XII
THE “OLD COMEDIES”
XII
THE “OLD COMEDIES”
I
It was in 1861 that Wallack’s Theater moved uptown from Broadway and Broome Street to Broadway and 13th Street and that the management passed from the hand of James W. Wallack to that of his son, Lester Wallack. In 1882 Wallack’s Theater made another migration, from Broadway and 13th Street to Broadway and 30th Street; and in this third and final home the company failed to find itself as attractive as it had been when it was lower downtown. Lester Wallack had to relinquish its control; and he was glad to accept as a provision for his declining years the proceeds of an all-star performance of ‘Hamlet’ given for his benefit with Edwin Booth as Hamlet and with Joseph Jefferson as the First Gravedigger.
It was in 1879 while the company was still in its second home, at Broadway and 13th Street, that Lester Wallack made a remark to me which helped to explain why his enterprize came to grief not long after it was transplanted to Broadway and 30th Street. He declared rather plaintively that the management of a theater in New York was in 1879 far more difficult than it had been in his father’s time. “We used to bring out the latest London success,” he told me, “and to revive the Old Comedies, and with a play now and then from Dion [Boucicault] or from John [Brougham], we got through the season very well. But I don’t really know now what people want.”
It was because he did not know what the people of New York wanted that he had to give up the management of his theater and to accept a benefit performance arranged for him by his friendly rivals, Augustin Daly and A. M. Palmer. Altho he had been born in New York Lester Wallack was always proud to consider himself an Englishman. So it was that he remained an alien in the city of his birth, unresponsive to the shifting currents of American life and unaware that the playgoers of New York were slowly surrendering their former habit of colonial dependence upon London. Wallack was so insistently English that he never found himself at home in an American part in an American play; and perhaps he may have felt that he was not really qualified to pass on the merits of a drama dealing with the life of this country. Brougham and Boucicault, Irishmen both, had each of them a far better understanding of American likes and dislikes than Wallack had, altho such an understanding is, of course, absolutely necessary to the manager of a New York theater.
His more energetic rivals in management, Daly and Palmer, often outbid him for the acquisition of the “latest London success,” and they also made direct arrangements to acquire the latest Paris success, whereas Wallack waited until this French piece had been transmogrified into a British piece, almost as foreign to the traditions of the American people as the French original had been. In time Dion and John ceased to supply him with occasional new plays. So it was that he was reduced to the third of his three sources of supply, the Old Comedies. In so doing he was for a while secure from rivalry, altho Daly was soon to become a vigorous and dangerous competitor in this field, which Wallack had long thought to be his exclusive property.