All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (6 page)

This of course was the Barrymore Hamlet that the critics saw, and they let loose with near-unanimous praise on the highest level. John Corbin sent another valentine, recalling John’s “exotic beauty” bringing “a thrill of admiration that was half pain” in Tolstoy’s
Redemption
(1918) and
The Jest,
and seeing now a “slender figure, with its clean limbs, broad shoulders and massive head.” Heywood Broun of the
New York Tribune
declared John “the most interesting, intelligent, and exciting Hamlet in this generation,” and Kenneth Macgowan called John “truly magnificent.” Even the support was thought excellent, with Blanche Yurka as the Queen (though she was John’s junior by seven years), Tyrone Power (father of the movie actor) as Claudius, and an unusually sensual Ophelia from Rosalind Fuller.

Corbin did think the set design “trivial and grotesque”: a great flight of stairs extending from wing to wing, with a curtailed playing area downstage and an arch at the back. As with the Hopkins-Jones
Macbeth
for Lionel, this was modern thinking, disturbingly ahead of its day on The Street, though it did allow for the novelty of continuous playing through each of Hopkins’ three subdivisions of the text. (His intermissions occurred after the first Players’ scene and the murder of Polonius.) We forget now how fitfully Shakespeare played in the age when a change of scene often meant an empty wait while the stagehands struck and reset—and we should note, too, that while audiences of 1922 did rather know their
Hamlet,
Hopkins’ cuts sought out untraditional options. This
Hamlet
really was a novelty from every standpoint.

So it wasn’t just excellent: it was shocking. After taking it to London, John toured the show at home, making a three-week return to New York in November of 1923 at that cavernous Manhattan Opera House, proving what a phenomenon it was: the John Barrymore Hamlet! For years afterward, people disputed the meaning of that phrase, because it showed that John really was America’s great actor, but it showed also that John himself didn’t care. He walked. He went Hollywood. How valid was Broadway’s cultural self-importance if America’s great actor didn’t need it?

*   *   *

After the Shakespearean revival—and the classics in general—perhaps the most prestigious theatre genre of the 1920s was the chronicle play. It attracted “serious” writers and a “serious” public, and its subjects were if nothing else prominent. True, Percy MacKaye’s
George Washington
(1920) failed to resonate even with that dignified Walter Hampden as the First American, with Martha Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, and Tom Paine along for a look at thirty years’ worth of founding fathers. The problem was MacKaye, always so daintily visionary, so laborious yet so fanciful. A narrator called Quilloquon and two children sang between scenes, and side by side with Hamilton and Paine were such characters as The Comic Mask, The Tragic Mask, and The Presence. A two-week failure,
George Washington
ended the remarkable MacKaye dynasty, for Percy’s father, Steele MacKaye, had been a major figure of the late nineteenth century as playwright, manager, and innovator in theatre design.

There was an
Abraham Lincoln
(1919) that same season, and this one was a big success. It had already been a hit in London, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and was in fact the work of an Englishman, John Drinkwater. Unlike the sprawling
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln
concentrated: the piece began with Lincoln accepting the presidential nomination and ended with the assassination. Again there was a narrator, speaking in verse. Otherwise the play was almost absurdly simple in diction, with no attempt to pastiche the lingo of Lincoln’s day. Heywood Broun thought too much of Lincoln was missing, especially the “crackerbox storyteller.” Broun liked the show but felt that a lively character had been turned into a Woodrow Wilson. Still, that all-important first-night audience was moved and even exhilarated, cheering for, of all people, Robert E. Lee. In the house was Robert B. Stanton, son of Lincoln’s second secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton; Junior had known Lincoln and declared the play true to the man.

George Washington
had revolved around the colorless grandeur of Walter Hampden, but
Abraham Lincoln
had no stars, and the Lincoln, Frank McGlynn, was an unknown in his fifties, much as Frank Bacon had been when
Lightnin’
opened. McGlynn’s playing was as simple and effective as the script, and he certainly looked the part. His was not the last word, however, for there was another Lincoln play the following season. This was the short-lived
A Man Of the People
(1920), by Thomas Dixon, author of the novel and melodrama
The Clansman
(1906), the source of D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
.

