Interior of Tripler Hall, 1850. In 1854 it burned down and was replaced by The New York Theatre, which was renamed The Winter Garden Theatre by the impresarioDion Boucicault after extensive remodeling in 1859.
The first theatre in New York City to bear the name The Winter Garden Theatre had a brief but important seventeen-year history (beginning in 1850) as one of New York's premier showcases for a wide range of theatrical fare, from variety shows to extravagant productions of the works of Shakespeare. Initially known as Tripler's Hall or Metropolitan Hall, it burned down in 1854 and was rebuilt as The New York Theatre. It rose from the ashes under different managers, bearing various names, to become known as one of the most important theatres in New York history.[1] It nearly burned again in November 1864, in plot hatched by Confederate sympathsizers, and burned to the ground a second time in 1867.
One of the most significant and politically influential productions in American theatre history took place at The Winter Garden Theatre on November 25, 1864. Junius Brutus Booth Jr., Edwin Booth, and John Wilkes Booth, three sons of Junius Brutus Booth, one of America's great tragedians, staged a benefit performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to raise funds to commission a statue of the playwright for Central Park.[3] Four months later John Wilkes Booth fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln in Washington D.C., while shouting the historic words of Brutus in ancient Rome.[4] Throughout its seventeen-year history, The Winter Garden Theatre played a significant role in American theatre.
Groundbreaking
The so-called "Jenny Lind Hall", detail from a poster of 1850 before the concert hall was finished.
The theatre was originally planned in 1850 for the first engagement of Jenny Lind, an internationally known singer known as the "Swedish Nightingale". Located at 667 Broadway, New York, across from Bond Street south of Amity Street (today's West Third Street),[6] the new theatre was to be "one of the largest musical halls in the world," boasting one of the largest stages in New York City.[7]
On Mercer Street. The theatre burned to the ground on January 8, 1854 and was replaced by a new theatre the same year.
Delays in construction resulted in the theatre not being ready for Lind's first show. She arrived to great fanfare and a reported gathering of over 40,000 (all arranged by her manager, P. T. Barnum), and opened at New York City's Castle Garden. The theatre that was to have opened with "the name of Jenny Lind [that] would attract attention all over the country",[8] was later opened as Tripler Hall. It had productions of numerous minstrel shows, which were fashionable and popular on the American stage.
Tripler Hall also was used for other large gatherings. In December 1850 it was the site of an important ceremonial meeting of the Freemasons of New York City, which was attended by thousands of men. It was described as "the event was regarded and still is regarded [1899] as a landmark in the history of Freemasonry in the history of New York."[9]
Several different managers had control during this period, with each manager naming the theatre as he or she pleased. When the theatre was used for the American Art-Union Prizes Distribution, a report in The Illustrated London News described the interior of Tripler Hall:
Never - not even on the nights of the "Nightingale" - has the capacity of Tripler Hall been more fully booked than the evening appointed for the distribution of the Art Union prizes. The immense floor (30 feet wider than Kester Hall), the aisles, the galleries before the stage, and beside the doors, were crowded to excess."[11]
On May 15, 1855, new management took over, presenting a musical by John and Morris Barnett called Monsieur Jacques. John Lafarge, owner of the famed Lafarge House which adjoined the theatre, assumed management and renamed it as Metropolitan Hall.
Laura Keene
Laura Keene's Variety Theatre, 1856
On December 27, 1855, the actress and manager Laura Keene reopened the theatre as Laura Keene's Varieties with Old Heads and Young Hearts.[12]
Here the leading female impresario of New York produced an eclectic form of entertainment which she would perfect in subsequent productions such as the musical Seven Sisters five years later.
A rare etching of the interior of the theatre at this time depicts a production by Laura Keene in her theatre; From the point of view of the stage, it depicts what is probably the production of a classical text, with two figures in historical costumes standing downstage close to the footlights.[13] This etching, from the actors' point of view, gives a rare glimpse into theatrical production on the American stage in the pre-Civil War era.
Despite the success of the theatre under Laura Keene, the Panic of 1857 bankrupted the theatre, and it was forced to close once again.[14]
The Octoroon, Act IV, 1859. The premiere of this controversial melodrama became the "sensation" of the season. (Compliments of Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent).
