But it's the pictures....ah, the pictures. Photographs taken 80 and 90 years ago make the price of this book a steal. Having only heard about the grande dames of the stage, I was familiar with the names Katherine Cornell and Lynne Fontanne, Helen Hayes and Gertrude Lawrence, always imagining them as ancient crones. I was surprised to see photographs of them when they were major stars of the New York theatre scene, as stunningly beautiful young women. Ona Munson, who played stately madame Belle Watling in 1939's epic film, "Gone With the Wind," was a flirty ingénue in a dainty, lacy dress when she appeared in "No No Nanette" in 1925. There's even a picture of Antoinette Perry, the actress for whom the "Tony Awards," theatre's highest honor, were named. And a page on which photographs of Fanny Brice in the "Ziegfeld Follies" and the woman who played her in "Funny Girl," Barbra Streisand, both at the Winter Garden Theatre, are placed side-by-side, is priceless.
Young men who later went on to great success are represented here, too, including Marlon Brando in his Broadway debut as a teenager in "I Remember Mama" in 1944, and Leslie Howard, an English actor whom I remembered only as a pale young man in "Gone With the Wind," who was, in fact, one of the mainstays of Broadway in the 1930's. Early pictures of Humphrey Bogart, Paul Newman and Robert Redford cause the heart to flutter when encountering them in their stage debuts, as well.
Botto also tracks the various names with which the theatres have been endowed, and answers some questions I've always wondered about: while I know who Neil Simon is (his eponymous theatre was originally the Alvin Theatre, and was only named after him in 1983); but who was Martin Beck? A vaudeville mogul, it turns out, who built his theatre in 1924; and who was Mark Hellinger? According to Botto, "an esteemed columnist." In fact, I attended a production of "My Fair Lady" at the Hellinger in the early 1960's, and still remember the elegance of this magnificent grande dame of a theatre 40 years later.
Botto plays a subtle running joke through the book while noting the designers of these theatres. In the 1910's and 20's, an architect named Herbert Krapp had built so many theatres at such a pace that by 1924 Botto calls him "the very busy Herbert Krapp"; by 1925, when he built the Biltmore theatre, he's called, "the busiest architect in town"; and finally is credited in the book as "an architect who seemed to turn out a theatre every week in the Roaring Twenties." One minor quibble: Botto places the magnificent musical "West Side Story" in the "rumble-ridden Bronx." If you live in New York, you know that the play takes place in the West side of Manhattan. a neighborhood long known as "Hell's Kitchen." In fact a key scene, the rumble, is set under Manhattan's now-defunct West Side Highway. (Although there may have been rumbles in the Bronx, there is no West side in the Bronx.)
Nevertheless, the book is one to cherish for anyone who is interested in the history of New York City's legitimate theatres, and for those of us who have been privileged to visit many of these houses and attend many of the plays and musicals listed here, it serves as a scrapbook of memories of good times gone by.
February 17, 2008
This article was originally published on http://www.amazon.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment