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Henry Savage Puts The Showgirls in the Broadway Show

At age 20, Mildred Taylor Mills’ future seemed stable. Heir to her father’s modest fortune, the Westport, Conn., girl was “for a long time considered the belle of Westport,” a local newspaper reported. In 1914, newly married and seemingly happy, 20-year-old Mildred shocked the town when she disappeared with the local postmaster – a married man more than twice her age. As her family made inquiries, the news that came back was not encouraging. Mildred had become a Henry Savage girl.

Mildred’s elopement wasn’t just a story worthy of a Broadway musical farce. She actually had landed in the middle of one. As Broadway roared to life in the early 20^th century, Henry Savage was one of its leading impresarios, and chorus girls were his trademark.

From Harvard to Broadway

Savage grew up in New Durham, N.H. After attending Harvard University and graduating in 1880, Savage created a prominent construction firm in Boston. By 1894, Savage had secured a fortune for himself as a real estate developer. Then he partnered with a firm to build a theater – the Castle Square Theatre on Tremont Street in Boston (It was torn down in 1933.).

Castle Square Theatre, ca 1896

Savage initially took an interest in the project as a developer. And the theater earned praise as a showpiece of construction for its Rococo/Renaissance style interior. Marble stairways lit with wrought-iron lamps lead from the main foyer to the upper balconies. The theater seated up to 1800 patrons, and it featured modern conveniences such as a elevators to the upper boxes and an early form of air conditioning that provided a comfortable experience even in summer.

Situated near train lines that served towns in all directions, the theater’s developers had located it as a perfect destination for a show and a night on the town. And it almost fell flat on its face.

Soon after the theater opened, investors wanted out and the theater management was jumping ship. Henry Savage astounded the world with his announcement that he would operate the theater himself.

What did a builder know about running a theater? Quite a lot, it turned out. After one struggle of a season, Henry Savage had the Castle Square Theatre up and humming.

Opera With an American Flair

One of Henry Savage’s first passions was opera. Specifically, he wanted to bring European operas to America – sung in English. Savage’s marketing targeted not the wealthy opera patrons who could travel Europe, but middle-class Americans, the majority of whom who might well go their whole lives without ever witnessing an opera. Savage and a group of like-minded producers intended to change that.

Savage’s approach to producing operas varied from the traditional model, where the big-name stars provided the draw. Realizing that he could not compete for the finest voices in opera, he instead employed lesser-known singers and promoted the opera experience itself, not the singular voices. He kept prices low, within reach of most people. If the voices were not absolutely top quality, they were very often exceptional, and many of his operas received rave reviews. (He had some clinkers, too.)

But Savage soon realized that staying rooted to the Castle Square Theatre limited his opportunities to increase sales. By taking his operas on the road, he could reach new audiences. He pushed into New York and Philadelphia, natural destinations, but competition soon sprung up there when others saw him succeed. So he also went to smaller cities in the Midwest and West.

Lightening Up

As time passed, tastes changed. And Henry Savage changed right along with them as he moved into the 1900s. He began importing comic operettas from Europe and elsewhere. Broadway in New York in this era had become an entertainment hub. Visitors flocked to the city to partake of a dinner, a show and night at the city’s clubs.

Henry Savage produced the operetta the Merry Widow Savage and other producers grappled with the challenge of keeping the pipeline of shows flowing, both importing plays from Europe and commissioning original works. The perfect formula for success for a musical involved a successful run on the stage, a traveling production of the show that carried it far and wide and its final evolution into a silent film. Not so different from today. And Henry Savage seemed a natural at surviving in that the rough and tumble world.

A Savage show would travel west moving from city to city, using the familiar template. Advance men traveled to a city to put up posters and place newspaper advertisements. The goal: build a ready audience before the theater troupe even set foot in the city. In one instance, however, a Savage show arrived in Salt Lake, Utah, to find only minimal publicity. A strike had stopped the newspapers in the city. Savage directed that the production company publish its own newspaper – just one edition – to carry advertisements for the play. Starved of newspapers, the public warmly welcomed the publication and filled the theater seats.

To keep this operation churning, Henry Savage needed a steady stream of talent: writers, actors and, most importantly, chorus girls.

Henry Savage . . . Conniving Producer

Author P.G. Wodehouse and writing partner Gary Bolton documented the machinations of the industry in a semi-autobiographical fictional tale: Bring on the Girls: The Improbable Story of Our Life in Musical Comedy, With Pictures to Prove It.

Wodehouse, who at that time wrote lyrics for the musical numbers that intertwined with the stories in the plays, described a fictional “Colonel Savage.” He and Bolton described a money-grubbing, conniving Henry Savage who, among other things, tricks writers into churning out a never-ending supply of stories by luring them onto his boat and trapping them there.

As much as the theater impresario needed writers, the demand for chorus girls was even greater. Whenever a show bogged down and no amount of rewriting could help, there remained a singular solution – add more chorus girls. Wodehouse explained:

“How wonderful those girls always were. They did not spare themselves. You might get the impression that they were afflicted from some form of chorea, but the dullest eye could see that they were giving of their best. Actors might walk through their parts, singers save their voices, but the personnel of the ensemble never failed to go all out, full of pep, energy and the will to win. A hundred shows have been pushed by them over the thin line that divides the floperoo from the socko.”

