Box office, U.S.A., 1864–1870: Regional Profiles

1967 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-126
Author(s):  
Eugene K. Bristow ◽  
William R. Reardon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Stock Company ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Central Concentration

Paralleling in time, though not in power, the national expansion and concentration in finance, transportation, and manufacturing, the American theatre entered the 1860's as primarily a stock-company operation, but emerged from the decade as a traveling theatre with a central concentration in New York City. Circuits and booking agencies organized by managers and producers during the seventies and eighties led eventually to the virtual monopoly of the American theatre established by the Theatrical Syndicate in 1896.

Channelling the dead: A conversation on Desdemona with Tina Benko

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
York City ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Character Building

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.

“I'll Show You the Bowery from Chatham Square to the Cooper Institute”: The Entertainment and Ethics of Slumming in the Theatre

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
J. Chris Westgate
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Box Office ◽  
East River ◽  
Brooklyn Bridge

In 1894, Robert Neilson Stephens's playOn the Bowerydebuted at Haverly's Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City, with Steve Brodie, who had won fame for purportedly jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge years earlier, playing himself. Although Brodie's entrance is delayed until the second act, he rather quickly commandeers the plot and leads the rest of the characters through the Bowery and across the Brooklyn Bridge (where he reenacts his jump to enthusiastic audiences) to an East River pier, where he leaps into a burning building to rescue one of those perpetually distressed damsels from the 1890s. Naturally, mainstream newspapers were rather critical ofOn the Bowery’s literary merits. TheNew York Heraldclaimed that the play made “no dramatic pretensions,” and thePhiladelphia Inquireremphasized that it left the critic not “overly impressed with the play as a play.” TheNew York Timestook an especially harsh line. Lamenting the play's “threadbare plot” and “no originality,” and overreliance on Brodie's celebrity, its critic used the production as an opportunity to advance rigid delineations of highbrow and lowbrow, upper class and lower class, and literature and leisure. For what this reviewer described as the “Brodie audience,” the working-class spectators who crowded the gallery and boisterously cheered Brodie's every feat,On the Bowerygratified a yearning for escapism and entertainment.On the Bowerywas not, according to theTimes, geared to what the reviewer described as the “Booth audience,” the middle- and upper-class spectators who normally prized Edwin Booth's Shakespearean performances: “even the management does not take [Brodie] seriously.” If box office success is any measure, however, many from both the Booth and Brodie audiences did takeOn the Boweryseriously. Productions of the play toured for nearly three years, and a number of plays emulatedOn the Boweryduring the next five years. If Bruce McConachie is right that what is relevant is not “whether . . . melodramas were any good” but what audiences were watching and what meanings they were constructing from these plays, then theatre history should takeOn the Boweryseriously too.

Trial by Jury: An Alternative Form of Theatrical Censorship in New York, 1921–1925

1985 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Rod
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Jury System ◽  
Legal Controls ◽  
Public Concerns

Between 1921 and 1925, an experimental form of nongovernmental censorship of the theatre was developed and practiced in New York City. Referred to variously as volunteer juries, citizens' juries, or the play-jury system, the experiment attempted to overcome the shortcomings of existing legal controls on the theatre and to relieve public concerns about the exploitation of sexually suggestive and obscene materials in stage plays. Although the play-jury system was short-lived, a review of its brief career reveals significant accomplishments and can provide a clearer picture of some of the issues confronting the American theatre in the first part of the twentieth century.

East West Players and After: Acting and Activism

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-263
Author(s):  
Christine Mok
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
York City ◽  
Steering Committee ◽  
Ethnic Representation ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Not For Profit

