"Don’t Say 'Macbeth' . . . And other superstitions, traditions and secrets of the theater world"

by Juan A. Ramírez

[On 14, 17, 20, and 23 August 2020, I posted a four-part series called “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions” on Rick On Theater (the link is to the first installment).  Three months ago, in T, its magazine dedicated to fashion, living, beauty, holiday, travel, and design coverage that’s published 11 times a year, the New York Times published an article on a similar topic, but also covering some of the personal traditions in which theater folk engage behind the scenes. 

[Juan A. Ramirez’s article on some of these peculiar customs (including some I covered in my post) was published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 November 2025; it was posted on the paper’s website as “Don’t Say ‘Macbeth’ and Other Strange Rituals of the Theater World” on 8 November.]

Pulling back the curtain on the theater world’s strange rituals and enduring superstitions.

You may not have realized it, but there’s little chance you’ve heard anyone whistle inside a theater. In the old days, sailors often worked the ropes backstage, bringing to show business codes like command whistles. So a whistle meant as a compliment, or to get a person’s attention, might have landed a piece of scenery on someone’s head.

Theater is full of these customs — many arising, like most rituals, from hazy origins. Still, show people hold on to them. In an industry that hopes to conjure the same wonder every night (with wildly different results), there’s comfort in tradition, especially if it reaches back decades or even centuries. Some, as the 56-year-old Broadway wardrobe supervisor and costume designer Patrick Bevilacqua [The Great Gatsby (2024-Present)] says, are “rituals of consistency” — the private fist bumps or helpful Listerine sprays during a backstage quick change, which must be “choreographed within an inch of its life” to keep the show running smoothly. Others are spiritual; according to the actress Lea Salonga [Miss Saigon (1991-2001): Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, Theatre World Award; Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends (upcoming in April)], 53, “any practice where everyone can see each other as human” is necessarily grounding.

Some are individual: The actor Hugh Jackman [The Boy From Oz (2003-04): Tony for Best Actor in a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical, Theatre World Award; ], 56, last seen as the lead in “The Music Man” [2022-23] on Broadway in 2023, buys scratch-off lottery tickets for each production member every Friday; occasionally, someone wins a few hundred dollars. Some are secretive, like stealing costumes after a show closes, while others are blared through the house, as when stage managers announce on loudspeakers before a performance, “It’s Saturday night on Broadway,” a reminder that the wearying workweek is almost over.

Length dictates quantity: Longer-running productions are more likely to develop more idiosyncratic traditions. This means that in New York, Broadway is more ritualistic than Off, and musicals outmatch straight plays for the same reason. The 64-year-old actress Amra-Faye Wright [Chicago (1996-Present)], for example, has for about a decade been painting murals each season backstage for “Chicago,” the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history [the current production has run 11,105 regular performances (as of 16 February)], which opened in 1975 [until 1977] and has been up since its 1996 revival [Wright was in it 2006-24]. All agree that London is more laid-back, despite having some quirks, such as everyone in the cast and crew banging on the windows facing the National Theatre’s interior courtyard on opening night; or the Baddeley cake, an intricately decorated and frosted dessert that varies from show to show but has been served with punch at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, every Jan. 6 since 1795. It’s named after Robert Baddeley [1733-94; best known for playing Moses in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal], an actor who played minor roles there and who in his will bequeathed funds for the annual festivity.

As the 43-year-old British director Michael Longhurst [artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse theater (2019-2024; directed Broadway transfer of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change (2020-21), which originated at Chichester Festival Theatre); nominated for Tony for Best Revival of a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical] says, most are “a mix of the practical and superstitious.” Actors tell one another to break a leg — maybe because “good luck” is gauche; maybe because they’re an understudy wishing a principal would just bow out; maybe because a theater’s “legs” are the thin drapes that frame the stage, which you’d cross if receiving an ovation; or maybe just because they know it’s a phrase they ought to keep alive.

It’s like when the actress Patti LuPone [Evita (1979-83): Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical; Anything Goes (1987-89): Drama Desk for Outstanding Actress in a Musical; Gypsy (2008-09): Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, Drama Desk for Outstanding Actress in a Musical; Company (2021-22): Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical, Drama Desk for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical; Theatre World’s John Willis Award for Lifetime Achievement (2021)], 75, was given some of Ethel Merman’s [1908-84] jewels by the wardrobe supervisor Adelaide Laurino [1929-2003] to wear in the Broadway musical “Evita” in 1979. She didn’t just steal them because . . . well, who wouldn’t? She stole them because, as she says, “these will be passed down, but [the recipient] won’t be given the information that will be lost to time.”

Cards From the Neighbors and a Telegram From Bette Midler

It’s grueling work to get a play ready, which is why there’s a collective sense of celebration when a new show opens. For the past few decades, the casts and companies of Broadway productions have signed cards bearing their shows’ logos, then sent them to the newest show on its opening night. What were once couriered over were later faxed and are now sometimes sent as PDFs that are printed out by stage managers. While some shows keep them up throughout their run, most are displayed about as long as Christmas cards.

Aside from these well wishes, companies can expect gifting tables backstage full of presents from their producers and admirers and from one another. These can range from bottles of Champagne and homemade cookies to elaborate offerings like branded bomber jackets, tote bags and alarm clocks. Before the pandemic, Tiffany key chains featuring a show’s artwork would often be distributed in New York. The American actress Marisha Wallace [Aladdin (2014-Present); Something Rotten! (2015-17)], 39, who works mostly in London, says that British openings are not “as extravagantly gifted because U.K. people aren’t really gifters.” She learned this when she showed up to “Dreamgirls” in 2016 [Savoy Theatre, West End, through 2019] with T-shirts and personalized mugs for everyone, only to receive cookies in return. (Brits do, however, enjoy closing-night gifts.)

Personalized presents, as always, are the most appreciated. Salonga, who will return to Broadway in the Stephen Sondheim revue “Old Friends” next spring, remembers her first starring role (at 9 in 1980 as Annie in the musical’s Manila premiere), when her aunt gave her a small brass elephant. She now collects these figurines in her dressing room, pointing them toward the stage for good luck. The actress Tracie Bennett [End of the Rainbow (2012): Tony nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play, Theatre World], 63, still marvels at the books — some filled with recipes inspired by the production — that Denis O’Hare [Take Me Out (2003-04): Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play; Sweet Charity (2005): Drama Desk for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical], 62, gave to his co-stars in Sondheim’s posthumous Off Broadway show, “Here We Are,” last year at the Shed [2023-24] in New York: “He didn’t need to do it,” she says, “and that’s the point!”

LuPone, a self-described “instinctual archivist,” keeps many opening-night tokens in a curio cabinet at her Connecticut home, including an “Evita” death mask and an egg filled with small wooden statuettes of the actors from the 1987 revival of “Anything Goes” and mounted on a music box. The 46-year-old actress Mandy Gonzalez [In the Heights (2008-11): Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance], now appearing in the Broadway revival of “Sunset Boulevard” [2024-Present], has long kept two significant gifts: a Western Union telegram sent by Bette Midler [b. 1945], for whom she used to sing backup, the first time Gonzalez originated a role on Broadway, in 2002’s “Dance of the Vampires” [through 2003]; and an iPod engraved with a message from Yoko Ono [b. 1933] for the 2005 premiere of the musical “Lennon” [2005].