During the summer of 1859, the daring actor–playwright–manager Dion Boucicault, called "the most conspicuous English dramatist of the 19th century",[17] tried his hand at management, took over the theatre, and gave the theatre its final name of The Winter Garden Theatre with the opening of his original burlesqueChamooni III on October 19, 1859. The theatre was aptly named The Winter Garden because Boucicault remodeled the theatre extensively, surprisingly cutting the auditorium in half and installing "artificial tropical plants after a Parisian prototype."[18] Boucicault effectively turned the theatre into a "winter garden" in the fall of the year. Among Boucicault's stable of first-rung actors were Joseph Jefferson, Agnes Robertson, and Mrs. John Wood. Boucicault's dramatization of Charles Dickens's Christmas story Cricket on the Hearth was his opening production, starring Jefferson as Caleb Plummer and Robertson as Dot; this immensely popular production eventually toured, as one critic has said, to "every possible playhouse in English-speaking America."[19]
The Octoroon
That winter, on December 5 of 1859, Boucicault premiered one of his most popular - and controversial - melodramas The Octoroon, subtitled "Life in Louisiana", which he had adapted from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Mayne Reid. The Octoroon, dealing with people of mixed white and African heritage, caused nothing short of a sensation, to see on the stage a drama that provoked discussions about race and politics.[20] About this new phenomenon, The New York Times wrote that it had become "the great dramatic sensation of the season":
Everybody talks about the Octoroon, [sic] wonders about the Octoroon, goes to see the Octoroon; and the "Octoroon" thus becomes, in point of fact, the work of the public mind...the public having insisted on rewriting the piece according to its own notions, interprets every word and incident in wholly unexpected lights; and, for aught we know, therefore, the "Octoroon" may prove after all to be a political treatise of great emphasis and significance, very much to the author's amazement.[21]
The newly named Winter Garden Theatre eventually became home to a series of musical extravaganzas and burlesques: Cinderella with music by Charles Koppitz and a text by Charles Dawson Shanley on September 9, 1861, The Wizard's Tempest by Charles Gayler, on June 9, 1862, and King Cotton by Charles Chamberlain on June 21, 1862.
On February 21, 1863, Edwin Booth took on the management of the Winter Garden Theatre (together with his brother-in-law, John Sleeper Clarke) with the intention of shifting the focus from musicals and burlesques to classical dramas. This enterprise included a toga-clad, one-night production of Julius Caesar on the evening of November 25, 1864, Evacuation Day, played by Edwin and his brothers, John Wilkes Booth and Junius Brutus Booth Jr.[3]
In the handbill promoting the production (right), it stated that there would appear, for one night only, "The Three Sons of the Great Booth." The three Booth brothers were then listed, from oldest to youngest, Junius, Edwin, and John, and beneath this, the Latin phrase that left no doubt that the entire production was dedicated to their father, the great tragedian Junius Brutus Booth: Filii Patri Digno Digniores.
As their mother watched on from a box on the aisle, the three Booth brothers reenacted the tragedy of Julius Caesar before an audience in The Winter Garden Theatre that was "packed to the rafters."[24] During the performance the clanging of fire bells could be heard from the streets of New York, as confederate sympathizers during the ongoing American Civil War tried to burn the city to the ground, which included fires set in the Lafarge House, which abutted the rear of The Winter Garden Theatre. About a half-hour into the performance, during the first scene of Act Two, when Brutus was pacing in his orchard, contemplating his pending assassination of Caesar, the clang and clatter of horse-drawn fire engines could be heard from the street outside. It seemed that there was a fire next door in the Lafarge House which threatened to engulf The Winter Garden Theatre. Before panic could consume the audience, Edwin stepped to the footlights to calm the audience.[24]
Julius Caesar and the burning of New York City
The fire at the Lafarge House that almost spread to The Winter Garden Theatre had been set by sympathizers to the cause of the Confederacy with the intention of burning New York to the ground during these, the last months of the Civil War.[25] At the Lafarge House, someone had set fires in the front parlor and had emptied a bottle of phosphorus on the furniture throughout a room on the third floor.[26]
In describing this "diabolical plot to burn the City of New York," which The New York Times called "one of the most fiendish and inhuman acts known in modern times," it was reported under a banner heading:
THE EXCITEMENT AT WINTER GARDEN
On November 26, 1864, confederate rebels set fire to the Lafarge House. The house was located next to the Winter Garden Theatre, and the rebels had the intention of spreading the fire and burning down New York. A woman was arrested at the Metropolitan Hotel after witnesses had seen her leaving each building right before they caught on fire. She was suspected of using phosphorus to help start the fires and was detained. The fire marshal Baker was in charge of investigating how the fires were started, while police tracked down other suspected people. The New York Times said that this rebel attempt was "one of the most fiendish and inhuman acts known in modern times."
