Weekend, May 21-22, 2022 – A LOVELY AND LONG AWAITED RESTORATION
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, MAY 21-22 2022
THE 681st EDITION
DAVID BELASCO
STEPHEN BLANK
David Belasco
Stephen Blank
I attended a wonderful Met performance of Madame Butterfly on Saturday, and when I read through the Playbill, I was surprised to learn that Puccini’s opera was based on a play written and directed by David Belasco. (I assume for many, dear readers, this is no surprise. It was to me.) The Met’s Program Note says, “In the summer of 1900, in London, Puccini saw the American playwright and director’s Madame Butterfly. He went backstage and begged for the rights. ‘I agreed at once,‘ Belasco wrote, ’[though] it is not possible to discuss business arrangements with an impulsive Italian who has tears in his eyes and both arms around your neck.’”
My thoughts turned again to the American theater, and I decided it would be fun to pursue Mr Belasco, whose name had come up in several pieces I recently wrote. Reader alert: a ghost appears in this article.
David Belasco was one of the outstanding personalities of the American theater. His career spanned the turn and rise of a new century – from the 1880s to his death in 1931 – and fundamental changes in American entertainment, in live theater, in radio and in films. Belasco, like Ziegfeld, was a theater builder and was also deeply involved in creating the modern “Broadway” around what would become Times Square (Longacre Square until 1904). From 1901 to 1920, forty-three theaters were built around Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, including the Belasco’s Stuyvesant Theatre (renamed the Belasco Theatre in 1910). The Belasco Theater is still there – on west 44th between 6th and 7th.
David J. Belasco Wikipedia
Born in San Francisco on July 25, 1853, to Portuguese-Jewish parents who had emigrated from England, Belasco, whose father had been on the London stage, began acting as a child. He acted and worked in theaters in San Francisco and then moved to New York in 1882 to manage the Madison Square Theatre. (At the moment, this was a big deal job – controlling every aspect of a theater.) Seeking greater freedom, he became a freelance playwright and director and by 1895, he was so successful that he was considered America’s most distinguished playwright and producer. During his long creative career, Belasco either wrote, directed, or produced more than 100 Broadway plays, making him the most powerful personality on the New York City theater scene. He also helped establish careers for dozens of notable stage performers, many of whom went on to work in films. (One line I particularly like: “I’m David Belasco! I can make a telegraph pole look good!”)
Belasco’s most important contributions to the theatre came in the field of design and technology. his elaborate, realistic scenic displays using the latest mechanical inventions and experiments in lighting. As Ibsen and Strindberg were gaining prominence as realistic playwrights, Belasco took this naturalism to the extreme, reproducing detailed, operational apartments, a Child’s restaurant, and a laundromat on stage – or sometimes going so far as to buy an actual room and place it on stage, one wall removed, as his set. Belasco wanted his theatre to be like a living room in which audiences could watch actors behaving onstage exactly as they would in real life, down to the barest detail.
His new theater was outfitted with the most advanced stagecraft tools available including extensive lighting rigs, a hydraulics system, and vast wing and fly space. Tiffany Studio designed lighting fixtures throughout the theater. Belasco produced or directed almost 50 productions at the theater over the next two decades; the majority ran for at least a hundred performances
Belasco theater, Wikipedia
Historians are divided over his plays. “His writing, in a time when lbsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov were introducing realism, “one notes, “remained filled with sensational melodrama or maudlin sentiment. His plays have virtually no lasting value.” Another says, “As an author, Belasco was prone to use the stock format he had learned as an actor in San Francisco. The Hero, Villain, and Damsel in Distress were the characters of importance and any ‘scandalous’ situations which might arise in the telling of their story were always resolved with the highest of proper Victorian morals intact and in the melodrama of the day, there was always a little scandal. In all things, ’virtue’ must triumph.” A reviewer complained of seeing “the same sugary sentiment, the same hollow pathos, the same forced style…. “
One of Belasco’s most successful plays, https://www.wikiwand.com/en/David_Belasco
Others praise his work: “What Mr. Belasco has done has been to write pieces for the play-house, not criticisms of life . . . he has bent his mind to devise them with all possible air of probability and with all possible fidelity of pictorial setting. Especially in the latter respect he has succeeded as no other man of our time has.” A more serious academic examination gives Belasco credit for “helping to refashion melodrama” by strengthening the role of women. He “redefined the traditional gender roles, so that the formerly innocent and ignorant ingenue gains strength and autonomy and, above all, a sexual identity of her own.” A recent biography says that the content of the plays Belasco produced mattered less to him than the quality of their presentation. And in any case, audiences loved it, and his shows ran for hundreds of performances. Many of his plays were transformed into films in the early era of the silents.