Another backstage tradition was started by Alyce Gilbert, 81, who in 2007 became the only wardrobe supervisor to be honored with a Tony [Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre], along with the late dresser Bobbye Sue Albrecht. Gilbert’s first Broadway show was the memorable run of “A Chorus Line” at the Shubert Theatre in 1975 [through 1990 (6,137 performances)]. When Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’” [1978-92 (1,774 performances)] stole several of that production’s members three years later, she and Albrecht procured a glass candy jar, spelled “Dancin’Wardrobe” on its lid with stick-on letters and took it next door to the Broadhurst. “It was the first time anyone had sent something that was really for the wardrobe department,” Gilbert says. Almost five decades later, she’s sent a jar to most musicals, and some plays, on their opening night. Filled with peppermints — they’re good for the throat and, unlike chocolates, won’t stain costumes — the jars remain in the wardrobe department for all to enjoy; crew members take them home, or to their next show, upon closing. Bevilacqua, the wardrobe supervisor for Broadway’s “The Great Gatsby,” says that collecting them has become an industry badge of honor.

You Must Touch the Robe

One of Broadway’s most regimented traditions has an impressive musical theater pedigree: In 1950, a chorus member on “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” [1949-51]. took a robe from a fellow chorine and sent it to a friend who was opening that night in the ensemble of “Call Me Madam” [1950-52] starring Ethel Merman [1908-84; Call Me Madam: Tony for Best Actress in a Musical; Hello, Dolly! (1964-70): Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance; Special Tony Award for her lifetime contributions to show business (1972)]. The recipient later added a cloth cabbage rose from Merman’s costume to the pale pink robe and gave it to a chorus member in the next opening musical, “Guys and Dolls” [1950-53], and an informal ritual was born. Since they traveled so quickly from contract to contract, Broadway dancers were often called “gypsies,” so the similarly itinerant garment was called the Gypsy Robe until 2018, when members of the union Actors’ Equity Association voted to rename it the Legacy Robe. [See my post “The Gypsy Robe” (4 November 2012).]

Equity had taken over the robe’s distribution long before then [1982], codifying the rules when it became obvious it was being improperly handled or accounted for, awarded based on popularity or bogged down by heavy additions such as shoes. These days, the robe is presented on the opening night of a Broadway musical to the ensemble member with the most Broadway chorus credits. An elaborate ceremony — which occurs half an hour before curtain, with the entire company (and past recipients) invited to attend — is led by the robe’s previous caretaker, who recites an Equity-written speech before revealing its new keeper. Once outfitted, that person circles the stage counterclockwise three times as each cast member reaches out to touch the robe for good luck. Then there’s a dash through the theater as the recipient visits each dressing room to bless the production.

The performer Jeffrey Schecter, 51, held back tears while receiving his second robe when a revival of “Once Upon a Mattress” [2024] opened this past August. [Schechter received his first robe, then still called the Gypsy Robe, for Fiddler on the Roof (2015-16).] Katie Webber, 43, who presented him with the robe that she’d received for “The Great Gatsby” [2024-Present] says the tradition not only honors the performers who form the backbone of any Broadway musical but also speaks to the profession’s unsteady, nice-work-if-you-can-get-it nature: “The longer I’m in this business, the more I’m shocked I’m still working.”

The wardrobe supervisor oversees the application of their production’s panel to the robe, which often bears the name of its recipient and includes signatures from all cast members. Bevilacqua says he likes to incorporate costume trims so that “in 100 years, people can see these were the fabrics we were using.” Once a robe is filled up, it’s archived by Equity, although a few of the 35 or so robes have been retired to the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, the Museum of the City of New York and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The robe that Schecter recently received had denim patches representing the down-home sensibilities of the previous season’s “Shucked” [2023-24], and there was also a black panel from the 2023 “Sweeney Todd” revival [through 2024] on one of the robe’s floor-length sleeves with a line on it from the show in blood-red yarn: “At last, my right arm is complete again.”

Falling Pigs, Dollar Fridays and Other Diversions

All productions must find ways to make coming to work every day fun and surprising. The wardrobe crew on the 2024 Tony-winning play “Stereophonic” [2024-25] started an odd tradition in which cast and crew members take turns dropping a five-inch-long silicone pig down the four flights of the John Golden Theatre’s stairwell when the actors receive their five-minute “places” call before the second act. Many people begin lending libraries of favorite books. During his ongoing stint in the musical “Hadestown” [2019-Present] the actor Jordan Fisher [Hamilton (2015-Present); Dear Evan Hansen (2016-22); Sweeney Todd (2023-24)], 30, also created his own more unique communal space: a stageside calibration station that acts as a type of shrine to which the company contributes crystals, stones, toys and flowers. According to Wallace, many London companies play a game in which everyone affixes a baby picture to the wall and then attempts to guess who’s who.

But the most widespread — and lucrative — activity is Dollar Fridays, a raffle that Bevilacqua half-jokes is “where we make our money.” The rules are simple: Someone (typically the production stage manager) passes around a kitty before the Friday evening performance; anyone is welcome to pitch in a dollar or more with their name written on it. Variations occur: Whole dressing rooms can enter as a unit, and famous actors are known to chip in extra. The winner is announced later in the evening — some productions do it during intermission — usually by the person organizing it. Certain shows allow participants to use Venmo. “But then,” laments the 43-year-old former “Stereophonic” stage manager, Erin Gioia Albrecht [A Strange Loop (2022--23)], “you can’t spread the dollar around the Theater District.”

A Bright Light to Ward Off Accidents — and Spirits

A ghost light is an exposed bulb that the head electrician or another crew member leaves center stage after hours so that nobody falls and hurts themselves in the dark. But for those with one foot in the supernatural world — and, as Albrecht says, “it’s certainly a superstitious industry” — the light is there to keep evil spirits away . . . or to provide friendly ghosts with a pleasant overnight experience. Many believe that every house on Broadway, the West End and beyond is haunted by any number of specters: the theater’s original owner, making sure that things are running smoothly; an aggrieved actor, still out for that final bow; a doomed showgirl, cursed to remain in destiny’s chorus. [Refer to my post on “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms,” referenced above: Part 1 explains the ghost light, and Parts 3 and 4 recount many theater ghost legends.]

Gonzalez, who starred in “Hamilton” from 2016 to 2022, recalls going into the cavernous Richard Rodgers Theatre to collect her belongings shortly after Covid-19 shut down Broadway for 18 months [March 2020-June 2021]. “The ghost light was the only light on,” she says. “Even though we were in a pandemic, I was proud the tradition stayed — one day we were going to reopen, and we needed good vibes.”

Other Curses and Hauntings

“I don’t even mind a poltergeist,” says LuPone, who believes she was haunted by Eva Perón’s [1919-52] ghost throughout multiple runs of “Evita.” In the world of pretend, she adds, “everything that goes along with the theater — the magic, the superstitions — just enhances one’s performance.” But even for nonbelievers, there’s charm to be found in eerier traditions. Salonga, who doesn’t consider herself “one of those people that attracts supernatural beings,” would nonetheless offer a greeting while walking backstage at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to whichever ghosts might be haunting it, including the so-called Man in Gray, a mysterious figure with a cloak, sword and tricorn hat who supposedly roams around there. [Salonga has been at the Drury Lane twice: she premièred Miss Saigon there in 1989-99, winning an Olivier Award for her performance, and she returned for Lea Salonga in Concert at Drury Lane on 26 June 2024.]