When the alarm of fire was given at the Lafarge the excitement became very intense among the closely-packed mass of human beings in [the] Winter Garden Theatre adjoining the Lafarge, and but for the presence of mind of Mr. BOOTH, who addressed them from the stage of the theatre, telling them there was no danger, it is fearful to think what would have been the result. There was only the usual number of policemen and watchmen in attendance, and the panic was such for a few moments that it seemed as if all the audience believed the entire building was in flames, and just ready to fall upon their devoted heads. In addition to what Mr. BOOTH said from the stage, Judge McCLUNN rose in the dress circle, and in a few timely remarks admonished them all to remain quietly in their places, and at the same time tried to show them the danger which would attend a pell-mell rush for the doors, and especially the uselessness of it, inasmuch as the theatre part of the building was known to be on fire. The presence of a squad of policemen soon after so reassured the audience that with a few exceptions, they remained until the close of the performance.[27]
The city was saved, as was The Winter Garden Theatre. The production of Julius Caesar proceeded. The production was the first – and only – time that the three sons of one of America's great tragedians, Junius Brutus Booth, performed together on the same stage. The production raised $3,500 for the building of the statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, which stands there today.[28]
The "Hundred Nights Hamlet"
Edwin Booth as Hamlet at the Winter Garden Theatre, 1864
The following night, on November 26, 1864, Booth played the lead role in what became known as the “100 nights Hamlet",[29] a record which stood for fifty-six years.[30]
The Hamlet of Edwin Booth is well documented in reviews and diaries of those who saw the production. One review, appearing in Harper's shortly after the run of "the hundred nights Hamlet" summarized what Edwin Booth had accomplished during this important portrayal - a production which, perhaps more than any other single production in American stage history, solidified one of the great roles in dramatic history with a single actor. As a critic from the era then wrote: "A really fine actor is as uncommon as a really great dramatic poet. Yet what Garrick was in Richard III or Edmund Kean in Shylock, we are sure Edwin Booth is in Hamlet."[31]
Set design for Edwin Booth's production of Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1, An Apartment in Portia's House, 1867, by Charles Witham.
After that, Booth followed his Hamlet marathon on March 23, 1865, with a series of what he called "Grand Revivals": a series of classical dramas sumptuously produced at the Winter Garden that began with a highly acclaimed production of Othello, with Booth in the title role.[32]
After Lincoln’s assassination, Edwin Booth went int a self-imposed retirement and asked president Andrew Johnson for his brother's body and had him buried at Green Mount Cemetery in 1865. Finally, in February 1866, he returned to the stage and played his acclaimed Richelieu, followed in January 1867 by a spectacular production of Merchant of Venice that was considered one of the finest productions of that play during the 19th century.[33]
Demise
On Saturday, March 23, 1867, a fire broke out under the stage which eventually burned the Winter Garden Theatre to the ground.[34][35]
A fire broke out about 8:40 o'clock on Saturday morning beneath the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre, resulting in the entire destruction of that establishment, and doing considerable damage to the Southern Hotel, formerly known as the Lafarge House. Although the Fire Department was promptly on hand, in an incredibly short space of time the flames had wrapped the entire interior of the Winter Garden in a sheet of fire, and the firemen were unable to work therein owing to the intense heat...By 9 o'clock the flames had reached their limit and the spectacle was one of peculiar grandeur and effect...At 9:15 the roof of theatre fell...The aggregate loss is roughly estimated at $250,000. Both the theatre and the hotel are owned by the Lafarge estate, as also the "stock" scenery and properties of the former...Messrs. EDWIN BOOTH and W. STUART also suffer severe losses. These gentlemen were the joint lessees and managers of the Winter Garden, and their extensive and valuable wardrobes, used in the recent Shakespearean revivals, as well as a large amount of new scenery and properties, were all destroyed by the flames. These articles were valued at $60,000 and uninsured...Mr. Booth is a heavy loser by the total destruction of his private wardrobe and many valuable presents. This wardrobe was considered to be the most extensive and valuable one in the possession of any single actor on this continent.[36]
Included in the wardrobe and also lost was Edwin Booth’s famous Hamlet costume. Rather than rebuild the theatre once again, Booth decided to erect his own theatre twenty blocks uptown on newly fashionable West Twenty-Third Street on the corner of Sixth Avenue, to be called Booth's Theatre.