Bring on the Girls

For the chorus girls, a role in a Savage production could be life changing – as a chorus girl distinguished herself on the stage, she might wind up in New York or promoted to a larger role. Many also exited the profession via marriage or pregnancy or simple exhaustion.

The news that Mildred Taylor Mills had departed Westport, Conn., for a life on the stage rocketed around the town. What’s more, people soon learned that Arthur Jelliffe – 45 years old and a former postmaster – had also disappeared. Jelliffe most recently had worked as projectionist at a movie theater, and he too had caught the theater bug.

Mildred the telephone operator had become Mildred the chorus girl. But the scene changed quickly in Westport. Mildred’s mother and sisters petitioned the court to seize control of her assets. Arthur Jelliffe’s wife, meanwhile, began preparing a lawsuit against Mildred for alienation of affection.

Mildred Returns Home

Poster for Henry Savage Everywoman Ironically, Mildred had a role in “Everywoman.” This Henry Savage production told the story of a woman who ends up miserable because she forsakes true love. Instead, her vanity drives her to pursue fame. In the end of the play, the main character is bereft. With her youth and virtue gone she has no one to care for her. Women theater reviewers did not particularly rave over the play.

When made into a movie, producers refit the story with a happier ending. Mildred didn’t have such a grim ending, either. With the show reaching San Diego, Mildred’s family managed to reestablish communications. She agreed to return home. She and Jelliffe had no romantic connection. The only reason given for her flight to the stage was her general discontent.

As for Henry Savage, he continued producing Broadway hits, with his last production in 1925. He died in 1927 at the age of 68, having produced more than 50 shows.

Photos: Billy Rose Theatre Collection – NYPL Digital Gallery. This story last updated in 2024.

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Pittsfield’s Frank Grant Fights Baseball’s Color Line in 1887

After Frank Grant lost his battle to play on integrated baseball teams, almost 50 years would go by before Jackie Robinson reintegrated the sport.

Grant played for six years on integrated minor league teams. Baseball historians considered him one of the best – if not the best – black ballplayer of the 19^th century.

But racism forced him out of the white leagues and into the Negro Leagues, where stars earned a fraction of their white counterparts’ pay.

Though his skin color created controversy during his playing days, the sports world forgot all about him after he retired in 1903. Buried in a pauper’s grave in 1937, historians have recently rediscovered the story of Frank Grant.

Frank Grant

He was born Ulysses Franklin Grant in Pittsfield, Mass., on Aug. 1, 1865 – a few months after the Civil War ended. He had eight brothers and sisters, six who survived to adulthood. His father, a farm laborer, died when he was four months old.

Bliss Perry

Frank Grant’s mother went to work as a domestic servant for Arthur Perry, a Williams College professor. His son, Bliss Perry, became a famous college English professor, novelist and editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In his autobiography, he wrote he was perfectly happy playing ball with Frank Grant and his brother Clarence.

In 1886, Frank Grant played for a minor league team in Meriden, Conn., that folded in mid-season for want of money. Then he signed with the Buffalo Bisons, a top-tier minor league team. He was one of five black players who played in baseball’s minor leagues.

The editors of Sporting Life disapproved of integrated baseball, asking, “How far will this mania for engaging colored players go?” An umpire openly admitted to calling close plays against teams that fielded African-American players.

In a game he played in Toronto on July 27, 1887, the local newspaper reported, ‘the crowd confined itself to blowing their horns and shouting ‘Kill the n—-r!”

Buffalo had good reason to hang on to Frank Grant, who the manager called an Italian and some described as a Spaniard. He led the league with 11 home runs, batted .340 and stole 40 bases. He also played second base brilliantly.

Baseball writer Sol White, who wrote the first book about the Negro Leagues, said, “In hitting he ranked with the best and his fielding bordered on the impossible. Grant was a born ballplayer.”

High Spikes

By then, white players from the Binghamton ball club threatened to strike if the team’s two black players weren’t released. The International League responded by banning black players from signing new contracts.

That wasn’t all. Playing for Buffalo, Frank Grant had to duck at the plate when white pitchers tried to bean him. White runners slid into second base feet first, aiming their spikes at Grant’s shins. (He took to wearing wooden shin guards and later playing the outfield.)

When he traveled to play in Louisville, Ky., he had to eat and room with the hotel’s black employees.

Frank Grant, circled, with the Buffalo Bisons.

But Frank Grant helped Buffalo win games. He also attracted many black fans, and he made a splash on the social scene. A New York newspaper featured an item about him.

He electrified Broadway recently by appearing in a blue corduroy coat, black and white striped trousers, yellow gloves, patent leather shoes with light drab gaiters, a slate colored fedora hat and a gold-headed cane.

Buffalo hung onto Frank Grant for the rest of the season, and for the next two, despite the International League’s new color line. The team did it by forming a new league. Buffalo’s white players, though, complained about playing with an African American, no matter how good. They refused to have a team picture taken with Grant in it.

Finally in 1889, Buffalo Bison management caved in to the players and released Frank Grant. Without him, the team collapsed and moved to Grand Rapids the next year.

