Charles Frohman: Manager and ManMarcosson, Isaac Frederick
General
Charles Frohman: Manager and Man
Marcosson, Isaac Frederick
Frohman, Charles, 1860-1915; Theater -- United States
To name the American plays that he produced in London would be to give
almost a complete catalogue of American drama revealed to English eyes.
Curiously enough, at least two plays, "The Lion and the Mouse" and "Paid
in Full," that had made enormous successes in America, failed utterly in
England under his direction. He gave England such typically American
dramas as "The Great Divide," "Brewster's Millions," "Alias Jimmy
Valentine," "Years of Discretion," "A Woman's Way," "On the Quiet," and
"The Dictator."
In addition to Gillette he presented Billie Burke in "Love Watches,"
William Collier in "The Dictator" and "On the Quiet," and Ethel
Barrymore in "Cynthia."
With his presentation of Collier he did one of his characteristic
strokes of enterprise. Marie Tempest was playing at the Comedy in
London. He had always been anxious to try Collier's unctuous American
humor on the British, so the American comedian swapped engagements with
Miss Tempest. She came over to the Criterion in New York to do "The
Freedom of Suzanne," while Collier took her time at the Comedy in "The
Dictator." He scored a great success and remained nearly a year.
* * *
The time was now ripe for the most brilliant of all the Charles Frohman
achievements in England. Had he done nothing else than the Repertory
Theater he would have left for himself an imperishable monument of
artistic endeavor. The extraordinary feature of this undertaking was
that it was left for an American to finance and promote in the very
cradle of the British drama the highest and finest attempt yet made to
encourage that drama. The Repertory Theater would have proclaimed any
manager the open-handed patron of drama for drama's sake.
The National or Repertory Theater idea, which was the antidote for the
long run, the agency for the production of plays that had no sustained
box-office virtue, which took the speculative feature out of production,
had been preached in England for some time. Granville Barker had tried
it at the Court Theater, where the Shaw plays had been produced
originally. The movement lagged; it needed energy and money.
Barrie had been a disciple of the Repertory Theater from the start. He
knew that there was only one man in the world who could make the attempt
in the right way. One day in 1909 he said to Frohman:
"Why don't you establish a Repertory Theater?"
Then he explained in a few words what he had in mind.
Without a moment's hesitation Frohman said, briskly:
"All right, I'll do it."
With these few words he committed himself to an enterprise that cost him
a fortune. But it was an enterprise that revealed, perhaps as nothing in
his career had revealed, the depths of his artistic nature.
With his marvelous grasp of things, Frohman swiftly got at the heart of
the Repertory proposition. When he launched the enterprise at the Duke
of York's he said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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