Wallace learned the hard way that even practical customs can turn metaphysical. When Michael Ball [b. 1962], her co-star [as Edna Turnblad] in the 2021 London Coliseum production of “Hairspray,” caught her whistling backstage, he warned of bad times to come. No sailors dropped any beams on her head, but most of the cast soon came down with Covid, forcing the musical to temporarily close. And Gonzalez admits that she’s not sure whether “Dance of the Vampires” bombed (it closed just over a month after opening) because of the material or because she didn’t touch the Legacy Robe during its ceremony.

Perhaps the industry’s best-known bylaw is that, unless acting in Shakespeare’s early 17th-century play, one should never say the word “Macbeth” inside a theater — otherwise you risk ruining the current production. The origins of this are predictably murky. The play traffics in things that might very well incur a hex — witches, hauntings, grisly murders — but one possible source could be the simple fact that, in an era when most theater companies operated in repertory (performing a rotating selection of popular works), “the Scottish play,” as the piece can be safely referred to, was a guaranteed moneymaker. If your season was failing, it might be time to stage “Macbeth.”

The way to lift the curse — which LuPone enforced during a 2008 revival of “Gypsy,” when its director and playwright, Arthur Laurents [1917-2011], accidentally uttered the word during previews, after which a cast member broke their pelvis — is for the perpetrator to exit the theater, turn three times, spit over their left shoulder, swear, then say a line from another of Shakespeare’s works or knock on the theater door to be allowed back in.

Shakespeare, in fact, invites a fair amount of shibboleths. As Longhurst says, “If your repertoire is classical or Greek plays, you begin to connect to the ancient rituals.” A few years ago, the director learned of a site-specific one at Shakespeare’s Globe in London: All shows there must end in a newly choreographed jig — or chance a calamity. Longhurst was skeptical when directing a production of John Ford’s 17th-century play “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” in 2014 (“You finish and everyone is dead, and it’s like, ‘Well, now we get up and do a dance?’”) but appreciated the creative challenge and came to see it as a way to counteract the show’s grim finale.

That’s hardly the only jinx that verges on the comical. Rumor has it that Daniel Frohman [1851-1940], the early 20th-century producer-manager of Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre [1886-1909], would wave a white handkerchief from his office overlooking the stage whenever his overacting wife, Margaret Illington [1879-1934], needed to rein in her performance. Some actors, in flashes of ego death, still admit to seeing that hankie today.

[Juan A. Ramirez is a New York-based Venezuelan-American writer and critic focused on film, theater, and all forms of pop culture, as well as queer issues.  His writing has been featured in the New York Times, New York magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, them, INTO, HuffPost, DigBoston, Exeunt NYC, Theatrely, and the Huntington News.

[I didn’t cover the personal back-stage traditions of theater folk in my “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms.”  I had some practices of my own that I tried to keep up, however.  At the first theater at which I worked in New York City, I began bringing in brownies for my castmates.  I guess I did it about once a week during performances, and each batch was a little different.  The first tray were simply straight chocolate brownies, but when those went over well, I got adventurous.  I made mocha brownies by adding coffee to the batter, and chocolate-mint brownies.  I put peanut butter drops in one batch, and I even added a taste of brandy to one.  (And no, I never made pot or hash brownies.)

[I didn’t keep that up, though.  That theater was just a couple of blocks down from my apartment, so it was easy to bring the tray of brownies with me, but later I worked at theaters all over Manhattan—and a couple in New Jersey.  I retreated to an easier treat.  

[There were a couple of unusual toy stores in my neighborhood, and another shop that sold craft items from indigenous people from all over the world.  I looked for small gifts that either seemed evocative of my fellow actors and the director, or ones that seemed to match the characters they were playing—hopefully with a little humor.

[That got hard to keep up, so in the end, I finally just bought assorted mini-bottles of liquor.  One of the liquor stores near my apartment sold the little bottles like the ones served on airplanes.  That turned out not to be much fun, either to shop for or to give; there was no imagination in it.

[I also made it a practice for opening night to send the cast a telegram, following the old tradition of years ago.  I think the first ones I sent were actual Western Union telegrams, but then I learned of a service that just did opening night theater telegrams.  The messages came on special forms with colorful designs specifically reflecting show business, and the service, whose name I no longer remember—I’m sure it’s no longer operating anyway—guaranteed delivery just before curtain.]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 4

 

[Part 4 of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” below, starts with the theater director’s return to New York City after his two-year sojourn in New Mexico and the Four Corners.  Having formed his second performing group, the Appleseed Circus, the first he launched on his own, Shapiro assembled a group of actors to initiate his second and most significant troupe, the Shaliko Company, whose name was a product of his New Mexico experience. 

[All of his previous experiences and influences coalesced to guide Shapiro’s experimentation in founding Shaliko.  As you’ll see, the company’s earliest productions were manifestations of what he’d learned up to this point.  

[You’ll also see that many of Shapiro’s childhood experiences and interests began to show up in his artistic work, as they would continue to do for the rest of his life.  Unhappily, the same was true of his problems, faults, and obsessions.

[Furthermore, this section of the bio looks at Shapiro’s contentious relationship with the press, a development which had profound effects on the theater artist’s work and life.

[As I have, starting with the second installment of the bio post, I strongly suggest to all readers who haven’t been following along since Part 1, that they go back and pick up the earlier segments of “A Biography” (16, 19, and 22 April) before reading this segment.  As with any chronological narrative, later parts will make more sense if you know what went before.]

Returning to New York in 1971 after the dissolution of the Appleseed Circus, Shapiro sought out the actors he’d known in the 1960s at New York University’s theater program.  Among Shapiro’s other acquaintances at NYU had been director André Gregory (b. 1934), founder of the Manhattan Project; Omar Shapli, who started the improvisational group Section 10; and director-teacher Richard Schechner, who launched the Performance Group (forerunner of the Wooster Group).  They’d all started their companies after studying with Grotowski and employed, in one way or another, the techniques Grotowski taught.  

Filled with ideas by Kass, Carl Weber, and Grotowski, and inspired by the examples of his predecessors—certainly because of the Becks’ influence, and Theater Genesis’s example—Shapiro put Shaliko together in January 1972 using former NYU students, including Candace Tovar, who was now his wife; Margaret Pine; Tom Crawley; and Linda Putnam.

The first Shaliko (Shapiro would re-form the troupe twice over its existence) was a group of young actors committed to exploring together the possibilities of performance as an expression of personal, artistic, and social concerns.  The overarching aim of this ensemble was “a new synthesis of theatrical forms that is directly rooted in our belief in the importance of learning to speak the truth in public to a public that has been conditioned since childhood by euphemism, packaging and illusion.”

From its formation, Shaliko was a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary ensemble of American performers and collaborators of European, African, and Hispanic descent as well as artists from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, drawing on the traditions of Native American cultures, European experimentalism, and Asian classical arts. 