Belasco theater, Wikipedia Belasco is said to watch plays and rehearsals from the balcony.
His last two decades saw his influence decline, eclipsed by the rise of a new generation of American playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill, and a new kind of theater. But Belasco had brought a fresh realism to theater production and was the most successful man of the theater in turn-of-the-century America where spectacular and emotionally wrenching melodramas were in vogue.
Personally, Belasco seems to have been rather weird. He dressed in a black suit and collar like a priest – and was known as the “Bishop of Broadway.” It is said that he was an egomaniac who insisted on total obedience to his direction. On the other hand, in an era when productions were hurriedly patched together, Belasco took time to perfect his work; even his most severe critics admit a “tidiness” not often found on the American stage. He excelled in creating a mood and tension in his crowd and mob scenes. Moreover, whatever was seen on stage was Belasco and the other artists were the instruments of his will.
He was married just once, to Cecilia Loverich from 1873 until she died in 1925. They had two daughters, but none lived in the limelight.
Cecilia Loverich Belasco, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41403659/cecilia-belasco
In an era of palatial homes, Belasco lived above the store – although grandly. Belasco added a ten-room duplex apartment to the Belasco theater in 1910 – with a private elevator, and a living room with a 30-foot ceiling. The duplex contained eccentric items including a collection of ancient pieces of glass; a room containing Napoleon memorabilia, such as a strand of Napoleon’s hair; and a bedroom designed with Japanese furnishings. Belasco had a collection of erotica and medieval art in a hidden Gothic-style room. Scattered across the duplex were banners, rugs, books, and what one biographer called “a vast, confusing medley of collectors’ treasures”.
Unlike Ziegfeld, there’s little memory of scandal. Belasco liked women and was associated with many glamorous actresses.
Https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/david-belasco.jpg
It is said that “the Bishop…. certainly didn’t act the part in private,” that he was a serial seducer: “There are many lurid tales of the gothic canopied bed and the chamber that adjoined his office.” He is said to have had peculiar sexual tastes. Wearing his priestly garb, he would bring the leading lady to his apartment and usher her into a confessional in the front hallway. For each sin confessed, the actress would remove an article of clothing. Belasco may have invented the “casting couch” (Belasco’s “original casting couch” is now located at Ten Chimneys, the home of Broadway actors Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt at Genesee Depot in Wisconsin). But if so, the lurid tales remain fairly well hidden, and Belasco avoided the newspaper tumult generated by the indiscretions of peers Flo Zeigfeld and others.
But there must be a ghost. The ghost of impresario David Belasco has long been said to haunt the theater he built on West 44th Street, dressed in the same type of clothes he wore in life – a cassock and a clerical collar. Belasco’s ghost started to appear at the theatre immediately after his death. Sightings have been numerous and consistent in terms of what people describe. Over the years, actors have reported hearing moans in the wings after a particularly bad show. Dressing rooms have been ransacked during performances. Stagehands have sworn they’ve heard the chains rattling in a private elevator that goes straight to Belasco’s once-sumptuous apartment above the theater — even though the elevator hasn’t worked in years.” It’s no surprise that the Rocky Horror Show opened there in March 1975.
In the great history of arts, David Belasco for all that he did for the American theater, may be best remembered for providing Puccini with the play, Madame Butterfly.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen Blank
RIHS
May 4, 2022
WEEKEND PHOTO
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FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
LATE 1930’S IMAGE OF THE ISLAND SHOWING
GOLDWATER HOSPITAL, QUEENSBORO BRIDGE, ELEVATOR STOREHOUSE, STEAMPLANT, CENTRAL NURSES RESIDENCE.
A NYC Department of Hospital’s postcard printed during the tenure of Dr. Sigmund Goldwater, MD (1934 to 1940) showing Blackwell’s Island around 1939, with the Central Nurse’s Residence, the Power House, the Elevator Building the Queensboro Bridge and The Welfare Hospital for Chronic Disease that was was renamed Goldwater Memorial Hospital shortly after the death of Dr. Goldwater in 1949. ED LITCHER GOT IT!!
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
SOURCES
https://biography.yourdictionary.com/david-belasco
https://www.talkinbroadway.com/bway101/2.html
https://adebiportal.kz/en/authors/view/3462
http://www.valentinetheatre.com/mural/bios/David_Belasco.html
https://www.bartleby.com/227/1115.html
https://archives.nypl.org/the/21350
http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/maude/mplay24.html
http://www.edwardianpromenade.com/women/fascinating-women-mrs-leslie-carter/
https://theaterhound1.medium.com/the-wizards-lair-the-man-behind-the-belasco-theatre-84843c94ab6f
GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
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