John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated United States President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland, he was a noted actor who was also a Confederate sympathizer; denouncing President Lincoln, he lamented the then-recent abolition of slavery in the United States.
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (First Folio title: The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar), often abbreviated as Julius Caesar, is a history play and tragedy by William Shakespeare first performed in 1599.
Dionysius Lardner "Dion" Boucicault was an Irish actor and playwright famed for his melodramas. By the later part of the 19th century, Boucicault had become known on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most successful actor-playwright-managers then in the English-speaking theatre. The New York Times hailed him in his obituary as "the most conspicuous English dramatist of the 19th century,"; he and his second wife, Agnes Robertson Boucicault, applied for and received American citizenship in 1873.
Edwin Thomas Booth was an American actor who toured throughout the United States and the major capitals of Europe, performing Shakespearean plays. In 1869, he founded Booth's Theatre in New York. Some theatrical historians consider him the greatest American actor, and the greatest Prince Hamlet, of the 19th century. His achievements are often overshadowed by his relationship with his younger brother, actor John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
Junius Brutus Booth was an English stage actor. He was the father of actor John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. His other children included Edwin Booth, the foremost tragedian of the mid-to-late 19th century, Junius Brutus Booth Jr., an actor and theatre manager, and Asia Booth Clarke, a poet and writer.
Laura Keene was a British stage actress and theatre manager. In her twenty-year career, she became known as the first powerful female manager in New York. She is most famous for being the lead actress in the play Our American Cousin, which was attended by President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington on the evening of his assassination.
John Sleeper Clarke was a 19th-century American comedian and actor.
Agnes Booth, born Marian Agnes Land Rookes, was an Australian-born American actress and in-law of Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Booth, and – arguably the most notable – John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
Prince of Players is a 1955 20th Century Fox biographical film about the 19th century American actor Edwin Booth. The film was directed and produced by Philip Dunne from a screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the book by Eleanor Ruggles. The music score was by Bernard Herrmann and the cinematography by Charles G. Clarke. The film was made in CinemaScope and in DeLuxe Color.
The Booth family was an English American theatrical family of the 19th century. Its most known members were brothers Edwin Booth, one of the leading actors of his day, and John Wilkes Booth, also a fellow actor most remembered for assassinating Abraham Lincoln.
Junius Brutus Booth Jr. was an American actor and theatre manager.
Booth's Theatre was a theatre in New York built by actor Edwin Booth. Located on the southeast corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue, Booth's Theatre opened on February 3, 1869.
Edmund O'Flaherty, also known as William Stuart, was an Irish MP who hurriedly emigrated to the United States in 1854. In New York City he was the business partner of the actor-managers Dion Boucicault and Edwin Booth, and with them leased and managed the Winter Garden Theatre. He managed the New Park Theatre on Broadway from 1874 to 1876.
Piper's Opera House is an historic performing arts venue in Virginia City, Storey County, Nevada in the United States. Piper's served as a training facility in 1897 for heavyweight boxing champion Gentleman Jim Corbett, in preparation for his title bout with Bob Fitzsimmons. The current structure was built by entrepreneur John Piper in 1885 to replace his 1878 opera house that had burned down. The 1878 venue, in turn, had been to replace Piper's 1863 venue which was destroyed by the 1875 Great Fire in Virginia City. Mark Twain spoke from the original Piper's stage in 1866, and again a century later in the third venue, as portrayed by Hal Holbrook in his one-man play Mark Twain Tonight! A lynch mob hung a victim from the first venue's rafters in 1871. American theatrical producer David Belasco was stage manager at the second opera house before moving to New York City. Piper's opera houses played host to Shakespearean thespians such as Edwin Booth. Musical performers Lilly Langtry, Al Jolson and John Philip Sousa once performed here. In 1940, Errol Flynn auctioned off historic Piper memorabilia from the opera house stage, during a live NBC broadcast that coincided with the premiere of Flynn's new movie Virginia City.
Catherine Norton Sinclair (1817–1891) was an actress-manager who worked with such notable actors as Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Booth, and Laura Keene. Her sensational divorce from Edwin Forrest captivated the American public in the mid-1800s.
