PLAYHOUSE NOMENCLATURE.
The Names of Some Recently Christened Theaters Indicate a Painful Lack of Propriety and Variety.
The announcement that David Belasco will manage the new theater to be built in Forty-Fourth Street, and will call it the Stuyvesant, adds another appropriately named house to the group that has been growing up in New York of late years. The Hudson, the New Amsterdam, the Knickerbocker, the Manhattan and the Astor are all indigenous of the soil and are to be commended.
Liberty is not bad, although, to be sure, it would be more happily situated in Philadelphia than in Gotham. The Quaker City is now to make a needed departure from its run on street nomenclature by calling the house now building the William Penn Theater.
Speaking of Pennsylvania, it was too bad Pittsburgh sank the historic Duquesne in “Belasco”—all right in itself, but the name Belasco loses its force as a distinctive title when duplicated too many times. Three cities now have theaters of this title—New York, Washington, and Pittsburgh.
And Shuberts, more’s the pity, will soon be as thick as huckleberries in August. The house that should be known by this name is the Princess in New York, which would thereby be exchanging a cognomen perfectly inappropriate in America, for one that would much better stand over one house in New York than over twenty elsewhere.
It is a thousand pities that the name Booth was suffered to vanish from over a theater’s doors when Booth’s, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, was pulled down. All that remains of it is a bust of Shakespeare in the side wall of McCreery’s, on the latter thoroughfare.
It is odd, too, when you come to think of it, that we have no Shakespeare Theater. It is a pity Charles Frohman did not use this—or at any rate Globe (the name of the house Shakespeare managed) rather than Empire. This might better have been Republic, which, when the Empire was opened in 1893, was still in the market, not having been affixed to the theater which Hammerstein built later and very soon passed over to Belasco. Another absolutely footless theater name in the United States is Savoy. Garrick is good, and Criterion not bad.
WHAT MAKES A PLAY?
English Managers Tell of the Methods They Employ In Estimating Value of Manuscripts.