But meanwhile, the South was displeased with Drinkwater’s reading of history, particularly his characterization of Robert E. Lee. In an editorial, the
Richmond News-Leader
got righteous about the matter in somewhat racist tones: “A northern city, with a population half of whose ancestors were in Europe in 1860, may throng a theatre to see a false picture of Lincoln, but an Anglo-Saxon South … will never countenance any injustice to the memory of that prince among men [General Lee].”

This referred to the rumor that Drinkwater was contemplating writing a play about Lee: and he did.
Robert E. Lee
(1923) even began its tryout in this same Richmond, the very capital of the Confederacy. Along with Berton Churchill in the lead was Alfred Lunt as one of a quartet of young gentlemen who act as foils to the protagonist throughout the action, devoted to the war years.

Robert E. Lee
closed quickly, as did
Voltaire
(1922) and
Pasteur
(1923), though both starred eminences of the pre-1919 era, respectively Arnold Daly and Henry Miller. In whiskers and glasses, Miller disappeared into the lead role of an unexpectedly all-male ensemble, and there was further innovation when Pasteur, in the middle of a speech, was heckled by doubters in his audience. These were impersonated by plants in the auditorium of the Empire Theatre, anticipating the vivid dramatic coups of the Federal Theatre’s Living Newspapers of the 1930s.

*   *   *

The mystery was a favorite genre, often counting on the mass audience that avoided Shakespeare and chronicle. Rewriting Cora Dick Gantt’s original script, George M. Cohan spoofed the form in
The Tavern
(1920), this one, too, with Arnold Daly. It had all the clichés—the dark and stormy night; the mysterious stranger; the unconscious girl carried in from outside; the gun aimed at the hero, who scoffs that it’s out of bullets (or is he bluffing?)—and it scored a hit. But the public preferred its thrillers straight. John Willard, who had co-authored Theda Bara’s vehicle
The Blue Flame,
wrote
The Cat and the Canary
(1922) around that soon-to-be old standby, the attempt to drive the heroine (Florence Eldridge) insane, to cheat her of a legacy.

A similar plotline ran through Avery Hopwood and Mary Roberts Rinehart’s
The Bat
(1920), drawn from Rinehart’s story “The Circular Staircase.” At 867 performances,
The Bat
was for a few years Broadway’s second-longest-running attraction (after
Lightnin’
), but this is to ignore
The Bat
’s national popularity. In the 1920s, successful plays—generally those running between 100 and 150 performances in New York—could then tour the road for one or two years as well. However,
The Bat
didn’t wait to tour after the Broadway closing, and instead sent out specially organized touring companies—a total of six by the spring of 1922. Further, the piece was a favorite of high-school and amateur groups for two decades.

Yet
The Bat
is actually rather humdrum, short of the eccentric characters that enliven the genre in its later form. Think of Agatha Christie’s
Ten Little Indians
(1944), with its sanctimonious spinster and devious doctor. What holds
The Bat
together is that perennial cartoon relationship of the no-nonsense lady of the manor and her credulous maid. We get the typical isolated house and raging storm right from the start, and within a line or two the maid establishes that all the other servants have run off because of … “it.”

THE LADY OF THE MANOR:
Fiddlesticks!

Suddenly, the mistress veers into nonsense, as the pair consult a Ouija board that spells out B, then A, then T. Returning to no-nonsense mode, the mistress decides to collect some hard news in the evening paper. So of course:

HEADLINE:
POLICE AGAIN BAFFLED BY THE BAT

And we’re good to go. Others in the cast include a Japanese butler; a hired detective; and a romantic couple, the mistress’ niece and the new gardener. One reason why George M. Cohan liked to twit the form was that the serious thrillers depend so much on contrivance, as when the detective blandly defies plausibility with:

THE DETECTIVE:
The architect who built this house was an old friend of mine. We were together in France.… Just an hour or two before a shell got him, he told me he had built a
hidden room
in this house.

Did I mention that a fortune is supposed to be concealed on the site? If only they can locate the blueprints … Wait, what’s that strange rapping noise?

