VintageMeld

“Greenroom Stories: Some True Tales of Stage Folk” reprinted from the Saturday Evening Post, June 3, 1905, by Charles Bloomingdale, Jr. This is the 3rd of 5 parts of uneven length. More on this selection at the bottom of the page.

Part 3: The Player’s the Thing

It was Marcus Mayer again who told me this story of Booth, and it is a refutation of the old adage that “the play’s the thing”–in some cases it’s the player.

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, 1873 color lithograph

“One of Booth’s beliefs,” said Mayer, “was that, when an actor reached that point in his profession where his name was a magnet, his supporting company could be composed of mediocre players. ‘Not,’ said Booth, ’so the talent of the star may shine with greater strength by reason of the contrast with the efforts of his weak company, but because the playgoer comes to see the actor who is thought great and not the play the actor may be illumining.’

“But Booth’s friends tried to persuade him otherwise, and in 1882 they induced him to get together a company of excellence and try results for one season. Booth did so. He was booked to play a two weeks’ engagement at the Broad Street Theatre in Philadelphia. The first week of his engagement brought in eleven thousand dollars to the box-office. Then Booth’s wife died, and he hurried on to New York, his company being advertised to appear in repertoire during the second week in Philadelphia, minus Mr. Booth. The result was that Booth’s company played to three hundred and fifty dollars for the week, giving eight performances–a trifle less than forty-four dollars each performance. And, as Booth afterward said, had it been a barnstorming aggregation instead of a magnificent organization of superb players, it couldn’t have played to less money.”

Previously: Part 2: A Thespian Crazy Quilt
Next: Part 4: The Fly in Booth’s Ointment

I deal in a lot of old magazine back issues and from time to time find myself distracted paging through them. When the material provides a peek into the pop culture of yesteryear plus is old enough itself to be in the public domain, I’m going to do my best to transcribe it here, on the VintageMeld.

I’d been hoping to pull some stories of late 19th and early 20th century stars of the stage into the VintageMeld, so “Greenroom Stories,” published in 1905 by the Saturday Evening Post, seemed a natural selection to serialize. Published in one helping by the Post, I’m going to break it into uneven parts on the VintageMeld, basically cutting it off at each major break in the original article. “Greenroom Stories” gives me a chance to share some images of early 20th century stage stars while Mr. Bloomingdale has the opportunity to entertain once again, over 100 years later.