The first theater in New York 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. Although the theatre burned to the ground several times, 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.[2]
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Some of the leading actors and theatre managers of the 19th century worked at The Winter Garden Theatre, from Jenny Lind and Laura Keene to Dion Boucicault and Edwin Booth.[3] One of the most significant and politically influential productions in American theater history took place on a single night at The Winter Garden Theatre on November 25, 1864, when three sons of one of America's great tragedians, Junius Brutus Booth, namely Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., Edwin Booth, and John Wilkes Booth staged a benefit performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to raise funds to build a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park; four months later John Wilkes would assassinate Abraham Lincoln in Washington D.C. as he cried out the historic words of Brutus in ancient Rome.[4] Throughout its seventeen-year history, The Winter Garden Theatre played a significant role in the history of the American theater.
The theater was originally planned in 1850 for the first engagement of the famous singer from Sweden, Jenny Lind, known as the "Swedish Nightingale". Located at 624 Broadway, New York, across from Bond Street just south of West Third Street,[6] the new theater was to be "one of the largest musical halls in the world," boasting one of the largest stages in New York.[7]
Delays in construction meant that the theater wasn't finished in time for Miss 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), but without the theater being built for her; instead, Miss Lind opened at New York City's Castle Garden. The theater that was to have opened with "the name of Jenny Lind [that] would attract attention all over the country",[8] instead was later opened and was christened Tripler Hall, thereafter, playing numerous minstrel shows, an entertainment then quite fashionable on the American stage.
There were a few notable exceptions to these theatrical diversions, demonstrating that Tripler Hall had a more legitimate reputation during this period. In December 1850 an important ceremonial meeting was attended by thousands of Freemasons of New York City at Tripler Hall, of which it was written: "the event was regarded and still is regarded [1899] as a landmark in the history of Freemasonry in the history of New York."[9] In February 1852 a memorial service was held at Tripler Hall for the renowned American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, presided over by the noted statesman Daniel Webster, with a eulogies said by Washington Irving, and William Cullen Bryant. That same year William Thackeray concluded a national tour with a lecture at Tripler Hall.[10]
The theater went through several different managers during this period, each manager naming the theater as he or she pleased. After burning down in 1854, the rebuilt theater was at last leased to Jenny Lind for her acclaimed Varieties and renamed the Jenny Lind Hall. During her residence there, she performed her famed music. Nevertheless, the "Swedish Nightingale" had competition when the theater was used for the American Art Union Distribution. The report in The London Illustrated News gives an interesting description of the interior of Tripler Hall:
On May 15, 1855, the theater passed to new management with a musical by John and Morris Barnett called Monsieur Jacques, and was renamed Metropolitan Hall, and managed by John Lafarge, owner of the famed Lafarge House which adjoined the theater to the rear.
On February 22, 1856, the actress and manager Laura Keene reopened the theater as Laura Keene's Variety House with her original "musical extravaganza" featuring music by Thomas Baker. This production was rightly called Varieties, as it featured a range of entertainments, from singers to acrobats.
It was here in her newly renamed theatre that the leading female impresario of New York, Laura Keene, developed her talent for producing an eclectic form of entertainment which she would perfect in subsequent productions such as the musical Seven Sisters five years later.
Two rare etchings of the interior of the theater at this time depict two different productions by Laura Keene in her theater; one picture (right) shows what appears to be a contemporary domestic comedy, with four figures on the stage in various positions (including a man in a pants suit seated in a chair in a comic posture to the right); a second picture (left), from the point of view from the stage, depicts what is probably the production of a classical text, with two figures in historical costumes standing downstage close to the footlights.[13] Together, these two etchings—from both the actors' and the audience's points of view—give a rare glimpse into theatrical production on the American stage in the pre-Civil War era.
Despite the success of the theater under the management of Laura Keene, the Panic of 1857 bankrupted the theater and it was forced to be closed once again.[14]
Later next year, on December 30, 1857, John Burton took over management and renamed the theater simply Burton's New Theatre with the opening of his musical burlesque Columbus El Filibustero!! In 1858, Joseph Jefferson performed in a burlesque of the play Mazeppa by F. A. Brady in which he was drawn across the stage atop a Crandall horse.[15]
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 theater, and gave the theater its final name of The Winter Garden Theatre with the opening of his original burlesque Chamooni III on October 19, 1859. The theatre was aptly named The Winter Garden because Boucicault remodeled the theater extensively, surprisingly cutting the auditorium in half and installing "artificial tropical plants after a Parisian prototype."[18] Boucicault effectively turned the theater 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]
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. About this new phenomenon, The New York Times wrote that it had become "the great dramatic sensation of the season":
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, played by Edwin and his brothers, John Wilkes Booth and Junius Brutus Booth, Jr.
The goal of staging Julius Caesar for just one night was to raise funds for the establishment of a statue of William Shakespeare designed by J. Q. A. Ward in the relatively new Central Park on the northern outskirts (then) of Manhattan.[21] Tickets went for sale for a (then) astounding price of five dollars. Considering the way history was to unfold, it is curious that it was Edwin Booth who played the role of Brutus, assassin of Julius Caesar, and the role of Marc Antony was played by John Wilkes Booth, while "lean and hungry" Cassius was given to the heavier built Junius Brutus Booth, Jr..[22]
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."[23] 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]
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 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.[27]
The following night, on November 26, 1864, Booth played the lead role in what became known as the “100 nights Hamlet" a record which stood for fifty-six years.[28]
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."[29]
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.[30]
Finally, in February 1866, after his return to the stage after a self-imposed retirement due to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by his brother John, Booth 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.[31]
On Wednesday, March 25, 1867, a fire broke out under the stage which eventually burned the Winter Garden Theatre to the ground.[32]
Rather than rebuild the theater once again, Booth decided to erect his own theater twenty blocks uptown on newly fashionable West Twenty-Third Street on the corner of Sixth Avenue, to be called Booth's Theatre.
The site was then occupied by the Grand Central Hotel, and is today the location for the New York University School of Law's Mercer Street Residence.