Sol White’s ‘History of Colored Base Ball,’ 1907. Only five copies are known to exist.

Cuban Giants

In 1890, Frank Grant went to play for the Cuban Giants, the first African-American salaried baseball team. They weren’t Cuban and at 5’7” Frank Grant wasn’t a giant. But he hit like one.

Sol White explained why some teams called themselves Cuban. They wanted “to conceal the fact that they were just American Negro hotel waiters and talked a gibberish to each other on the field which, they hoped, sounded like Spanish,” he wrote.

But Frank Grant got caught up in the machinations of the early baseball teams and leagues, which routinely disassembled and reassembled.

The Cuban Giants moved to York, Pa., where they became the York Monarchs, an Eastern Interstate League team.

Their new rival, the Harrisburg Ponies, wasn’t pleased that the dominant Cuban Giants had joined the league. So the Ponies management pilfered Frank Grant from the Monarchs.

Jim Crow

The Ponies, though, wanted to join a higher minor league organization. They petitioned to the Atlantic Association for membership, but they had a problem. The Atlantic Association, like the International League, didn’t have any black players. The Ponies stood firm, and the Atlantic Association admitted them. Frank Grant was now the only African American player in the league.

But Jim Crow wasn’t going away. Grant had to live in a segregated boarding house in Harrisburg. Players on opposing teams refused to play against Harrisburg if Frank Grant played. When playing in Baltimore, he didn’t stay at Kelly’s Hotel with the team, but lodged and ate at the headwaiter’s home.

In Wilmington, Del., the Clayton House refused to accommodate the team because of Frank Grant. So they found another hotel with the understanding that Grant would eat with ‘the colored help.’

In 1891, he returned to the Cuban Giants. Then he joined the New York Big Gorhams, as good a team if not better than the Cuban Giants. For the next decade, Frank Grant jumped around, the Philadelphia Giants, the Colored Capital All-Americans and the Genuine Cuban Giants. He spent winters in Williamstown, Mass., and played with local clubs when the weather allowed. The Blackinton Co., a North Adams textile manufacturer, sponsored a team he played on.

The 1902 Philadelphia Giants. Frank Grant played on the team along with Sol White.

The Rest of the Story

After he retired from baseball in 1903 he lived the rest of his life in anonymity, working as a waiter in New York City, perhaps playing semipro ball in his spare time.

He died on May 27, 1938, and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Clifton, N.J., where he never lived.

On April 18, 1946, Jackie Robinson made his debut with the International League in a Montreal baseball game. The New York Times reported, “There have been other Negro players in the International League. ….Frank Grant played at second base for Buffalo and a Moses Walker caught for Newark in a game between those two teams on April 30, 1887.”

Though he never played in the Major Leagues, Frank Grant was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 2006.

Five years later, the Negro Leagues Baseball Grave Marker Project laid a headstone on his grave in the East Ridgelawn Cemetery in Section 14, Block B, Row E, Number 6.

Images: Frank Grant, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6140862; History of Colored Base Ball By Sol White(Life time: n/a) – Original publication: Sol White, History of Colored Base Ball. Philadelphia: H. Walter Schlichter, 1907.Immediate source: http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/sol-whites-1907-history-colored-base-ball, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42882527.

With thanks to John Thorn, Fame at Last, from Thorn Pricks, and Frank Grant by Brian McKenna at sabr.org. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Gardens

Historic gardens have a special appeal to New Englanders if only because of our harsh winters and long dreary springs.

Though they offer the visitor serenity and relaxation, preserving historic gardens usually involves a great deal of hard work and commitment. Stewardship of historic gardens also requires knowledge of horticulture, garden design, landscape design, history and often architecture and architectural history.

Here, then, are six historic gardens, one in each New England state.

Elizabeth Park

The historic gardens at Hartford’s Elizabeth Park

Elizabeth Park in Hartford is the oldest municipal rose garden in the United States with 800 rose varieties.

Charles M. Pond, who financed the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, bequeathed his estate to Hartford — but only if the city named it after his late wife. In 1897, Hartford took possession of the 102-acre site.

Park superintendent Theodore Wirth created the 2.5-acre Rose Garden in 1904. The city decided it couldn’t afford the historic garden in the 1970s, so a group of volunteers rescued it.

Today, the park includes the historic gardens, pathways, century-old Lord and Burnham greenhouses, lawns, tennis courts, bowling greens, a picnic grove and a pond. Ironically, the border between Hartford and West Hartford moved, so Hartford’s largest park now sits mostly in the neighboring town.

1561 Asylum Avenue, West Hartford, Conn.

Asticou Azalea Garden

Asticou Azalea Garden, one of two historic gardens that came from Reef Point

Think of a Japanese stroll garden in coastal Maine and you’ve pretty much imagined the Asticou Azalea Garden. Though it started in 1957, the garden has a much longer history. It began as Reef Point, a Bar Harbor estate owned by Mary Cadwalder Rawle and Frederic Rhinelander Jones, Edith Wharton’s brother. Mr. and Mrs. Jones were also parents of landscape architect Beatrix Farrand.

