Charles Frohman: Manager and ManMarcosson, Isaac Frederick
General
Charles Frohman: Manager and Man
Marcosson, Isaac Frederick
Frohman, Charles, 1860-1915; Theater -- United States
Frohman loved to present farce. He enjoyed this type of play himself
because it appealed to his immense sense of humor. He delighted in
rehearsing the many complications and entanglements which arise in such
plays. The enthusiasm with which French audiences greeted their native
plays often misled him. He felt that American theater-goers would be
equally uproarious. But often they failed him.
The same thing frequently happened with English plays. He would be swept
off his feet by a British production; he was at once sure that it would
be a success in New York. But New York, more than once, upset this
belief. The reason was that Frohman saw these plays as an Englishman. He
had the cosmopolitan point of view that the average play-goer in America
lacked.
This leads to the interesting subject of "locality" in plays. Frohman
once summed up this whole question:
"As I go back and forth, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, the
audiences on both sides seem more and more like one. Always, of course,
each has his own particular viewpoint, according to the side of the
Atlantic I happen to be on. But often they think the same, each from its
own angle.
"You bring your English play to America. Nobody is at all disturbed by
the mention of Park Lane or Piccadilly Circus. If there is drama in the
play, if in itself it interests and holds the audience, nobody pays any
attention to its locality or localisms.
"But an English audience sitting before an American play hears mention
of West Twenty-third Street or Washington Square, and while it is
wondering just where and what these localities are an important incident
in the dramatic action slips by unnoticed. Not that English audiences
are at all prejudiced against American plays. They take them in the same
general way that Americans take English plays. Each public asks, 'What
have you got?' As soon as it hears that the play is good it is
interested.
"English audiences, for example, were quick to discover the fun in 'The
Dictator' when Mr. Collier acted it in London, though it was full of the
local color of New York, both in the central character and in the
subject. Somehow the type and the speeches seemed to have a sort of
universal humor. I tried it first on Barrie. He marked in the manuscript
the places that he could understand. The piece never went better in
America.
"On the other hand, one reason why 'Brewster's Millions' did not go well
in London was because the severely logical British mind took it all as a
business proposition. The problem was sedately figured out on the theory
that the young man did not spend the inherited millions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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