William Shakespeare is an outdoor bronze sculpture of William Shakespeare by John Quincy Adams Ward, located in Central Park in Manhattan, New York. The statue was created in 1870 and unveiled in Central Park in 1872. Four thousand dollars towards the funding of the statue was raised at a benefit performance of Julius Caesar on November 24, 1864, performed by the sons of Junius Brutus Booth at the Winter Garden Theater.
An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Jacobs-Jenkins reframes Boucicault's play using its original characters and plot, speaking much of Boucicault's dialogue, and critiques its portrayal of race using Brechtian devices. Jacobs-Jenkins considers An Octoroon and his other works Appropriate and Neighbors linked in the exploration of theatre, genre, and how theatre interacts with questions of identity, along with how these questions transform as a part of life. In a 2018 poll by critics from The New York Times, the work was ranked the second-greatest American play of the past 25 years.
Abbey's Park Theatre or Abbey's New Park Theatre was a playhouse at 932 Broadway and 22nd Street in what is now the Flatiron District of Manhattan in New York City. It opened as the New Park Theatre in 1874, and was in use until 1882 when it burned down and was never rebuilt as a theatre.
Jean Haskell Hosmer was an American actress and tragedienne who reached the zenith of her career directly following the American Civil War, and is associated through her career with actor and Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth along his brother Edwin Booth.
Olympic Theatre was the name of five former 19th and early 20th-century theatres on Broadway in Manhattan and in Brooklyn, New York.
References
↑ Mary C. Henderson. The City and the Theatre, (Back Stage Books, New York, 2004) p. 94-96.
↑ Mary C. Henderson. The City and the Theatre, (Back Stage Books, New York, 2004) p. 95.
↑ Eleanor Ruggles. Prince of Players. (New York), p. 282
↑ Poster of Jenny Lind's first engagement in New York. The theatre was named "Jenny Lind Hall", before it was finished. Because of delays, the theatre was not ready for Lind's first performance and was named "Tripler Hall" instead. The complete poster is from the Library of Congress collection, LC-USZ62-1425.
↑ For 1859 map showing location and address, see Perris, William, “Plate 49” Maps of the City of New York, [Third Edition,] Vol. 4. Perris & Browne, New York, 1859, at New York Public Library Digital Gallery(Image ID: 1268339). For a good map of New York theatres of this era, see Mary C. Henderson's The City and the Theatre, (Back Stage Books, New York), p. 82.
↑ Review of Jenny Lind's first performance in New York, for which tickets were auctioned off by P. T. Barnum for as much as a thousand dollars New York Herald, September 9, 1850.
↑ Ross, Peter. A Standard History of Freemasonry in New York. (The Lewis Publishing Company, New York) 1899.
↑ The Mercer Arts Center History, compiled by Joseph Devorkin, 2004.
↑ Vernanne Bryan. Laura Keene: A British Actress on the American Stage, 1826-1873 (McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997).
↑ Mary C. Henderson. The City and the Theatre, (Back Stage Books, New York, 2004) p. 94.
↑ McClintock, Inez and Marshall, Toys in America, Public Affairs Press, Washington, D. C., 1961, p. 151
↑ An original lithograph showing a "scene from 'The Octoroon', Adelphi Theatre, London, 1861." The lithograph is entitled, "Octoroon Quadrille" and depicts, "the slave sale". According to records: "It is possibly a title page for a piece of music" for The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault; compliments of Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent
↑ The record of Booth's 100 consecutive performances of Hamlet lasted until John Barrymore played exactly 101 Hamlets in 1920.
↑ George William Curtis. "Editor's Easy Chair." Harper's, April, 1865, quoted in Charles H. Shattuck. The Hamlet of Edwin Booth. (University of Illinois Press; Chicago, 1969. p. 60.
Brown, T. Allston. A History of the New York Stage. Vol. 3, Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1903, pp.446–449.
Klein, Christopher. Inside John Wilkes Booth’s Famous Family. HISTORY, A&E Television Networks, 2009.
Osborne, John. In New York City, the Winter Garden Theater Is Destroyed by Fire. House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, 1867.
Rutigliano, Olivia. Fire! A brief history of theater fires in New York City—and the regulations that helped people escape them. Roundtable, Lapham’s Quarterly, 2019.
The New York Times. The Rebel Plot, Attempt to Burn the City, The Lost Museum Archive, 1864.
Willis, Richard A. Curtain down on Theatre Fires, Theatre Survey, vol. 13, no. 2, 1972, pp.60–73.
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