Farrand inherited the property in 1935, and she and her husband Max decided to turn Reef Point into a horticultural study center. The venture was less successful than the Farrands hoped, and Bar Harbor refused to grant them a tax exemption after the Maine fires of 1947.

Farrand then broke up her gardens, selling many of her plants to Charles Savage. He moved most of them to Thuya Garden, an English flower garden, but he thought the azaleas would do better next to a pond in Northeast Harbor. And so he created the Asticou Azalea Garden, which features cherry trees that bloom in spring, azaleas and rhododendrons in June, Iris in July, water lilies in August and fall colors in September and October.

Savage designed the historic gardens to inspire feelings of serenity, something you’ll need if you visit nearby Acadia National Park in the summer.

3 Sound Drive, Northeast Harbor, Maine

Arnold Arboretum

Arnold Arboretum includes some of the oldest historic gardens

The Arnold Arboretum certainly counts as historic, as it started in 1872 because of a bequest from a whaling captain named James Arnold. But is an arboretum a garden? Well, yes. The Arnold Arboretum includes an herbarium, the wildflower-filled Cosmopolitan Meadow and the Explorers Garden, with plants from the North America-China Plant Exploration Consortium of the early 1900s.

The arboretum began when Arnold bequeathed part of his estate to Harvard, which added it to another country estate given to the college by Benjamin Bussey. In 1872, Harvard named botany professor Charles Sprague Sargent as arboretum director. Sargent worked with Frederick Law Olmsted to design the roads, pathways and gardens.

Harvard gave the Boston the arboretum in 1882, when it joined the city’s Emerald Necklace park system. The college got a 1,000-year lease and the responsibility for running the historic garden, now 281 acres.

The arboretum includes about 15,000 plants, including tiny trees in the Larz Anderson Collection of Japanese Dwarfed Trees, originally imported by Larz Anderson in 1913.

125 Arborway, Boston, Mass.

Prescott Park

Portsmouth’s Prescott Park

Prescott Park provides a waterfront oasis for pedestrians strolling through the historic city of Portsmouth, N.H. Two sisters, Mary and Josie Prescott, inherited a fortune from their brother Charles in 1932. They decided to use the money to replace a seedy, industrial section of town with a public park.

The sisters began to systematically buy up land along the Piscataqua River, deeding the land to Portsmouth in 1940. They also set up a trust to maintain the 10-acre park in 1949.

Today, the University of New Hampshire donates plant material for the park’s flower beds, but the city maintains them. The park, popular among artists and wedding planners, features lawns, gardens, brick walkways, boardwalk piers, public docks, and an island for picknicking. The park stays open year-round, and in summer hosts outdoor Broadway musicals.

1 Water Street, Portsmouth, N.H.

Green Animals

The Green Animals topiary garden in Portsmouth, R.I., dates to 1859, when the Victorian mansion was built on a 7-acre estate overlooking Narragansett Bay.

Thomas E. Brayton, treasurer of the Union Cotton Manufacturing Company in Fall River, Mass., bought the property in 1872. He hired Joseph Carreiro as superintendent of the property in 1905, and Carreiro began to train topiaries. Carreiro also planted and maintained fruit trees, perennial beds, herb and vegetable gardens.

Later joined by his son-in-law, Carreiro created more than 80 topiaries, including a horse and rider, a unicorn, a giraffe, an ostrich, an elephant and two bears.

In the 1940s, the estate hosted a coming-out party for Jacqueline Bouvier and later a reception for First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. In 1972, Brayton’s daughter Alice left the estate to The Preservation Society of Newport County upon her death.

Today, Green Animals is the oldest and most northern topiary garden in the United States. It opens seasonally and includes formal flowerbeds, geometric pathways, rose and grape arbors and fruit trees in addition to the topiaries.

380 Cory’s Lane, Portsmouth, R.I.

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller

The formal Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller Garden

The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park was the boyhood home of George Perkins Marsh, a founder of both the environmental movement and the Smithsonian Institute. Frederick Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, bought the property. He managed it according to the principles of land conservation put forth by George Perkins Marsh.

Mary and Laurance Rockefeller later bought the property in 1954. A series of prominent landscape architects, including Ellen Shipman and Robert Morris Copeland, created and altered the extensive gardens. Today they include an azalea and rhododendron garden, rock garden, cutting garden, a hemlock hedgerow and a stand of Norway spruce,

The property became a national historic park in 1992, its purpose to interpret the history and evolution of conservation stewardship in America. It is open from Memorial Day through October.

54 Elm St, Woodstock, Vt.

Images: Arnold Arboretum By Daderot at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18516058; Asticou Azalea Gardens By Dudesleeper – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17126170; Prescott Park By Bostonian13 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27655804; Green Animals By Brian Feathers, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58062721. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Outrageous Comical Brown Comes to Town

If you live in a New England town with town hall, a school, a church or an opera house, chances are good it was visited at least once by the outrageous showman William B. Brown, better known as Comical Brown.

Comical Brown

Born in 1833 in Lancaster, Mass., into a Quaker family, as a child he prepared to become a shoemaker. But at 16 his musical talent took him in a different direction. He began performing small concerts on the violin to help support his blind father. It set the direction for the next 45 years of his life.

At first he took small parts in minstrel shows and regularly performed in the stage play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the book of the same name. By the mid-1860s, however, he hit the road as a headliner. An advance man would work the towns on Brown’s calendar, appearing a few days in advance to plaster the town with fliers and newspaper notices for “That Comical Brown!” show.

His act consisted of a number of humorous monologues in which he took the role of cranky, old Yankee or warm-hearted Irishman. He joked with the crowd while spinning yarns and songs designed to draw laughs or groans. Mixed in, he played the violin and turned the stage over to other members of his small troop.

His other acts included Frank Hayden, boy soprano; E.A. Marsh, contralto, singing the Star Spangled Banner; or a trained dog act featuring Scottie and Prince Charlie doing tricks.

As Brown traveled from town to town, he updated his material each year or two so it was fresh whenever he rolled into town. He brought the fun of the vaudeville stage to the small towns of New England and beyond for a remarkable 45 years.

Comical Brown Makes ‘Em Laugh

In 1885 Brown compiled some of his best material and published it as Comical Brown’s Songster – equal parts cornball observations and slyly racy songs. Male/female relationships, man’s personal foibles, the temperance society and other timely topics were staples of his comedy. This number, Of Course It’s No Business of Mine, surely raised the rafters when he belted it out:

Now, for instance, at Mrs. Montgomery’s,
Every afternoon, just about three,
When her husband is out at his business,
A gent with moustache comes to tea.

He stays till half-past eight o’clock,
For the husband don’t get home till nine;
Now I’d like to know what he does there!
But then it’s no business of mine.

Across the way lives dear Miss Baxter,
A nice, dashing, handsome young girl;
Who, for the last twelve months or so,
Has been flirting with Mr. Fitz-Furl;

They say she is going to be married,
Well, I must say I think it is time;
For, if she’s not married, she’d ought to be,
But then it’s no business of mine.

I met Lucy Bell t’other evening,
With her nephew going out for a walk,
And, of course, as soon as she saw me,
She stopped and began a long talk

All about her dear little nephew,
Who she said was between eight and nine,
But some say it isn’t her nephew,
But then it’s no business of mine.

At Mrs. Fitz-Snooks’, round the corner,
Last evening I heard such a din,
And found that she’d not paid her rent,
So the Sheriff they quickly brought in.

I don’t know what she does with her money,
Though her nose always redly does shine,
I think that she spends it for brandy,
But of course it’s no business of mine.

Comical Brown Hits a Sour Note

Contralto E.A. Marsh costumed for The Daughter of the Regiment. (Library of Congress)

The indignities of the comedy circuit were many. The show had to go on each night in a new town, regardless of weather. Comical Brown’s critics suggested there was good reason he never played the same venue two nights in a row: because once the audience heard his act they would warn their neighbors not to bother.

One particularly joyless stop came in Charlton, Mass. where Brown was forced to play in a church rather than the town hall, which had burned. He churned out his music and jokes to a stone-faced audience, whose members were too intimidated by the church sexton glaring from the rear of the church to even crack a smile.

Over the years, Comical Brown moved around New England, living in Somerville, Mass. and Rutland and Barre in Vermont. As he grew older there were hints that he was slipping, though he was still much loved. The Saint Johnsbury Caledonian reported in 1891, “Comical Brown played to a large audience at the Opera House Thanksgiving night. Everybody was kept in good humor and though Brown is not as good as he used to be, he still makes folks laugh.”

Comical Brown’s career finally ended in 1893. At the age of 60 he was found unconscious at a Boston train station, possibly headed for his next concert. He died at the nearby hospital leaving behind a widow and two daughters. His death was reported as far away as California.

The Afterlife

The Comical Brown act lived on for more than a decade after Brown’s death in the form of the “Comical Brown Concert and Comedy Company.” It was also “billed as Comical Brown’s Old Show with a replacement cast.” Finally, his act became synonymous with outdated, stale jokes. Into the 1920s, if someone told a particularly unfunny, old joke, the proper response was, “That’s a great one. I think I remember Comical Brown using it.”

In 1909 Brown’s career was eulogized by Broadway playwright Stanley Rosenfeld in the comedy-drama The Barnstormer, about the star of one-man show traveling to backwoods towns in the waning days of his career. It was not a hit.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The New England Summer Theater — Six of the Oldest

Summer theater has been a feature of New England resort towns since a Maine entrepreneur started staging plays in a former skating rink in 1899.

In 1916, the Provincetown Players produced Eugene O’Neill’s plays on a wharf. During the 1920s, summer theaters started up in Peterboro, N.H., Cape Cod and the Berkshires. They featured young talent, usually fresh out of college, and provided good, cheap entertainment for vacationing city dwellers. They were called ‘summer stock’ because they reused costumes and sets, and were performed by a resident company.

The ‘Straw Hat Circuit,’ as it became known, became a proving ground for Broadway plays. Stars like Bette Davis, Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando got their start in summer theater.

Here are six of the oldest summer theaters in New England, one in each state. If you have a favorite old summer theater, please mention it in the comments section.

Ivoryton Playhouse

The Ivoryton Playhouse

The Ivoryton Playhouse building started out in 1911 as a recreation hall for the workers of the Comstock-Cheney factory, which made ivory coverings for piano keys. There was another ivory manufacturer in Ivoryton, a village of Essex, Conn. It’s called ‘the town built by elephants.’

The building was vacant when an actor and director named Milton Stiefel came to Essex for a rest after touring nationally. He saw the potential of the unused building as a summer theater. He put his actor friends together in a troupe called The New York Players and staged the Broadway play Broken Dishes on June 30, 1930. By the end of the season the Ivoryton Playhouse was the first self-supporting summer theater in the country.

The theater quickly developed a national reputation and helped launch the careers of Cliff Robertson and Katharine Hepburn. It went dark during World War II due to gas rationing, but resumed afterward. The summer theater attracted such stars as Marlon Brando, Art Carney, Talullah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ezio Pinza, Betty Grable, Groucho Marx and June Lockhart.

Milton Stiefel retired in 1973, but stayed involved in the summer theater until he died in 1983. His successor couldn’t quite make a go of the theater and decided to sell it. Rumors spread that the building would be razed for a discount drugstore, and so supporters formed the non-profit Ivoryton Playhouse Foundation and bought the building. The theater floundered until 1987, when The River Rep company began to stage artistically successful productions.

This summer, the Ivoryton Playhouse will present Million Dollar Quartet, West Side Story, Saturday Night Fever: The Musical, and the world premiere of I Hate Musicals: The Musical.

103 Main Street, Ivoryton, Conn.

Lakewood Theatre

Lakewood Theatre

The Lakewood Theatre started out as a religious sanctuary for spiritualists on the shores of Lake Wesserunsett, six miles north of Skowhegan in Madison, Maine. It became a skating rink and a vaudeville theater.

By 1899, it was part of a swampy amusement park at the end of a trolley line when Herbert Swett began running it as a summer theater. He developed it into a venue for Broadway tryouts, which earned the theater the nickname “Broadway in Maine.”

During its heyday, such stars as Vincent Price, Ethel Barrymore and George M. Cohan played in Lakewood. The summer theater premiered one of the longest running play on Broadway, Life with Father, in 1939.

The theater declined after World War II. The Swett family sold it in 1970 and owners came and went for the next 15 years. Television and pop stars played the summer theater. John Travolta appeared in Bus Stop while taking a break from the Welcome Back, Kotter television series. He scrawled his signature on a backstage wall. So did Myrna Loy and Mama Cass Elliot.

In 1985, the The Cornville Players arrived with an agreement to perform three plays for six weeks. They were successful, and formed the nonprofit CUE (Curtains Up Enterprises). Since then, CUE has renovated the summer theater and stages comedies, dramas, musicals and children’s shows.

This season, the Lakewood Theater presents Arsenic and Old Lace, Some Sweet Day, Shout! The Mod Musical, Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner, Avenue Q, The Savannah Sipping Society, Bullets Over Broadway, Baskerville and A Comedy of Tenors.

76 Theater Rd., Madison, Maine

Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse, like the Lakeville Theater and Barnstormers, claims to be the oldest summer theater in the country.

We won’t debate the merits of their arguments, but we do question the original cover story about the Cape Playhouse, which also has a cinema on its grounds. The theater’s marketing claim was that a visionary ex-botany teacher named Raymond Moore moved an old church to a pasture on Cape Cod and transformed it into a world-famous theater complex. The Playhouse debuted Bette Davis, Henry Fonda and Humphrey Bogart, while the Cinema featured a spectacular ceiling mural by Rockwell Kent.

Actually lumber heiress and Cape summer resident Edna Bradley Tweedy backed Raymond Moore in his summer theater venture. She secretly married him a year before she died in 1953. She was at least 65, he was still in his late 30s. Tweedy had inherited the Bradley lumber fortune and left Moore a generous bequest. That became public when Moore quarreled over the will with her three daughters, the main beneficiaries of the estate.

Whatever. The Cape Playhouse was a smash hit when it opened in 1927. Three years later John Barrymore praised Moore for bringing Broadway to “dirt road and oil-lamp country.” The Cape Playhouse and Cape Cinema, he wrote, are “a dream come true, that has attracted the attention of the theatrical and playgoing world.’

This season, the Cape Playhouse presents Art, The Foreigner, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Red, Gypsy and Murder for Two.

820 Maine St. (6A), Dennis, Mass.

The Barnstormers

The Barnstormers, like the Cape Playhouse, claims to be the oldest ongoing professional summer theater. It was founded in 1931 by Francis Cleveland, the son of President Grover Cleveland. He ran the Tamworth, N.H., theater until he died in 1995.

Francis, his wife Alice and their friend Ed Goodnow founded the summer theater company in 1931. Their company of resident actors – mostly recent college graduates — performed different plays each night in Maine and New Hampshire. Sometimes they arrived at a barn in the afternoon, set up scenery and lights and performed in the evening — hence the name ‘Barnstormers.’

They finished each week with a Saturday evening performance in Tamworth at a former boxing venue where former First Lady Frances Cleveland, dressed in an evening gown, often greeted the audience.

In 1935, the Barnstormers bought Kimball’s Store on Maine Street in Tamworth and turned it into a summer theater. Since then the acting company rehearses one play by day and performs one by night. Barnstormers is one of three Equity theaters in New Hampshire.

This season, Barnstormers presents Spamalot, The Ghost Train, My Three Angels, Toward Zero and Driving Miss Daisy.

104 Main Street, Tamworth, N.H.

Weston Playhouse

Lloyd Bridges

Beginning in summer of 1937, a drama teacher at the Boston Conservatory of Music traveled to Weston, Vt., to produce 10 plays. For the next 34 summers, Harlan Grant produced ambitious summer theater programs. From that day to this, the Weston Playhouse never missed a summer theater season.

Among the actors launching the first professional season was none other than Lloyd Bridges.

Over the years the theater, housed in a remodeled church, encountered some difficulties. On a summer night in 1962 fire gutted the theater. But in the spirit of ‘the show must go on,’ the company performed the next night in a tent on a makeshift stage in front of an audience seated in folding chairs. An enthusiastic crowd assembled that night for the performance of Write Me a Murder.

The 300-seat theater was rebuilt for the following season. Floods damaged the rebuilt theater twice in the 1970s, but the Weston Playhouse has never ceased to thrive. It opens its season in 2017 on June 22 with the theater’s Young Company performing the musical Really Rosie. Also showing this summer are Once, Lost in Yonkers, The Music Man, Long Days Journey Into Night, Tenderly and Buyer & Cellar.

The Weston Playhouse is poised to launch a new arts center for the development of a new generation of playwrights, actors and directors.

703 Main St., Weston, Vt.

Theatre by the Sea

Theatre By The Sea

In 1933, Alice Jaynes Tyler brought “Broadway in a Barn” to the Rhode Island village of Wakefield in South Kingstown. It was on the grounds of a summer camp that had been crippled by the Great Depression.

For the next 35 years the Theatre by the Sea thrived as visitors spent days on the nearby beaches and nights seeking entertainment. Along the way, the Hurricane of 1938 put a dent in the theater’s façade. During World War II it did its part for the war effort by serving as a target for training pilots to dive at.

In 1963 it faced its closest brush with death when it nearly was demolished. But for a few seasons when it went dark, however, the summer theater never wavered.

Stars such as Marlon Brando, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West, Judy Holiday, Shelley Winters and more entertained the summer crowds night after night. In 2017, the summer theater opens again with Beehive, The Music Man, Beauty and the Beast and The Producers.

364 Cards Pond Rd, Wakefield, R.I.

If you don’t recognize the stars at the top of the page, they are Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis and Lloyd Bridges.

Images: Theatre By the Sea, By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434102

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Six Brutalist Buildings In New England

Two of the most famous Brutalist buildings in America are still provoking strong emotions in New England decades after they first reared their heavy concrete heads.

The massive buildings – Boston City Hall and Rudolph Hall — are appropriately in Boston and New Haven. Both places are key to the development of modern architecture.

For example, the influential modernist Walter Gropius found a home in Boston after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. He joined the faculty at Harvard, where he brought modern ideas about architecture to the United States.

And in New Haven, Yale President Whitney Griswold’s building campaign from 1950-1963 had an outsize influence on modern architecture. Glass-and-steel International Style office buildings are called Yale Boxes.

Brutalist Roots

Like much New England architecture, Brutalism came from Britain. The British didn’t love it much. Prince Charles called a Brutalist shopping center in Portsmouth, England, a ‘mildewed lump of elephant droppings.’

Many Brutalist buildings were part of urban renewal programs and, like urban renewal, were born of idealism and quickly viewed as a big mistake.

Brutalist buildings got shabby fast as concrete aged faster than the architects predicted. They turned out to be unfriendly to pedestrians and difficult to subdivide.

When Michael J. Lewis entered architecture school in 1980, Brutalism was ‘unlovely, irrelevant, a universally acknowledged historical blunder.’

And now it’s coming back.

Nikil Saval, in the New York Times, wrote in October 2016, that enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings is taking hold.

“Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness,” he wrote.

Brutalist buildings can be found throughout New England. Here are examples of six for you to love or hate.

Rudolph Hall, Yale University

The Yale Art and Architecture Building was the crown jewel of Yale President Whitney Griswold’s modern building program after World War II. Under Griswold, nearly a dozen new buildings were designed by such leading modernist architects as Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft and Philip Johnson.

Paul Rudolph, who studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard in 1963 designed the Brutalist Art and Architecture Building.

Critics called it ‘the most provocative American building of the decade.’

Rudolph, then chair of Yale’s architecture department, created a heavy concrete structure with 36 (or 37, depending on who’s counting) levels within seven stories.

The building had problems from the start. First, art students threatened to picket the dedication ceremony. Then during the ceremony itself, 2,000 people heard architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemn the building as oppressively monumental.

And yet it appeared on the cover of every major architectural magazine, and New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved about it.

Inside, the building had bright orange carpets, incandescent lighting and plaster casts of Classical artworks.

Sculpture students had to work in small, dark studios in the sub-basement. The rope curtains didn’t keep out sunlight.

“It ignored about two-thirds of its users,” said Mark Simon, an architect who had to use it. Richard Benson, who taught in the building for 18 years, called it ‘awful.’

A spectacular fire raced through the building not five years after its dedication. It was widely believed (though never proven) the fire had been set by student architects forced to use it. Yale remodeled the building, cutting up the interior space into a ‘depressing rabbit warren of white-walled rooms.’

Yale then spent $126 million to restore and expand the Brutalist building, renaming it Rudolph Hall. The New York Times called it, ‘a masterpiece of late Modernism.’

Hillside, Colby College

The problem with Brutalist architecture, wrote critic Michael Lewis, was that people ‘could not be made to see that the problem with modern architecture was that it was insufficiently surly.’

Corporate and commercial clients wouldn’t buy Brutalist architecture. Only administrators of academic institutions, government and the occasional church seemed to like it.

In Waterville, Maine, Colby College administrators belonged to that select group. The college hired Boston architect Ben Thompson, a partner of Walter Gropius, to design dormitories. He came up with a network of five interconnected dorms called Hillside.

A confidential student guide to Colby describes them as ‘ugly.’ “But they have their charm, including spacious common rooms, that cozy small-dorm feeling, and their own parking lot… Plus, “I live in Hillside” can be another point of bonding– bonding through adversity, hah.”

Boston City Hall

Boston City Hall arose from the urban renewal program that demolished the immigrant West End neighborhood in the 1950s. From the rubble rose the State Health, Education and Welfare Service Center, designed by none other than Paul Rudolph.

Mayor John F. Collins then continued urban renewal with the New Boston program. It leveled the bawdy Scollay Square neighborhood, to the regret of countless sailors.

Collins wasn’t careful enough for what he wished. When presented with the blueprints of City Hall, he is said to have gasped. Someone in the room then said, “What the hell is that?”

The architectural firms of Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles with Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty designed the Brutalist behemoth and completed it in 1968.

It is easily the most hated building in the city. Boston’s late mayor Tom Menino wanted to tear it down. So did the next mayor, Marty Walsh. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow agreed with them. “Its great crime isn’t being ugly; it’s being anti-urban,” he wrote.

“The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm’s length,” he wrote. “It disperses crowds, instead of gathering them together. It creates an island of inactivity, several blocks long and wide, in the middle of what is otherwise a bustling commercial district.”

Some, though, view it as a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture. An American Institute of Architects poll listed it as one of the 10 proudest achievements of American architecture in 200 years.

Phillips Exeter Academy Library

The writer Tom Wolfe had little use for Louis Kahn, the architect who designed the Brutalist Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, N.H.

Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, described Kahn as a ‘shambles,’ who had deep within a ‘molten core of confidence.’ “Kahn would walk into a classroom, stare blearily at the students, open his mouth… and from the depths would come a remarkable voice: “Every building must have … its own soul.”

Kahn was hired in 1965 to design a home for the Phillips Exeter’s 60,000 volumes. The collection has grown to 160,000 since the library opened in 1971. Today it’s the largest secondary school library in the world.

Kahn designed the library in three concentric squares. The brick outer ring includes the outer walls and the library carrel space, the concrete middle ring holds the stacks and the inner ring is an atrium with circular cutouts that reveal the stacks.

In 1997, the American Institute of Architects 1997 gave the library the Twenty-five Year Award, which recognizes architecture of enduring significance and given to one building per year.

On the Brutalism website, someone commented,

This is exactly how I imagine the library from A Clockwork Orange (book).

Knight Campus, CCRI

In 2017, admirers of the Brutalist style held a funeral for the John E. Fogarty Building, torn down in 2017. (Watch the video here.)

It’s the third Brutalist building torn down in Providence. Also gone are The Outlet parking garage on Friendship Street and the circular Gulf gas station off Broadway.

But in Warwick, R.I., the Knight Campus of the Community College of Rhode Island still stands.

The Brutalist architectural firm The Robinson Green Beretta Corporation, viewed the building as an educational megastructure. They rejected the traditional sprawling college campus with buildings separated by disciplines. Instead they tried to promote diversity and interaction among students in a single, gigantic structure.

It was built on the former Knight Estate, a gentleman’s farm owned by the founders of the Fruit of the Loom brand.

When the building opened in 1972, people already considered it outdated.

Cathedral Church of St. Paul

In 1971, a fire destroyed the Gothic Revival building where years to Episcopalians in Burlington, Vt., had worshiped. The city had undertaken a massive urban renewal project at the time. It therefore offered to swap the old St. Paul’s land for a large tract overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. Though controversial, St. Paul’s took the deal.

The cathedral’s leaders wanted to make a new architectural statement. They thought it shouldn’t function as a museum, but home to the arts, lectures and discussion. So an international competition was held, and the winner was a local firm Truex, Cullins & Partners. The Brutalist building was consecrated in 1973.

Images: Rudolph Building, Yale By Photographer: interrupt; – edit of flickr image, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11872101; Hillside (Sturtevant dormitory), By Colby Mariam – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49324860; Boston City Hall, By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12229690 Phllips Exeter Academy Library, By Gunnar Klack – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57029474; St. Paul’s Cathedral, By Beyond My Ken – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29111530. This story about Brutalist buildings was updated in 2023.

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