Truesdell) from attending rival Bingham College. [12]
The play was adapted to a silent film of the same name in 1915, and again in 1927, [13] and in the sound film Maybe It's Love in 1930 and Freshman Love in 1936. [14] The 1932 Marx Brothers' film Horse Feathers also largely appears to be a parody of the 1927 film. [15]
It was also adapted into a successful musical in 1917 under the title Leave It to Jane .
Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago ". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg.
Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921). He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. In the 1910s and 1920s he was considered the United States' greatest living author. Several of his stories were adapted to film.
Guy Reginald Bolton was an Anglo-American playwright and writer of musical comedies. Born in England and educated in France and the US, he trained as an architect but turned to writing. Bolton preferred working in collaboration with others, principally the English writers P. G. Wodehouse and Fred Thompson, with whom he wrote 21 and 14 shows respectively, and the American playwright George Middleton, with whom he wrote ten shows. Among his other collaborators in Britain were George Grossmith Jr., Ian Hay and Weston and Lee. In the US, he worked with George and Ira Gershwin, Kalmar and Ruby and Oscar Hammerstein II.
George Ade was an American writer, syndicated newspaper columnist, and playwright who gained national notoriety at the turn of the 20th century with his "Stories of the Streets and of the Town", a column that used street language and slang to describe daily life in Chicago, and a column of his fables in slang, which were humorous stories that featured vernacular speech and the liberal use of capitalization in his characters' dialog.
Little Johnny Jones is a musical by George M. Cohan. The show introduced Cohan's tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." The "Yankee Doodle" character was inspired by real-life Hall of Fame jockey Tod Sloan.
Cora Witherspoon was an American stage and film character actress whose career spanned nearly half a century. She began in theatre where she remained rooted even after entering motion pictures in the early 1930s. As Witherspoon’s career progressed, she carved a niche playing haughty society women or harridan housewives such as Princess Lina in Ferenc Molnár's 1928 play Olympia, or Agatha Sousè, W.C. Fields’ domineering spouse in the 1940 film The Bank Dick. John Springer and Jack Hamilton, authors of They Had Faces Then: Super Stars, Stars, and Starlets of the 1930s (1974), wrote that "Witherspoon was blessed with a face that might have been drawn by one of those cartoonists who specialize in dealing with the war between men and women."
Elizabeth "Bessie" Toner was a motion picture and theater actress in the early 20th century.
The Golden Age of Indiana Literature is a period between 1880 and 1920, when many nationally and internationally acclaimed literary works were created by natives of the state of Indiana. During this time, many of the United States' most popular authors came from Indiana. Maurice Thompson, George Ade, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Eggleston, Frank McKinney Hubbard, George Barr McCutcheon, Meredith Nicholson, Gene Stratton Porter, Lew Wallace, and James Whitcomb Riley were foremost among the Hoosier authors.
Leave It to Jane is a musical in two acts, with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, based on the 1904 play The College Widow, by George Ade. The story concerns the football rivalry between Atwater College and Bingham College, and satirizes college life in a Midwestern U.S. town. A star halfback, Billy, forsakes his father's alma mater, Bingham, to play at Atwater, to be near the seductive Jane, the daughter of Atwater's president.
The College Widow is a 1927 American silent comedy film produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and directed by Archie Mayo. The film is based on the 1904 Broadway play of the same name by George Ade and was previously adapted to film in 1915 with Ethel Clayton. The 1927 silent film version is a starring vehicle for Dolores Costello.
George Windsor Graves was an English comic actor. Although he could neither sing nor dance, he became a leading comedian in musical comedies, adapting the French and Viennese opéra-bouffe style of light comic relief into a broader comedy popular with English audiences of the period. His comic portrayals did much to ensure the West End success of Véronique (1904) The Little Michus, and The Merry Widow (1907).
Maybe It's Love, also known as Eleven Men and a Girl, is an all-talking 1930 pre-Code musical comedy film produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and directed by William A. Wellman. The movie stars Joan Bennett, Joe E. Brown and James Hall. The film is based on George Ade's 1904 play The College Widow and is a remake of Warner's own 1927 silent version of the story, which starred Dolores Costello. The play had also been filmed in 1915, starring Ethel Clayton.
The College Widow is a 1915 silent film starring Ethel Clayton. It's the first filming of George Ade's 1904 campus comedy play of the same name performed on Broadway that year. The film was made by the Lubin Company in Pennsylvania and is now lost.
Ivy Troutman was an American supporting actress active during the first half of the twentieth century. She acted in at least twenty-one Broadway productions between 1902 and 1945, appearing in such long-running plays as A Pair of Sixes, Baby Mine and The Late George Apley. In the 1920s Troutman, with her husband, portrait painter Waldo Peirce, joined the colony of American expatriates in Paris that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
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.
Douglas Wood was an American actor of stage and screen during the first six decades of the 20th century. During the course of his career, Wood appeared in dozens of Broadway productions, and well over 100 films. Towards the end of his career, he also made several guest appearances on television. Wood died in 1966.
The County Chairman is a 1903 comedy play by George Ade, which was one of his greatest successes. Produced by Henry W. Savage, it played for 222 performances on Broadway at Wallack's Theatre. It was also adapted to film in 1914 and 1935.
George Ade House, also known as Hazelden, is a two-story, fourteen-room, Tudor Revival-style home in Iroquois Township in Newton County, Indiana. Chicago architect Billie Mann designed the frame dwelling, built in 1904, George Ade (1866–1944), a syndicated newspaper columnist, author, humorist, and playwright. Ade named the property Hazelden, after his English grandparents' home.
Dorothy Tennant was an American stage and screen actress, best known for her stage roles in the first decade of the 20th century, and most prominently her starring role in George Ade's 1904 comedic play The College Widow.
Gustav Carl Luders, sometimes written Gustave Luders, was a musician who wrote the music for various songs and shows in the U.S. He was born in Bremen, Germany. He came to the U.S. in 1888 and lived in Milwaukee and then Chicago. He was known for his musical comedies. His The Prince of Pilsen was adapted into the film The Prince of Pilsen.
