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.