Category: Theater
-
Renaissance of the Masher and Swashbuckler
As life tamped down in 1921 under Prohibition, people sought to live vicariously through the uninhibited characters of stage and screen, characters this New York Times Magazine article called “the masher and swashbuckler.” “The leaden lid of ‘Thou Shalt Not’ has been hammered down on us so tightly that the explosion of our suppressed healthy animality…
-
Heavens a Hippodrome and All the Actors Airplanes
In 1919, some predicted that the future realm of acting would be not the stage nor the screen, but the sky with airplanes. This is the key to the great Futurist drama. The Sardous, Gus Thomases, Ibsens, Sam Shipmans and Barries of the future will write for a stage whose wings will be Arcturus and…
-
Collective Bargaining for Actors’ Wages
Theater actors in July 1919 wanted higher pay for extra performances. When managers refused, the first strike in American theater history occurred. The old contract had specified eleven national holidays in the year on which the actor was required to play a matinee without additional salary… The actors demanded that they be paid upon a…
-
Puritan Attacks on the Stage and Its Clothes
Revealing clothing was becoming more popular at social events in 1919 — more revealing by the standards of the day, at least. Acceptable clothing in the staid theater, however, changed much more slowly. In a recent play a young actress engaged in a game of “strip poker” in which she “lost” large quantities of her…
-
Troublous Times for the Theatre Business
“In fact, the last week has been about the worst week in the history of the American theater.” That was the worry gripping Broadway in December 1917. What was causing this? “Pro Bono Publico writes to his favorite paper that it is because the plays presented nowadays are so inferior that intelligent people won’t tolerate…
-
Real Theatres in Every National Army Camp
Decades before the USO tours started in 1941, a prototype version called the Liberty Theaters was started in 1917. Marc Klaw, a member of the Commission on Training Camp Activities, was tasked with building 16 such theaters for up to 600,000 soldiers to view. “We will have eight companies on the road all the time,…
-
Shifting Tastes of the Theatergoers
Theater critic John Corbin lamented the rise of the anti-hero on the stage in 1917: “Clever trickery wins delighted applause, while the ancient law, moral as well as statutory, is scorned and derided. The phenomenon is interesting and rather disquieting… Like government, the drama is best when it is of the people, by the people,…
-
The Funniest Things in the Current Plays
What were the most uproarious lines in theatrical productions from a century ago? Reading most of them mostly confirms my belief that people weren’t funny until the late 1970s or early 1980s. But this line from Have a Heart by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse was at least somewhat funny, reminiscent of something Woody Allen might…
SundayMagazine.org 