“Where are all the Asian actors in mainstream New York theatre?” What began as a plaintive status update on Facebook launched a full-scale investigation by Asian American actors that culminated in a report titled “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages” and the formation in the fall of 2011 of an advocacy group, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC). AAPAC's findings were disheartening. In the preceding five years, Asian Americans had received only 3 percent of all available roles in not-for-profit theatre and only 1.5 percent of all available roles on Broadway. The percentage of roles filled by African American and Latino actors, in contrast, had increased since 2009. According to the report, “Asian Americans were the only minority group to see their numbers go down from levels set five years ago.” The data AAPAC compiled were both surprising in their concreteness and unsurprising in their bleakness. The Facebook query sparked an active digital conversation that touched a collective sense of discord just below the surface for many Asian American theatre artists, especially actors. Ralph Peña, artistic director of Ma-Yi Theatre Company, invited key Facebook commenters to hold a more formal conversation about access, embodiment, and Asian American representation. This group, many of whom were artists in midcareer, trained at top conservatories, and fostered in New York City's vibrant Asian American theatre community, became the Steering Committee of AAPAC. The members of the Steering Committee channeled their frustration and anger into archive fever by researching and documenting ethnic representation on Broadway and in sixteen of the largest not-for-profit theatres in New York City over a five-year period. In front of an audience of three hundred, members of AAPAC presented their findings at a roundtable at Fordham University on 13 February 2012 that included prominent artistic directors, agents, directors, casting directors, and producers and was moderated by David Henry Hwang. With the report in hand, AAPAC members roused the New York theatre community with a series of town hall–style meetings and urged theatrical production gatekeepers to do, if not better, then, something.

scholarly journals Maritime Migrations: Stewards of the African Grove

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-70
Author(s):  
ANITA GONZALEZ
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Theatre Company

This essay discusses how maritime migrations contribute to movements of ideas across transnational ethnic communities. It focuses on actors from the African Grove, a New York City-based African American theatre company. Actors in this company worked as stewards on transatlantic packet ships where the architecture of the ship supported intercultural exchanges.

The Folies Bergère in New York City in 1911

1983 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-156
Author(s):  
James S. Moy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Going Public ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Night Club

Nineteenth century American theatre managers generally sought to attract mass audiences. Toward this end they usually featured variety, novelty, and the spectacular in attempts to provide a little something for everyone on each evening's program. By the end of the century many managers had begun to alter this policy, choosing instead to offer entertainments which appealed to only a particular segment of the theatre-going public. Accordingly, the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century brought the development of many distinct strains of theatrical entertainment like vaudeville, the circus, the Little Theatre movement, and the beginnings of the night-club industry.

The Exterior of the Park Theatre, New York City, 1798

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-240
Author(s):  
Robert A. Gates
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Water Color ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Early American ◽  
New York Historical Society ◽  
Early American Theatre

Of particular interest to scholars of the early American theatre is a 1798 water-color by Cotton Milbourne entitled “Saint Paul's Chapel, Broadway Between Fulton and Vesey Streets,” in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. Besides depicting the Chapel, the watercolor shows the Park Theatre as it appeared at the time of its opening in 1798. As such, it replaces the unreliable Elkanah Tisdale engraving, found in David Longworth's 1797 American Almanack, New-York Register and City Directory, as the most accurate view of the theatre prior to its reconstruction in 1820.

An Important Armenian MS. with Greek Miniatures

1942 ◽  
Vol 74 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 155-162
Author(s):  
H. Kurdian
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Christian Iconography

In 1941 while in New York City I was fortunate enough to purchase an Armenian MS. which I believe will be of interest to students of Eastern Christian iconography.

Hospitals: N.Y. Appellate Court Denies Move to Privatize Public Hospital

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-203
Author(s):  
Robert Chatham
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Health System ◽  
Municipal Hospital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Benefit ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Benefit Corporation ◽  
The City

The Court of Appeals of New York held, in Council of the City of New York u. Giuliani, slip op. 02634, 1999 WL 179257 (N.Y. Mar. 30, 1999), that New York City may not privatize a public city hospital without state statutory authorization. The court found invalid a sublease of a municipal hospital operated by a public benefit corporation to a private, for-profit entity. The court reasoned that the controlling statute prescribed the operation of a municipal hospital as a government function that must be fulfilled by the public benefit corporation as long as it exists, and nothing short of legislative action could put an end to the corporation's existence.In 1969, the New York State legislature enacted the Health and Hospitals Corporation Act (HHCA), establishing the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) as an attempt to improve the New York City public health system. Thirty years later, on a renewed perception that the public health system was once again lacking, the city administration approved a sublease of Coney Island Hospital from HHC to PHS New York, Inc. (PHS), a private, for-profit entity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document