The Names of Some Recently Christened Theaters Indicate a Painful Lack
of Propriety and Variety.
The announcement that David Belasco will manage the new theater to be
built in Forty-Fourth Street, and will call it the Stuyvesant, adds
another appropriately named house to the group that has been growing up
in New York of late years. The Hudson, the New Amsterdam, the
Knickerbocker, the Manhattan and the Astor are all indigenous of the
soil and are to be commended.
Liberty is not bad, although, to be sure, it would be more happily
situated in Philadelphia than in Gotham. The Quaker City is now to make
a needed departure from its run on street nomenclature by calling the
house now building the William Penn Theater.
Speaking of Pennsylvania, it was too bad Pittsburgh sank the historic
Duquesne in “Belasco”—all right in itself, but the name Belasco loses
its force as a distinctive title when duplicated too many times. Three
cities now have theaters of this title—New York, Washington, and
Pittsburgh.
And Shuberts, more’s the pity, will soon be as thick as huckleberries in
August. The house that should be known by this name is the Princess in
New York, which would thereby be exchanging a cognomen perfectly
inappropriate in America, for one that would much better stand over one
house in New York than over twenty elsewhere.
It is a thousand pities that the name Booth was suffered to vanish from
over a theater’s doors when Booth’s, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and
Twenty-Third Street, was pulled down. All that remains of it is a bust
of Shakespeare in the side wall of McCreery’s, on the latter
thoroughfare.
It is odd, too, when you come to think of it, that we have no
Shakespeare Theater. It is a pity Charles Frohman did not use this—or at
any rate Globe (the name of the house Shakespeare managed) rather than
Empire. This might better have been Republic, which, when the Empire was
opened in 1893, was still in the market, not having been affixed to the
theater which Hammerstein built later and very soon passed over to
Belasco. Another absolutely footless theater name in the United States
is Savoy. Garrick is good, and Criterion not bad.