There is at least a fine first-act curtain, when the entire cast is onstage as the telephone rings. This particular outlet connects only with other rooms in the house, so:

THE LADY OF THE MANOR:
But we’re all here!

As the others look suitably nervous, perplexed, or guilty, the mistress picks up the receiver, listens, gasps, and allows an expression of terror to seize her features. And the curtain falls.

And here’s a canny way to launch Act Two: the curtain goes up on
the very next moment
. Then, too, after the bad guy—the detective, as it happens—is outsmarted, the curtain comes down only to rise again on a nineteenth-century device relegated by this age to only the corniest fare, a kind of eleven o’clock pantomime.
The Bat
’s was devoted to May Vokes, an audience favorite as the maid, who was seen poking open a door, looking around in fear, then backing out of sight as the public presumably let out an appreciate chuckle.

*   *   *

As we range through the content of Broadway in the early 1920s—searching, especially, for signs of evolution—we must note the surprising staying power of one manager who would appear to represent the most old-fashioned of theatres, David Belasco. However, this former actor who by the late 1890s had established himself as playwright, manager, and director was in fact as inventive as he was conservative. Though he worked in a variety of forms, by the early 1900s he was emphasizing melodrama. Some may call it damning that two of Belasco’s offerings turned so easily into Puccini operas; and his
The Darling of the Gods
(1902) is
Tosca
in Japan. Then, too, there is Belasco the fraudulent “realist,” rationalizing these melodramas with crudely naturalistic decor. This only stresses the humbug, by looking real in an unreal context. And what of Belasco the starmaker? Isn’t the ridiculous Svengali of
Twentieth Century
(1932) inspired in part by Belasco?

Even so, all this ignores Belasco’s ability to organize acting ensembles for his shows even while centering those precious stars of his, such as Mrs. Leslie Carter, Blanche Bates, and David Warfield. Other directors treated the extras as if they were bric-à-brac; Belasco individualized them. (No wonder he was called in to unify the sprawling
Aphrodite
.) Further, Belasco rehearsed more meticulously than other directors, searching (and rewriting) the text for characterological honesty in a shockingly modern way. History’s verdict is that Belasco was a gifted but antique show-off. Yet critics of his first nights saw it differently: Belasco put on good shows.

The difference in perception lies, obviously, in the ephemeral nature of performance. All that survives of Belasco today is the unimpressive scripts. Of Belasco’s collaboration with writer George Scarborough,
The Son-Daughter
(1919), the
Evening Sun
observed “a paste jewel put into a handsome gold setting.” Too often, the play wasn’t the thing: Belasco’s execution of it was.
The Son-Daughter
set forth the latest Belasco discovery, Lenore Ulric, as a young woman of New York’s Chinatown who avenges her father’s murder and an attempt on her fiancé’s life by agreeing to give herself to the bad guy. She despatches him instead in an elaborate murder scene. It’s more
Tosca
. There was also the customary Belasco pageantry, in a set-piece wedding in The Chamber of the Smiling Joss.

Ulric is a “son-daughter” because she loves like a woman, with filial respect, but counters outrages with rough justice, like a man. More conventionally, Ulric went on to Belasco’s French backstager
Kiki
(1921), as a chorus girl on the rise, thence to Belasco’s production of a Hungarian sex comedy,
The Harem
(1924). Returning to the unconventional, Ulric got into blackface for one of Belasco’s biggest successes,
Lulu Belle
(1926), written by Edward Sheldon and his nephew Charles MacArthur.
5

Lulu Belle
is
Carmen,
set in Manhattan and Paris and anticipating more than slightly what Oscar Hammerstein did in
Carmen Jones
(1943). Where
The Son-Daughter
’s dramatis personae are entirely Chinese,
Lulu Belle
’s are black but for the local cop and, eventually, the heroine’s French admirer. All the principals have parallels in Bizet’s opera: Don José becomes George (Henry Hull), Escamillo a boxer named Butch Cooper (John Harrington), which precisely looks forward to Hammerstein’s Husky Miller, and Micaëla is altered from village sweetheart to moralizing Uncle Gustus (Lawrence Eddinger). Even Zuniga is present, as a doctor whom Lulu Belle knocks unconscious with a hypodermic before rolling him.