THE ROAD

Moss Hart, in Act I (still the greatest theatrical autobiography ever written), tells of visiting the offices of theatre producers in the 1920s and finding actors sitting there, waiting for possible employment.  Theatre producers, in those days, produced perhaps four plays a year, with companies of plays produced in previous seasons still on tour.  If an actor in a touring company became ill or otherwise left the company, he or she had to be immediately replaced.  If one of the actors sitting near the entrance was the right "type" for the role in question, that actor would be immediately signed to a contract and sent out to join the company.  This was the way it was for many years.

Beginning in the early 1920s, the teen-aged Moss Hart heard actors sitting there complain that there was not as much work as there had been in previous years.  Terms like "a bad season" were uttered rather frequently.

The following year (theatrical year:  Labor Day to Memorial Day), Hart heard the same complaints and that it was "worse than last year."  Then, the next year, it seemed only to get worse.

Hart, in retrospect, knew what the situation was.  "The road was dying."  Silent motion pictures were already weakening the one and two-night stands that many touring companies had been playing for decades.  Audiences for the live theatre were already growing smaller.

There were other factors, too--including World War I.  But that's another blogging.
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PEAK YEARS

What years were the peak years of employment in the American theatre?  The answer may not surprise you.  Then again, it might.  Stay in touch with the American Theatre Network.
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BEST WISHES

Wishing all lovers of the theatre--Broadway, Off-Broadway, London West End, Tokyo, and all points north, south, east, and west, a great summer ahead.
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NEIL SIMON TODAY

When I was in my teens and twenties, I wondered if the day would ever come in which the plays of Neil Simon would be "dated."  Sadly, that day has arrived.  In fact, it came around the year 2000.  This is not to say that his plays are not good or even great.  They simply have become "period pieces."  Very few of them could be produced commercially today--his masterpiece, The Odd Couple, and perhaps The Sunshine Boys being the exceptions.  (Even they have become period pieces.)  It's simply that the world has changed too much.  Simon's plays were appreciated, despite their ethnicity, because we had a common culture that embraced that ethnicity.  That ethnicity has long since disappeared, as has that common culture.

The tourist Broadway audiences cannot relate to them, as was discovered a few short years ago, when an attempted revival of one of his plays had to close almost as soon as it opened on Broadway; there were simply not enough advance sales.

The critics, by and large, did not appreciate Simon's plays when they were produced on Broadway in the 1960s, '70s, and beyond.  This is probably because they were not "socially relevant"--i.e., they did not tackle social problems such as war, racism, poverty, etc.  (Some critics said that he was simply a "gag writer" as opposed to a playwright, a charge I felt and still feel was largely unwarranted.)  They were about types of people--their faults, peculiarities, and so forth.  They were character studies set against certain backgrounds--largely ethnic backgrounds that were nonetheless acceptable to a very wide audience.  This "world of Neil Simon" has long passed, and I am saddened by it.

Part of Simon's trouble is the fact that straight plays--whether dramas or comedies--cannot sustain on Broadway.  (I remember when a play entitled Top Dog, Under Dog, won the Pulitzer Prize and then opened--for a limited run--on Broadway.  That was around 2002.)  Arthur Miller spent the last ten years of his life making speeches complaining that the professional playwright had disappeared.  I had and have no argument to make against him.

Anyway, for what it's worth, we still love Neil Simon.
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SOME NORTH AMERICAN THEATRE HISTORY

The Broadway theatre of today, while quite successful and impressive, is but a small remnant of a thriving business that included hundreds upon hundreds of first class theatres in cities of every size throughout the United States and Canada.  Thousands upon thousands of people made their livings as actors, stagehands, theatre managers, and in other capacities that do not include producing, directing, and the writing of plays.  These creative aspects of the field were done, principally (but not exclusively) in New York City, the center of this vast network of stage entertainment.  [A number of successful touring shows, many of which played on Broadway at one time or another, were originally produced in Chicago and Los Angeles.  Oliver Morosco was the greatest producer of plays and musicals in L.A. from 1911 until into the 1920s.]
This did not include the various vaudeville circuits and burlesque wheels, each of which had its own theatres.  It is safe to say that more than a hundred thousand people made their livings through stage entertainment from the 1880s through the 1930s, when the triple blow of radio, sound films, and the Depression left so many jobless--people who had been in the "amusement" field for decades and who knew no other way of life.
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INTRODUCTION

This blog is about information on popular entertainment--primarily the American commercial stage. History of such is the main topic, but information, etc., on the current pop stage will not be out of bounds and is, in fact, quite welcome.
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