In the early months of its formation starting in late January 1972, The Shaliko Company spent time getting to know one another through games and exercises.  They devoted 30 hours a week—outside their bread-and-butter jobs—to physical training (10-15 hours) and work on texts (15-20 hours). 

Actor Christopher McCann (b. 1952), an early member of the ensemble, recalled that exercises like “blind combat,” in which the actors wear blindfolds and circle one another wielding wooden swords and out of which eventually grew the troupe’s first project, produced “a kind of physicality that ensued with people searching each other out—that enlivened your senses to what was happening in the room even though you couldn’t see anything.” 

Shapiro described the process of arriving at Shaliko’s first production:

We spent two months exploring our range.  Seeing what we could do and how far we could push ourselves.  Developing techniques that could use the new possibilities we were discovering.  By March [1972], we became more text-oriented and started trying out material.  We went through texts rather quickly, using them as tools to further our own growth, pushing them to their limits, then moving on to richer material. . . .  We were looking for a script that spoke directly to the needs we felt we shared with our audience, a script strong enough to take all we could put of ourselves into it and still maintain its own integrity.  By June, we had discovered the Greeks.

Not surprisingly, considering Shapiro’s early literary aspirations, among the earliest texts with which Shaliko experimented were poetry.  After testing Kenneth Koch’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1962), “a grade school skit, celebrating the American myth,” in February 1972 and discovering that it was “too thin” and “would not bear our weight,” the nascent Shaliko took up W. H. Auden’s (British-American; 1907-73) ballad “Victor,” a 1937 narrative of how modern society produces lost souls—elements of which sentiment found their way into Strangers in 1990.

Company literature stated that “Victor,” in its rendition of the story of a man who is so conditioned by his father’s rigid moral upbringing that he is alienated from society, “reflects our interest in making theatrical sense out of narrative material.” 

(The theme of parents sacrificing their children was a constant of Shapiro’s artistic work.  It appeared both literally and figuratively in many Shaliko works over the years.)

In May came Allen Ginsberg’s (1926-97) “September on Jessore Road” (1971), a long lyric poem describing the devastating 1968 floods and famine in India and chastising the U.S. for using its wealth to bomb Southeast Asians instead of sending humanitarian assistance to desperate Indians. 

At the same time that Shapiro and his new troupe were planning to work on Ginsberg’s poem, they also intended to begin work on another poetic theater piece, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918/1921 Mystery-Bouffe, a celebration of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik establishment of the Soviet Union.  This is significant, even though the planned “street show” adaptation never occurred, because a decade-and-a-half later, Shaliko would develop a modern version of this play about revolution (see “Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018). 

During the planned rehearsals of Mystery-Bouffe, the company wanted to develop an adaptation of William Golding’s The Inheritors, a 1955 novel which relates the destruction of the primitive Neanderthals by the more advanced Homo sapiens, but ultimately couldn’t secure the rights.  Then, after a year, the demand to produce became “pretty intense” and, “blind combat” having evolved into the Trojan War, Children of the Gods, a composite of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis, premièred in February 1973 at Philip Arnoult’s (b. 1941) Theatre Project in Baltimore.  (See my post, “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021.)

In May, Shaliko presented it in New York as part of an NYU Ensemble Theatre Project festival, a venture intended as a showcase for the work of small performing troupes spawned by the School of the Arts.  Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, a friend from the NYU days who followed Shapiro’s work from the beginning, pronounced Children “incredibly exciting.” 

The inaugural production also began Shaliko’s work on some of Shapiro’s most fundamental techniques and theatrical principals.  His employment of circus arts was fully in evidence in Children, which led inevitably to the work on the real-time event (see my post on 6 July 2021), which is dependent on the audience-performer relationship. 

The connection is straightforward.  Theater artists create illusions, Hovey Burgess, the NYU circus-arts teacher, believed.  “Circus is more real” because, he insisted, “[e]verything that happens in the circus should really be happening.”  What the audience sees, Burgess pointed out, is what is happening at that moment.  These notions formed the foundation of Shaliko productions for the rest of Shapiro’s career.

Also starting with Children, Shapiro developed an actor-audience contract that made “the audience the active participant that connects the dots,” under the influence of Russian and Soviet master filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and theater experimentalist Vsevolod Meyerhold (Russian; 1874-1940). 

As New Leader critic Albert Bermel (1927-2013) noted, “Around and above the playing area . . . stretches a rectangle of scaffolding with plushy mattresses.  Loafing on them, spectators unavoidably become the gods looking down on their would-be worshipers,” with, as Shapiro put it, “the actors . . . always doing everything for the audience hoping the audience would love them and give them favor.”

A similar relationship between the performers and the spectators was established in almost all of Shaliko’s productions throughout its existence.  Shapiro frequently affirmed: “What I want to do is to make passionate art involved with the audience.”

In the earliest shows, such as Children of the Gods, it was made clear to the audience what its role was.  As Shaliko and Shapiro matured, the specific audience-performer relationship became less explicit—but it was always part of Shapiro’s production plan.

The explorations of the real-time experience, the theater as thought-provoker, and the involvement of the audience in the performance event all had their most undiluted expression in Shaliko’s second production, Brecht’s The Measures Taken. 

The play, workshopped in March 1974 at Baltimore’s Theatre Project and on 30 September at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, introduced Shaliko to Joseph Papp (1921-91) who saw a performance at NYU and offered the young company the New York Shakespeare Festival as their home.  (Under Dickinson’s sponsorship, Shaliko toured Pennsylvania, including several union halls and prisons.)

The production, described as “a vigorous American adaptation,” moved into the Public Theater in October and Shaliko remained in residence there until 1976.

Measures, one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or “teaching plays,” was written in 1930.  The play’s first English translation had been commissioned in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities when it questioned Brecht, but the play’s apparent defense of Communist Party actions found little sympathy at either HUAC or, evidently, many theater groups. 

(Ironically, the socialist Guardian, New York City’s weekly newspaper of the Communist Party USA, dubbed Shaliko’s production “anticommunist” and declared, “In the guise of ‘honoring’ Brecht it is actually a stab in the back.”)

Shapiro, in fact, saw in the play’s investigation of the murder of a Young Comrade by a detachment of Soviet Agitators sent to China to foment revolution, a debate on political terrorism, a way to study “the paradoxes of radical committment [sic].”

Shaliko selected Measures almost by accident.  Following Children of the Gods, the company had begun work on a stage version of H. G. Wells’s (1866-1946) The Time Machine, one of several “fantasy projects” Shapiro developed over the years because of his continuing interest in science fiction and utopian visions.  The production never materialized, and the company began tossing about for another project. 

Shapiro had earlier suggested The Measures Taken, but the company rejected it as too “hard-edged,” not to mention that, as a learning play, it was considered boring.  (Brecht’s Lehrstücke were meant as indoctrination for young communist party members; they weren’t intended for performances before the general public.)

While Shapiro was away from New York in Saint Paul “sitting shiva” for his father (who had died on 15 January 1974), the company reconsidered the Brecht play.  When the director returned from Minnesota in late January 1974, he found the actors reading Measures. 

After Children, a number of the original company members had left Shaliko, including Tovar; Shapiro was in the throes of reorganizing the company; his marriage was dissolving, and he’d just left his hometown after Irving’s death.  He threw himself into the rehearsals for Measures, which he began to see not as a staged lecture, but “as a rip-roaring kind of . . . kung-fu Western.” 

In Measures, the role of the audience was the most specific of any Shaliko production.  Shapiro used direct address between the Control Council and the spectators and at the outset, the Chief Commissioner states: “[W]e are asking you to represent students.” 

Because the Control Council questioned the theatergoers about what was going on in the play, the real-time event was also most obvious, and the play was different every night.  “Every night the audience went out arguing with each other,” which, of course, was what Shapiro had formed Shaliko to provoke.  These techniques were never as blatant again.

Measures was well received by audiences, eventually playing over 300 performances, joining in repertory Shaliko’s April 1975 offering at the Public, an environmental production of Ibsen’s Ghosts (see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (shaliko’s ghosts, 1975), 6 September 2014). 

Shapiro’s model for Ghosts was a séance with “the actors haunting the audience, as if spirits of the past; the audience haunting the characters, spirits of the future,” so designer Jerry Rojo (1935-2018) created for the Public’s small (99 seats) Susan Stein Shiva Theater, a former movie theater, “an environment of lush Victoriana, where the audience pockets function as walls separating the rooms of this Victorian environment” which he thought of as “womb-like.”  Shapiro was most pleased with the lighting:

To encourage an historical environmental reality for audience/performer there was an authentic use of props and light.  The lighting was created by using period practical electric light fixtures (1910) to achieve a natural incandescent light.  And the performers were directed to actually control the illumination for the play.

Shapiro’s point with the Shaliko production of Ghosts was that the past haunts the present; he evoked it in the program with an allusion to the Norwegian playwright: “We sail,” Shapiro quoted Ibsen (from the 1875 poem “A Letter In Rhyme”), “[w]ith a corpse in the cargo.”

Set designer Jerry Rojo noted that the “actors . . . really use their own private worlds as catalysts for the roles,” which is a fine thumbnail definition of basic Stanislavskian acting. 

The description also suggests the seeds of what would become “testimony” (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013), though Shapiro pointed out that Ghosts was Shaliko’s first show in which the actors didn’t play directly to the audience.

In Children and Measures, the spectators were acknowledged presences for the actors—they were the gods to the actors’ Greeks in Children and students being indoctrinated in party practice in Measures—but in Ghosts, there was no substantive contact between the spectators and the actors.

This form of audience-performer interaction became the norm for Shaliko productions, a direct parallel to Grotowski’s practice, though sometimes the spectators of both Grotowski’s performances and Shapiro’s didn’t recognize their roles. 

In The Yellow House, for instance, the audience was supposed to stand in for Theo van Gogh (Dutch; 1857-91), the painter’s brother, but the relationship was never acknowledged.  (In the first version, in fact, an actor portrayed Theo from a microphone behind the audience, who never saw him.) 

In Ghosts, the spectators were the unacknowledged spirits of the Alving house, and Shapiro’s séance paradigm helps explain his interest in scenes which weren’t so much seen as overheard, a tactic that disturbed some reviewers.

Shaliko’s third production, or its critical reception, revealed something else about Shapiro’s theatrical world.  Shapiro was developing a fraught relationship with the press. 

Shapiro insisted that most audiences responded with “eagerness and enthusiasm.”  Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), critic and longtime editor of the Best Plays annuals, called the production “distinguished” and Richard Schechner proclaimed, “The show is very good, and important.  People should see it[.  Y]ears from now they may lie and pretend they did.”  

Peter Kass, Shapiro’s former acting teacher at NYU, even went to the length of sending Joseph Papp a telegram asking, “Do you know that the most extraordinary production of Ghosts is being given by the Shaliko Company at the Public Theater.”

In the New York-area press, only Barbara Ettorre of Women’s Wear Daily and Emory Lewis of The Record in New Jersey’s suburban Bergen County praised the production, with Lewis writing that Shapiro “has staged this probing play with extraordinary finesse.  He choreographed every movement.  The work becomes a dance of life.”  (Readers should note that in years past, both Women’s Wear Daily and the Bergen Record were considered significant critical voices in New York theater.)

In St. Louis, according to Judy Newmark, Shapiro “endowed Henrik Ibsen’s classic with the vitality and strength that may have characterized its original performance before the turn of the century.”  Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post that Shapiro’s “inventive staging . . . produces the immediacy that can draw the audience into the world of the play” and that Shaliko’s “most original conception of the play . . . never falls back on standard interpretations.” 

Many critics, however, including Clive Barnes of the Times, Marilyn Stasio of Cue, Julius Novick of the Village Voice, Martin Gottfried and Richard Watts of the New York Post, Edith Oliver of the New Yorker, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News, didn’t appreciate Shapiro’s concept of the production.

(It’s notable that the New York Post ran two reviews, one by Martin Gottfried and one by Richard Watts, both negative, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News felt strongly enough that he published two negative reviews himself, one in the daily paper and one in the Sunday edition.  The Times also ran a daily notice by Clive Barnes and then Walter Kerr published his Sunday column.)

Calling the production “thoroughly mindless,” Timesman Kerr (1913-96), who carried a lot of weight in the New York theater world, gave an entirely negative appraisal of the performance in his Sunday “Arts and Leisure” column of 13 April 1975.  It was so dismissive that it compelled Shapiro to write a rebuttal, which ran on 11 May. 

The Shaliko director wrote:

Are we going to allow these guardians of public taste to stand between us and fresh experience, or can we somehow restore criticism to its proper role as a stimulant to discussion and invention, rather than a limit imposed by a select few on what artists and audiences are allowed to say, feel, do, dare?

Noting that “the pattern of rejection . . . finally became clear,”  Shapiro and the New York Shakespeare Festival (later renamed the Public Theater) published an announcement for Ghosts in the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News which juxtaposed the critical response in 1891, the play’s London début, with that in New York in 1975.  

Later that same year, Shapiro spoke at “a colloquium of critics”—a regular meeting of the New York City membership of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA)—at La MaMa “and made the mistake of saying exactly what I thought.”

In a 1991 Village Voice column, Shapiro wrote a broadside in which he alleged, “After 25 years in the theater, I know what everybody knows.  The critics hate the theater [and] the artists hate the critics . . . .”

(The Voice appended to the column as an epigraph the famous quotation from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!” just to be certain no one missed Shapiro’s point.  The author affirmed that he hadn’t used this quotation; the paper’s editors inserted it.  Indeed, Shapiro’s typescript of the essay doesn’t include the quotation.)

Pretty much from Ghosts on, Shapiro and most of the New York City theater writers had an adversarial relationship—and Shapiro was mostly on the losing side.

[Part 4 is the mid-point in this eight-part biographical sketch of the experimental theater-maker Leonardo Shapiro.  Part 5, which I’ll be posting on Friday, 28 April, takes up the continuation of his history with The Shaliko Company, which he disbanded and restarted twice before closing it for good after 20 years.

[You’ll read about Shapiro’s brief stint as a freelance director and the end of his association with Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival.  This led to his relationship with Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.

[Please come back to Rick On Theater for the next installment of my biography of Leonardo Shapiro.  I’m sure you will find it revealing, for both those who knew the director and those who didn’t.]

Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 4

MORE GHOSTS

[You have reached the final installment of “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions,” my series on the paranormal beliefs of theater people.  The last two parts have been the stories of ghosts that haunt theaters around the country; Part 4, below, is a collection of tales of haunted New York City houses, especially those on Broadway.

[If you’re just coming upon this post, I invite you to go back and read the first three segments.  Parts 1 and 2, posted respectively on  Rick On Theater on 14 and 17 August, covered the superstitions held by actors and theater workers; Part 3, posted on 20 August, was my selection of ghost stories connected with several of North America’s regional playhouses  (one was a Canadian theater).]

Moving back to New York City, where there are lots of theater ghosts—some even with famous names, let’s go over to Brooklyn to the home of the Irondale Ensemble Project in Fort Greene.  Founded in New York City in 1983, the troupe’s home since 2008, the Irondale Theater, was converted from an abandoned, 160-year-old church Sunday school.  The theater has a wrap-around balcony surrounded by stained glass windows

“When people have stayed overnight, the sound of heavy boots walking in the capacious attic rumbles the ceiling,” has said the company’s executive director.  “We also have a storage room with a staircase that leads nowhere and often the temperature changes drastically there.  Needless to say that while the boots are walking and the temp is dropping, no one explores further.”

But the major league of U.S. theater is still Broadway, and the major league for theater ghosts has got to be the Great White Way.  Actor Tim Dolan, having gathered a passel of stories about haunted theaters while on a cross-country tour of Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, returned to New York and decdied that with all our theaters, “there must be crazy stories [here].”

Apparently he was right.  He began to research the legends of haunted Broadway, and in 2010, Dolan launched Broadway Up Close Walking Tours, followed in 2018 by The Ghostlight Tour: Haunted Broadway to follow through on his original idea.  For an hour and 45 minutes, tour participants cover a half mile of Manhattan’s Theatre District as the Up Close guide tells spooky stories about some of Broadway’s 41 houses.

(Broadway Up Close is providing virtual tours at this time.  For information in this service and other offerings, log onto the company’s website at https://www.broadwayupclose.com/.)

Arguably the most prominent theater ghost, if you don’t count Thespis (see Part 3), is the spirit of David Belasco (1853-1931), the theatrical producer, impresario, director, and playwright.  He built what is now the Belasco Theatre, which opened in 1907, at 111 West 44th Street, east of Broadway.  Originally named the Stuyvesant, the “Bishop of Broadway” (so called because he liked to wear a cassock and Roman collar) renamed it for himself in 1910; it’s now a Shubert theater, part of the holdings of Broadway’s largest theater-owning firm.

The penthouse was a 10-room apartment-office duplex for Belasco, and many theater folk believe the impresario remains in residence.  Some performers in the shows that played there have even claimed to have spotted him, dressed as he did in life and looking quite alive—no filmy, gauzy blur for David Belasco!—in the balcony or wandering the lobbies, sometimes speaking to theatergoers.  He might also step up to actors, shake their hands, and compliment them on their performances. 

It’s said that after Oh! Calcutta! an avant-garde musical revue created by Kenneth Tynan and renowned for full frontal male and female nudity, played at the theater in 1971-72, Belasco’s ghost stopped coming around. 

                                                                                                                

Performers and stage hands who’ve worked at the New Amsterdam Theatre, at 214 W. 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues (now operated by the Walt Disney Company), have seen nearly all the forms of haunting at one time or another.  They all blame onetime Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl Olive Thomas (1894-1920). According to Playbill magazine, Thomas manifests so often that the Disney management puts her photograph at all the entrances to the theater so employees can greet her when they arrive for work every day.  This is supposed to keep her mischief to a minimum.

Thomas’s death was tragic, though not really connected to the New Amsterdam.  She performed as a chorus girl at the theater for about a year, then in 1916, she went off to Hollywood and began a successful career in silent films.  In the same year, she married Jack Pickford (1896-1933), a film director and producer who was the younger brother of “America's Sweetheart” Mary Pickford (1892-1979).

Jack Pickford had a reputation for living a wild life—as did Thomas as well.  On a trip to Paris in 1920, Pickford is believed to have told Thomas that he had syphilis (the story varies in several details, though the infection was quite real).  That night, Thomas consumed her husband’s medication, mercury dichloride, a deadly poison if taken in large amounts. 

Whether she took the overdose accidentally—she was likely drunk and the label on the blue vial was in French—or deliberately is a matter of debate.  Nonetheless, Thomas died at the American Hospital outside Paris; she was 25. 

Thomas began haunting the New Amsterdam very soon thereafter.  She appeared throughout the ’20s and the ’30s, but her spirit became quiescent during the years starting in the middle of the century when the Theatre District began to decline.

When Disney took over the theater and started renovations in 1995, construction workers reported seeing a woman carrying a small, blue bottle.  When shows started being staged in the theater again, Thomas’s appearances became frequent, and they’ve continued through today.

The manifestations, which run the gamut from mere noises to full apparitions, are apparently non-threatening—though startling.  One night watchman in the early Disney era, however, quit on the spot when he saw a woman walk across the stage and disappear through a solid wall.

Thomas’s appearances are unpredictable, however; she doesn’t “‘perform’ on cue,” according to Playbill.  “She doesn’t appear on Halloween, for instance,” said the vice president of operations for Disney Theatrical Productions.  “When people try to find her, they can’t.  She tends to appear just at the moment we forget about her—when we’re busy putting in a new show or putting a new office in.  When there are changes happening.”

The Richard Rodgers Theatre at 226 West 46th Street, between Broadway and 8th Avenue was built in 1925 as Chanin's 46th Street Theatre; purchased by the Shubert brothers in 1931, it was renamed simply the 46th Street Theatre.  It went through a series of owners until the Nederlander Organization, Broadway’s second-largest theater-owners, purchased and renovated the theater and in 1990 renamed it in honor of the composer Richard Rodgers (of the famed Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein collaborations).  

The Rodgers has a history of incidents with the color red—the theater’s principal interior color.  According to actress Blanca Camacho of In the Heights, which played the Rodgers from 2008 to 2011, “There are reappearing red lipstick smudges in the ladies room.  They get painted and wiped but inevitably return.”

“Then three different people told me about the ‘Redheads,’” added Camacho, speaking of regular sightings of redheaded women.  Another Heights cast member, Tony Chiroldes, reported that he twice felt the presence of his mother (Vilma Carbia, 1930-2000), a sometimes-redheaded actress on Puerto Rican television during the ’50s and ’60s.  “Our beautiful red theatre must be a beacon for them,” concluded Camacho. 

(No source says so, but I wonder if this paranormal phenomenon is in any way connected to the fact that the Shuberts produced the spooky Herbert Fields-Dorothy Fields-Sidney Sheldon-David Shaw-Albert Hague murder-mystery musical Redhead in 1959 when the theater was still known as the 46th Street Theatre?  The show was directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, 1927-87; starred his redheaded soon-to-be wife, Gwen Verdon, 1925-2000; ran for 452 performances; and won six Tonys, including Best Musical.)

Other happenings, including apparitions usually attributed to the Redheads, are bathroom stall doors opening by themselves, dressing rooms issuing strange sounds, objects spontaneously falling off shelves, bizarre after-hours howling sounds, a door opening fully and closing slowly by itself, and chandeliers moving. 

Yet another actor in The Heights claimed to have seen the ghost of a small child just off stage during a performance.  Camacho, however, has been “assured that these are benevolent beings that like musicals as nothing bad ever happens during those times when music fills the Richard Rodgers Theatre.”

Ghosts mostly haunt old theaters; Playbill suggests houses built before 1930, but I’m not sure the spooks put that fine a point on it.  At least three spirits are believed to inhabit one of New York’s newer theaters: 1971’s Gershwin Theatre at 222 West 51st Street in midtown-Manhattan in the Paramount Plaza, on Broadway.

The building, a 48-story business high rise, was constructed by the Uris Building Corporation and was originally named the Uris Building; the theater incorporated in it was, therefore, called the Uris Theatre as well.  The skyscraper was sold and renamed for its new owners, the Paramount Investment Group.  In 1983, the theater was rechristened in honor of the brother team of composer George (1898-1937) and lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896-1983).

Reports suggest that there are three ghosts residing at the Gershwin.  The only one with a name is Drew (or Dennis); the two unnamed spooks are one who’s seen in a blue, 19th-century suit and the other in a white t-shirt.

A dancer in the Gershwin’s current, long-running Wicked (opened in 2013) was about to go on when he felt a tap on his shoulder.  He turned around, but there was no one near him.  When the dancer told other members of the cast and crew of this encounter, a wardrobe supervisor said he’d had the same experience from time to time though the years—always in the same spot in the theater.

Some years earlier, a stage manager working the same production was standing stage left with a cast member.  They looked up and thought they saw another performer watching the show from the wings.  The person disappeared suddenly behind a curtain, but the actor they thought they’d seen was actually on stage just a few feet away from them.

Reputedly the most haunted Broadway house is the storied Palace Theatre at 1564 Broadway (at W. 47th Street just east across 7th Avenue from Father Duffy Square and the TKTS discount-ticket booth).  From 1913, when it opened, through 1932, the Palace was the most sought-after booking in vaudeville.  “Playing the Palace” was the dream of all vaudevillians. 

(The reference even made it into the lyric of a Broadway musical—though it was a punning reference.  The song is “Very Soft Shoes” from act two of Once Upon a Mattress with book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer, and Dean Fuller; music by Mary Rodgers [daughter of Richard Rodgers, namesake of the Rodgers Theatre; see above]; and lyrics by Marshall Barer. 

(The première starred Carol Burnett and was directed by the legendary George Abbott and it débuted Off-Broadway at the Phoenix Theatre at 2nd Avenue and 12th Street, on the old Yiddish Rialto, in May 1959 before moving to Broadway where it played in four different houses—but not the Palace—until July 1960, a total of 470 performances.

(In the act two number, Matt Mattox, playing the Jester, sings about his father, a jester before him:

I am far from sentimental or romantic,

And I like to think I’m strictly up to date.

But at times the dancing gets a bit too frantic

in these hectic days of 1428.

          

So indulge me as I pause to raise my chalice

To a quaint and charming dance they used to do

In the days when my dear father played the palace,

Back in 1392.

(The play’s a retelling of “The Princess and the Pea,” so it’s set in the fairy-tale Middle Ages.  The “palace” the Jester sings of is, of course, the royal palace . . . but the reference to “playing the Palace” slips through nonetheless.  I have always loved this play, which I saw with Imogene Coca and Buster Keaton in Washington, D.C., in 1961—when I was about 14½.  “Very Soft Shoes” was one of my favorite numbers from the show and the line about the Palace just really tickled me!  It still does.)

But I digress . . . .  We were talking about ghost stories, not fairy tales.

In 1932, the Palace’s days as a vaudeville mecca ended and the theater began screening movies and hosting concerts.  It became a premier venue for concert performers like Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, Josephine Baker, and Shirley MacLaine.

(The Nederlander Organization bought the Palace Theatre in 1965 and the house went legit the next year with Cy Coleman. Neil Simon, and Dorothy Fields’s Sweet Charity directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse and starring Gwen Verdon.)

Garland set box-office records at her sold-out 19-week run of Judy Garland at the Palace “Two-A-Day” in 1951-52 and she returned to the theater in 1956-57 (15 weeks) and 1967 (4 weeks).  She was the darling of the Palace and its audiences. 

Her spirit is said still to haunt the great, old theater (which has mounted exhibits in its lobbies of Garland memorabilia and old photographs), especially on the “the Judy Garland Staircase.”  Garland would post herself on this hidden staircase at the house-left rear of the orchestra and smoke a cigarette or two before entering the stage.

During the run of the 2012-14 Annie revival, one actor claimed that when he was in a dressing room alone one night, he thought he heard a voice call “Judy.”  Now, Garland is the queen of the Palace’s celebrity spirits, but who could be calling her, and why, remains a Broadway mystery.

The Palace Theatre is reputed to be home to more ghosts than any other Broadway house.  “Among them,” lists Playbill, “is a mysterious figure who passes open doorways late at night, a child ghost who plays peekaboo in the mezzanine, a musician dressed in white who appears in the orchestra pit and a tight-rope walker (presumably from the theatre’s vaudeville days) whose appearance is said to foretell the viewer’s death.”

The musician, a cellist who played in the orchestra pit, last appeared to actress Andrea McArdle (the first Annie in 1977-78 at the Alvin Theatre) when she was performing Beauty and the Beast at the Palace in 1999.  The tight-rope walker is said to be Louis Borsalino who fell to his death during a performance when he was working without a safety net.

According to the New York Post, “Stagehands say that when the theater is empty, the ghost of [the vaudeville acrobat] can be seen swinging from the rafters.  He lets out a blood-curdling scream, then re-enacts his nose dive.”  Other sources have seen him walking a tight-rope from the house-left box up to the mezzanine. Either way, as a harbinger of death, this is not a ghost you should want to meet.

(The New York Times of Wednesday, 28 August 1935, reported the accident involving the 31-year-old Borsalino; however, the report listed him as “in a serious condition” with “a fracture of the pelvis, possible internal injuries and lacerations of the left arm.”  After a lifetime of performing, Borsalino died in 1963 in Pennsylvania.) 

One count is that there are over 100 ghosts haunting the Palace.  Regardless of the number, though, the Palace’s spooks have apparently been quiescent in recent years.  Reports of apparitions and inexplicable happenings have been few lately—though some of that may be attributable to the theater having closed for major renovations in September 2018 and isn’t expected to reopen until 2021.

So far, all the New York theaters about which I’ve been writing still exist, at least in some form.  Here’s a supernatural tale about one that been lost to the wrecker’s ball: the Lyric Theatre, which used to stand at 213 W. 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.

The Lyric building has a somewhat odd history.  Built in 1903, it operated as a playhouse until 1934, but a line of flop productions closed it and it was converted into a movie theater.  Garth Drabinsky’s Livent, Inc., bought the building in 1996, gutted it, and combined it with the adjacent Apollo (223 W. 42nd Street) to create the Ford Center for the Performing Arts.  All that remained of the Lyric was the 42nd Street façade.

