Kean was in his early thirties, and for a half dozen years, since his first triumphant season at Drury Lane in 1814, New York had been hearing of his magnificent powers. Coleman went to the theater that autumn night suspicious that most of his reputation had been acquired by stage trickery and appeals to the groundlings. He saw a man below the middle stature, and heard a voice thin and grating in its upper tones. “But,” admitted the editor, “he had not finished his soliloquy before our prejudices gave way, and we saw the most complete actor, in our judgment, that ever appeared on our boards.” The eyes were wonderfully expressive and commanding, and in its lower register the voice, said Coleman, “strikes with electric force upon the nerves, and at times chills the very blood.” He declared, in an enthusiasm which recalls Coleridge’s remark that seeing Kean play was like reading Shakespeare by lightning flashes:
We had been induced to suppose that it was only in the more important scenes that we should see Kean’s superiority, and that the lighter passages would, in theatrical phrase, be walked over. Far otherwise; he gave to what has heretofore seemed the most trivial, an interest and effect never by us imagined. The most striking point he made in the whole play (for we cannot notice the many minor beauties he exhibited) was his manner of waking and starting from his couch, with the cry of “Give me a horse—bind up my wounds! Have mercy, heaven! Ha, soft, ’twas but a dream.” ... This, with all that followed, was so admirable; bespeaking a soul, so harrowed up by remorse, so loaded with his guilt, as gave such an awful and impressive lesson to youth, that no one who witnessed it can ever forget it.
When Kean played in “The Merchant of Venice,” according to the Evening Post, the audience hung so breathless upon him that “when it was almost impossible to restrain loud bursts of delight, a kind of general ‘hush!’ was whispered from every part.” Many thought that his best rôle was Sir Giles Overreach, and an anonymous critic in the Evening Post said so. Coleman wrote that the effect he produced as King Lear was indescribable:
Strong emotions even to tears were excited in all parts of the house; nor were they confined to the female part of the audience. It could not be otherwise. Who could remain callous to the appearance of a feeble old monarch, upwards of fourscore years, staggering under decrepitude and overwhelmed with misfortunes, attended with aberration of mind which ends in downright madness? Such a representation was given with perfect fidelity by Mr. Kean. His plaintive tones were heard from the bottom of a broken heart, and completed the picture of human woe. Nature, writhing under the poignancy of her feeling, and finding no utterance in words or tears, found a vent at length for her indescribable sensations in a spontaneous, idiotic laugh. The impression made upon all who were present, will never be forgotten. His dreadful imprecations upon his daughters, his solemn appeals to heaven, struck the soul with awe.
On the final night, Dec. 28, according to the report in the Evening Post, the theater rang with unprecedented plaudits, and at the close the audience rose by common impulse and cheered Kean three times three.
But when Kean returned to New York in 1825 he was greeted with a storm of mixed applause and anger—his first night was the night of the famous “Kean Riot.” In 1821 he had accepted a summer engagement in Boston, and on the third night, finding the theater almost empty because of the heat, refused to go on with the play, thereby giving great offense. Moreover, after his return to England, reports of his flagrant immorality reached America. When the Commercial Advertiser heard of his second tour, it denounced him as a shameless “scoundrel” and “libertine.” Coleman, however, was eager to defend him. The Park Theater opened on Kean’s first night, Nov. 14, at 5:30, and it was at once filled with a crowd of more than 2,000. Seven-eighths, according to the Evening Post, were eager to hear Kean, but about one hundred, many of them Bostonians, made up an organized opposition. The moment the actor stepped forward, the groans, hisses, and shouts of “Off Kean!” mingled with the clapping and the cheers of his friends, were deafening. The play proceeded amid a continued uproar. Some few scenes in the fourth and fifth acts were heard, but the others, including all in which Kean appeared, were given in dumb show. The actor tried repeatedly to address the audience, but in vain. At one point he was struck in the chest by an orange. One interrupter was put out by the infuriated audience, and fights occurred in various parts of the pit, with damage to benches and furniture.
It would be pleasant to say that the Evening Post roundly denounced this disgraceful scene, but it rebuked it only mildly. Fortunately, the outrage was not repeated. Kean issued a mollifying address, the Bostonians went home, and a reaction ensued. As the Evening Post records, every one of his houses was filled to overflowing, and when he took his benefit night on Feb. 25, 1826, upon leaving, his receipts were $1,800 clear.
Compared with that of Kean, the début of Junius Brutus Booth, made in “Richard III” on the night of Oct. 5, 1821, attracted little attention. He came to the city a perfect stranger, and slowly made his way. When Edwin Forrest appeared at the New York Theater, in the Bowery, in the autumn of 1826, the Evening Post pronounced this American-born actor as good as any but the very foremost Englishmen—“irresistibly imposing,” indeed. But the only engagement comparable with Kean’s was that of Macready, who made his bow on Oct. 3, 1826, as Virginius in the well-known tragedy of that name by Knowles. He was greeted so enthusiastically that he was disconcerted, and many thought him no better than their old favorite, Cooper. But on the second night, when he impersonated Macbeth, his genius was perceived. Coleman wrote that he had never seen the rôle embodied so consistently. “There was a unity in his conception of character, which made the development of Macbeth’s feelings and prompting motives ... perfectly intelligible, from his first interview with the weird sisters to the final overthrow of all his hopes, and his desperate conflict with Macduff.”
The New York which Macready visited in 1826 was no longer a city of one playhouse, though when people spoke of “the theatre” they still always meant that on Park Row. The people could now support more than one star and one company at a time. Macready finished his October engagement on the 20th, and was immediately followed by Mr. and Mrs. James K. Hackett, in the first American performance of “The Comedy of Errors.” At the Chatham Theater, Junius Brutus Booth was playing Shakespeare; on the 25th he gave “Othello,” with James Wallack as Iago. Mrs. Gilbert at the New York Theater, a brand-new edifice in the Bowery, seating 3,000 spectators, was presenting “Much Ado About Nothing.” She was succeeded the next month by Forrest in a repertory of plays. The Evening Post that spring had surprised many by stating that the profits of the Chatham Theater the previous season had been $23,000, and the gross receipts $75,000. Of the former sum “The Lady of the Lake” alone, a play with musical numbers interspersed, had yielded $10,000. The newspaper was delighted when the Hacketts received, on their three benefit nights in “The Comedy of Errors,” a total of $3,500. This was actually $1,100 more than the balloonist, Eugene Robertson, took one afternoon that month when he floated from Castle Garden to Elizabeth, N. J., in the presence of a crowd estimated at more than 40,000.
The day when the Evening Post should have a musical editor was as far distant as that when it should give to sports more than a semi-annual paragraph or two upon the races. But Coleman enthusiastically reviewed the first Italian opera offered in the city—a performance of Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” at the New York Theater on Nov. 29, 1825. The fashion of the town turned out to see this Italian troupe, headed by Señor Garcia, on every Tuesday and Saturday during the middle of the winter; paying $2 for box seats and $1 for the pit. “In what language shall we speak of an entertainment so novel in this country?” asked the editor: