Oh my Willie! or, Memories of the Broadway Theatre ...

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Just a few nice bits that I've picked up in the last weeks ...

All of us who diligently researched and wrote biographical books in the years before the Internet made knowledge (real and false) so much more attainable, have to suffer the sigh-storms that come with finding extra material and even occasionally (horror!) corrections in this day and age. This week, my blog led me to a lady in America whose husband is a great-great-grandson of my beloved Willie Gill. And guess what -- yes, it actually happens in real life -- they have found an old suitcase in the attic ... I don't know whether to exult or to weep, I just know I want to re-do my book! And I very well may!

Of course, as a result, I've thought a lot about dear old Willie -- the largely-forgotten author of Broadway's biggest C19th hit musical -- in these last days. And a few Willie-related bits have even surfaced on ebay ...

Like this.

This piece was a huge long-touring hit for E E Rice, and its musical-comedy bill is littered with memorable names. Henry Dixey, star of Willie's famous show Adonis, English burlesque actress Topsy Venn, John Gourlay of Skipped by the Light of the Moon fame, George Howard from Evangeline, little Ada Lee of the Soldene troupe, Lina Merville, Marion Elmore, J A Mackay ... 

Lina Merville

This playbill is not from Horrors year-one. The cast was even more rich then! The great Willie Edouin and his delicious wife, Alice Atherton, William A Mestayer, Louis (brother of Alice) Harrison, the Thompson troupe's Ella Chapman (undoubtedly with her ubiquitous banjo) ... 

Ella Chapman

and look! Here are photos of two original cast ladies

Lizzie Dana had a 'thinking' role. But she 'thought' for several years, sometimes alongside younger sister Rose, who went on to play Iolanthe, Lady Angela, Kate Stanley et al ..

Marion Singer had a little more to do as The Jolie Housekeepaire ...

Another member of the original cast was Donald Harrold. I suspect he may have been brother to another Rice starlet, Lizzie Harrold ..

Lizzie Harrold

They were the children of a Pennsylvania Irish blast furnace founder, the eldest of whom, Maggie Harrold (1850-1907) had a neat career before becoming Mrs William Davidge II and a mother. Mothethood was the death of her. She died 'of shock' after hearing of the arrest of her son. Lizzie (b 1854) went on the stage in 1876, and featured with the Rice organisation, in Evangeline, before becoming the wife of William J Comley, producer and publisher. His efforts to promote her as a star were only mildly successful. She played in another written-to-order Willie piece, A Royal Tramp, in 1889. It sank. Mr Comley committed suicide in 1910. Elizabeth [Harriet] Harrold-Comley had two daughters and a son, and seems to have spent a lot of pains chopping a decade off her age. She died 19 March 1920.

This is Rosa Lee. I wrote a lovely wee biog of Rosa last year. It has been swallowed by my computer crash. But I can tell you that Rosa was not just a pair of legs. She was a trained opera singer. And Rice was far from the only one to feature her. Nor Houseworth the only one  to photograph her.

Oh dear, this was supposed to be just a wee post to 'save' some nice pictures. Well, here goes! After Willie, my favourite 'American' person is another (of course) unfairly forgotten man: Adolf Philipp. The originator of the style of show which has been hi-jacked by the more facile 'historians' of the American musical and credited to BoltonWodehouse'n'Kern and the Princess Theater. How great to find three photos of perhaps not his most successful show, The Girl Who Smiles ...

American Musical Theatre History!  Willie Gill, Edward Rice, Adolph Philipp (under his multitude of pseudonyms) ... that's the core! NOT Black Crook and Guy-Plum-Jerry.

Oh well. One can only try! Once fake history has been put in place .....

And to end up, here are some pix from run-of-the-mill musicals of those splendid theatrical years of last century ..

Joseph Santley's production of All Over Town stayed strictly out-of-town

Advertising cards for some of long-touring farce comedies of the nineteenth century ... and one, more discreet one .. what seems to have been an adaptation of La Poupée de Nuremberg put together, with a pasticcio score of comic opera hits, for local girl Miss Bessie Louise King by Benjamin E Woolf of Boston. She trouped it for several seasons through Sheboygan Wisc, Appleton, Green Bay, Pesthigo, Marinette, Oconto, New London ... with a support team of four ... and in between headlined Moss's [Boston Operatic] Minstrels ...

Bessie Louise (1855- ), 'late of the Corinne Merrymakers', went on to a long career as a soprano in comic opera and in vaudeville (I see her, still, performing in variety, in 1914, billed as 'the Irish prima donna', doing 'Swanee', 'Il Trovatore', 'classic statuary' and comedy patter), during which career she appeared as Miranda Maple in Willie's musical Bluff (1885), alongside female impersonator Charles Heywood.

My tirelessly researching colleague, Betsy, tells me that Bessie Louise married or 'married' American gymnast/acrobat/trapezist Frank Perez, and they can be seen in the 1900 census of Kansas City, with their children Joseph (b 1897) and Minnie Louise (b 1899). Frank is seemingly still doing his 'novelty aerial act of surprises' in 1922 ...

Bessie Louise aged fortyish in variety

Flops are fashionable these days. Well, to all but the investors. So I guess their ephemera is equally desirable.

The Echo was produced at the Studebaker, Chicago 25 April 1910 with Richard Carle as star. By the time it opened 17 August 1910 at New York's Globe Theatre, he had departed. It closed after 53 performances. But Charles Dillingham thought it worth taking to the provinces. By the time it reached Washington, the week after the New York closure, Bessie McCoy had risen up the billing to take the top.

The Red Rose 

The Musical Bentleys

When I came across this photo, my immediate reaction to the rather-endearing couple pictured therein was 'ah, right, minor English entertainers ... sketch artists, maybe .. mother probably sang'. Piers and things ....  So I went looking, and ...

Well, of course, they weren't named Bentley. Oh, and they weren't English either. And they were married. But not to start with.

He was Benjamin Dwight Coonley, son of Holland Chadwick Coonley (1834-1919) of South Bend, Indiana. But father Coonley spent time in Australia, married Australian  Helen Mary (d 1908), and young Ben was actually born 7 February 1879 in Townsville, Queensland. His brother Charles Coridan Coonley had been born in New South Wales. Mr Coonley apparently worked as a carpenter. Anyway, Ben was not Australian for long. In 1881 the family moved to California, and they can be seen in the 1900 census, at 91 Clay, where 21 year-old Ben is working as a lithographer. Father is now an insurance agent.

But he's already got the showbiz bug. And he's performing locally. I see him at the Olympia Republican Club, 'an adept on the xylophone' in 1898 and thereafter.

She was Alice Dora Helms, born San Francisco, 27 January 1880, of a father, teamster Friedrich Helms from Hannover, Germany and his Irish-American wife, Kate.

The two of them moved quickly after that 1900 census. By June, they are in Baildon, Yorkshire, proffering an entertainment as 'The Musical Bentleys'. But they seem to have been there the previous year too with their 'musical melange, cinematograph and living marionettes'. The cinematograph was a 20 foot film of Kissing in a Tunnel, which they soon sold off ('only slightly damaged') as they advertised 'Wanted: piers, gardens, on shares or certainty...', adding 'FOS' to their description. 'From overseas' as the picked up dates 'This week Helmsmore, Bradford, Keighley, Haslingden, Colne ..' 'Victoria Pier, Blackpool'. Madame recited 'The Absent-Minded Beggar', but the part of the act that went down the best was their performance on 'a number of rare and curious instruments'

That was the part of the act which Ben and Alice developed, as they trouped the middle-bills of Britain with their 'musical and patter act'

My last sighting of them in Britain is on a bill at Cambridge, in 1918.  But they weren't in Britain all of the time ... in 1917-1918 they were in Australia and New Zealand , exceedingly popular with their 'monster xylophone' ...

They got grand billing when they visited Hawaii, where Ben's brother Charles (1871-1914) lived

And on several occasions they visited America, where I see them in 1908, 1910, 1911 ... oh, and 1904, when they got married 9 November, at Santa Clara. And 17 October 1918 when their daughter, Evelyn Maude, was born in San Francisco. What? That has to be an imitator in Cambridge. Or a misdated newspaper!

Ben stayed in the profession. In the 1930 census of Maine, Illinois he is listed as 'actor, unemployed, 51'. Alice is hemsticher 50. Yet I see an advertisement from Winnipeg advertising the Musical Bentleys with the world's biggest marimba ... and again in 1947 .. maybe they passed on 'the act as known'?

Alice died 29 June 1951 in San Francisco, Evelyn (Mrs Shafer) lived to be 100 and died in Florida only last year ...

I guess it was her heirs who sold the family scrapbooks, diaries and photographs on ebay ... I hope they found their way into a museum ...

'Evelyn Corland'