The new theater revolved through a series of owners and names.  Drabinsky and Livent went bankrupt in 1998 and in 2005, after having become a property of Hilton Hotels Corporation, it was renamed as the Hilton Theatre.  In 2010, under an agreement with Foxwoods Resort Casino and the newly-formed Live Nation, the theater was renamed once again as the Foxwoods Theatre.  In 2014, after yet another change of management, the theater regained its original name, the Lyric.

Of course, nothing but the front of the old building remains today and, as we’ve seen, old ghosts seem not to stick around new structures that replace old theaters.  In some cases, as we’ve seen in playhouses built on sites of older buildings, spirits linger.  That doesn’t seem to have happened in the Lyric, even with the old name having returned.  But back on the day . . . .

An incident occurred on Tuesday, 21 December 1909, at the old Lyric Theatre.  It was the opening night of The City, the last play written in his lifetime by Clyde Fitch (1865-1909); the audience numbered over 1,000 people.  Largely unknown now, Fitch was the most prolific playwright of his day, author of hits like Beau Brummell (1890), Barbara Frietchie (1899), and Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901), among others.

(Sidelight: Hollywood movie star Barbara Stanwyck, born Ruby Catherine Stevens; 1907-90, purportedly took her stage-and-screen name from the first name of the title character in Fitch’s Barbara Frietchie and the last name of a British actress, Jane or Joan Stanwyck, who appeared in a 1906 production somewhere.  No one who’s tried to verify this legend, which the movie actor frequently repeated, has been able to confirm the existence of an actress named Jane or Joan Stanwyck—in any spelling variation—or of a production of Barbara Frietchie in 1906.)

The City has two claims to theatrical fame.  One is that it’s the first play in which a curse word was ever uttered on a Broadway stage: “goddamn.”  The second is more in the supernatural vein:

According to published accounts (as related by Playbill magazine), “as the cast of The City was taking its final curtain calls, women in the audience screamed and fainted as the unmistakable figure of the . . .  author emerged from the wings, strode to center stage, took a deep bow—and vanished right before everyone’s startled eyes.” 

Why all the consternation over Fitch receiving the grand accolades every playwright loves?  Well, you see . . . Fitch had died in France at age 44 of sepsis after an appendicitis operation the previous 4 September.  The playwright’s body was at that time entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx.  (He would later be cremated and his ashes reinterred at Woodlawn.)

Fitch’s curtain call was apparently his only manifestation at the Lyric or anywhere else—at least, I haven’t found reports of a revival.  Maybe the playwright only intended a one-off appearance—at the opening night of his final play—or maybe something interfered.  Folk lore says that the most effective way to exorcise a ghost is to burn the bones of the deceased, so perhaps Fitch’s cremation in 1910 put the kibosh on his future apparitions. 

The City ran at the Lyric until May 1910 and then transferred to the Hackett Theatre across 42nd Street at number 254 until June.  The next Fitch play to open in New York was a revival of his 1907 script The Truth, which played at the Little Theatre in the spring of 1914, long after the playwright’s remains had been cremated.

Changing a theater’s name can confuse ghosts, but it’s just as likely to anger them as to make then go away. 

The Martin Beck Theatre, at 302 W. 45th Street, was Broadway’s farthest-west house, located west of 8th Avenue.  It was built in 1924 as a vaudeville house by vaudeville promoter Beck (1868-1940).  In 1965, Beck’s estate sold the theater to Jujamcyn Theaters, the third and smallest of the Broadway theater-owners.

On 25 September 2002, Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn, announced that on 21 June 2003, the Martin Beck would be renamed for Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003), the caricaturist beloved for his 76 years of chronicling Broadway performances and performers, in recognition of his 100th birthday.  Hirschfeld knew of the plans, but unfortunately he didn’t live to see the honor bestowed.  The man known as “The Line King” died of natural causes on 20 January 2003, five months shy of his centenary.

The cast and crew of the revival of Wonderful Town, the musicalization of Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov’s My Sister Eileen which had only opened at the Hirschfeld on 23 November 2003 (running until 2005), a scant five months after it attained its new name, suffered a rash of lost props and things being mysteriously moved and removed from dressing rooms.  This seemed to be an unhappy ghost, and the feeling was that it was the spirit of impresario Martin Beck, who just hadn’t accepted the change-over.

Henry Miller’s Theatre, at 124 West 43rd Street, between Broadway and 6th Avenue—one if the few Broadway houses east of the Great White Way—went through far more changes of identity than had the Martin Beck/Al Hirschfeld.

(There are five working Broadway houses, until the pandemic shut-down, between 6th Avenue and 7th Avenue/Broadway.  The one farthest east is the Belasco at 111 W. 44th Street; the next is the former Henry Miller.)

Henry Miller’s Theatre was built in 1918 by and named for actor-director-producer Henry Miller (1859-1926).  (The theatrical Henry Miller is not related to the novelist of the same name who wrote, among other works, the scandalous Tropic of Cancer, published in France in 1934 and banned in the U.S. until 1961.)  It had a couple of different owners until, in 1970, it became a movie theater called the Park-Miller Theatre and then a porno house called Avon-at-the-Hudson in 1972.

In 1978, the former theater was converted into a disco named Xenon, a competitor to the hugely popular Studio 54 (now also a theater).  Believe it or not, I actually saw a performance in Xenon in 1982—not a traditional play, but a jazz-rock adaptation of an opera, The Coronation of Poppea (1643) by  Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), presented by the New York Lyric Opera Company.

In 1985, the space became SHOUT, a nightclub featuring music from the 1950s and ’60s, which closed in 1991 and reopened in 1995 as Club Expo.  In 1998, the room returned to performance use as the Kit Kat Club, named after the Berlin nightclub in the 1966 musical Cabaret, a popular revival of which was mounted by the Roundabout Theatre Company in the space. 

Due to an accident at a nearby construction site, the facility had to close in July and Cabaret moved to Studio 54, which Roundabout still operates as a theater.  The Kit Kat Club, however, continued to be a club until it closed in 2000.  It reopened as Henry Miller’s Theatre once again in 2001 with the very successful Off-Off-Broadway and Off-Broadway transfer of Urinetown.

The theater closed again in 2004 and the interior was demolished and then rebuilt as a 57-story high rise.  A reborn Henry Miller’s Theatre was built underground in the new skyscraper, one of only two such theaters on Broadway (the other is the Circle in the Square Theatre beneath the Gershwin Theatre; see above).  It reopened in 2009 with the Roundabout’s revival of the musical Bye Bye Birdie.

The Roundabout rechristened the theater once again in 2010 in honor of distinguished theater composer Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday.  The Stephen Sondheim Theatre opened in September 2010 with the limited-run Pee-wee Herman Show with Paul Reubens, TV’s original Pee-wee Herman. 

In the spring of 2014, a cast member in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2014-19 at the Sondheim) wrote that he

had stayed late one night at the theatre, walked up to the stage door and realized that I had forgotten something in my dressing room.  I noticed the old “Henry Miller” sign, which hangs over our security desk at the stage door, as I returned to the elevator to go back downstairs.  I murmured, under my breath, “Wow, I wonder what Henry Miller thinks of his sign being relegated to the stage door?”  And the elevator bounced.  And stopped.  I was stuck.  I screamed for about five minutes and finally, Adolf, our head of security, came to my rescue and pried the doors open.  I have NEVER said Henry Miller’s name in this theatre again.