"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.]

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.

Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 3

GHOSTS

[Thank you for reading “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms,” my survey of the paranormal beliefs and traditions of theater folk.  I’m up to Part 3 now, the start of my accounts of some of the stories about theater ghosts and haunted playhouses.  (Parts 1 and 2, posted on Rick On Theater on 14 and 17 August, respectively, covered the superstitions to which actors and other theater workers subscribe.) 

[I’m starting off with tales of hauntings in regional theaters, that is, theaters outside New York City.  (Part 4, coming up, will recount the ghost stories associated with houses in New York, mostly the Broadway theaters.)  As I observed in Part 1, nearly every theater seems to be inhabited by at least one spirit, especially the old houses (or ones built on the site of an older structure).

[After reading Part 3, below, you’ll be convinced that that’s probably true.  By the time you get through Part 4, you’ll be certain of it!  So, relax and indulge your supernatural tendencies and read about some of the spooks that haunt our entertainment centers.

[“Only . . .,” as Tevye, the milkman of Fiddler on the Roof, says to his wife Golde when he’s about to tell her a different kind of theater ghost story (one told in a play, as distinguished from one told about a playhouse), “don’t be frightened!”]

Let’s move on to the pièce de résistance of theater superstitions: haunted theaters.

No type of building is as frequently haunted as theaters.  (Cemeteries aren’t buildings, so they don’t count.)  Just about every theater has at least one resident ghost.  If the Soviet formula for concrete was one part cement, one part sand, and one part microphones, the builders’ plans for a new theater seem to be: one seating area, one performing area, one back-stage area, and one ghost.

Theaters that don’t have their own specter can always rely on one spirit to pay them a visit: the ghost of Thespis.  When anything goes wrong in the theater, believers can point to the ghost of Thespis as the culprit if they don’t have their own house spirit.

Thespis is mostly a legendary figure in Western theater lore as almost nothing is known about his life.  A singer of dithyrambs (songs about stories from Greek mythology) in Ancient Greece, he flourished in the 6th century BCE. 

Aristotle (384-22 BCE) records that Thespis was the first performer to step out from the chorus and speak dialogue as a character in the story.  That made him the first actor and, coincidentally, the inventor of Greek drama.  It’s from his name that we get the term for ‘actor’ in the English-speaking world: ‘thespian.’  Thespis won the first documented competition for the best tragedy in 534 BCE at the City Dionysia in Athens.

People who work at theaters around the country (indeed, probably around the world, but I’m going to limit my coverage to the U.S.—plus one) have frequently told of eerie happenings that they can’t explain.  The most common occurrences of this sort, I suspect, are encounters with someone who formerly worked or appeared at the theater but still hangs around after his or her final curtain has rung down. 

“There are several levels of haunting,” instructs Playbill, “ranging from the odd unaccountable noise to actual knocking . . ., to the mysterious opening of doors and cabinets, or the flickering of lights.”   Author Robert Viagas continues:

Sometimes there is a strange cold spot in a room, a colored mist, a floating orb in a photograph, an inanimate object that moves without anyone touching it . . . or the echo of a disembodied voice.  Sometimes you may see a wispy manifestation, a contorted face in a mirror or window.  More rarely you see a full human figure, sometimes ectoplasmically white or sometimes in full natural color.  Even more rarely, the figures speak.  Or touch.

(There are plenty of accounts of ghosts and specters in New York City’s many performance venues, but for the last four years, American Theatre, the monthly magazine about the non-profit theater scene in North America published by the Theatre Communications Group, has posted a yearly article on theater ghost stories from regional companies. 

(Since they mark Halloween, the articles, written by AT managing editor Russell M. Dembin, are all published—only on the journal’s website—on 31 October; when that date rolls around again this year, we’ll see if AT will continue the series beyond last Halloween.  Most of the stories about the regional theater ghosts below are drawn from Dembin’s reports.  I’ve cherry-picked some that seem most intriguing.)

The Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California (about 10 miles northeast of Los Angeles), has had so many reported sightings and unexplained events that the theater hosts groups who wish to explore the building (built around 1912) for evidence of the paranormal.

There’s even a staff member whose duty, among others, is to coordinate with the paranormal groups.  She herself has reported that after arriving at her office below the prop loft early one morning, she heard overhead what “sounded like a woman walking around in high heels.  Our prop master would never, ever wear high heels,” she asserted.  “Plus I was the only one there, ’cause it was so early in the morning.”

Other Pasadena Playhouse staffers in the theater have also reported footsteps above their heads when no one else was around or ghostly whistling in the basement late at night.  The common belief is that

It’s the spirit of Carrie Hamilton (1963-2002), an actress, singer, and playwright who was the daughter of Carol Burnett, a member of the Pasadena Playhouse board.  The small theater upstairs was rededicated to Hamilton after her death from complications of lung cancer and people have claimed to have seen a woman of Hamilton’s age there wearing a white or yellow dress

Staffers at Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre have reported several incidents of spectral encounters.  Since 1977, the company has occupied an 1883 building (the former stable for the horses of Toronto’s streetcar company) and at least one apparition was dressed in Victorian garb.

That appearance was reported by YPT’s administrative director.  Like the Pasadena Playhouse staffer, he was alone in the old building, working late rather than early.  He was locking up for the night and on the second floor, he checked the ladies’ restroom to see that the lights had been turned off.  He saw that they had been and turned around quickly to head down to the lobby.  

In front of him on the staircase, he saw a young woman in a Victorian-style “chocolate brown satin formal outfit with a floor-length skirt and waist-length jacket.”  The woman looked at the admin director, seemingly alarmed that he’d seen her.  She dashed down to the ground floor, but by the time the admin director followed her seconds later, she’d disappeared.

Probably almost everybody knows the little poem about the man who wasn’t there:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there!

He wasn’t there again today,

Oh how I wish he’d go away!

(It turns out, serendipitously, that there’s a theater connection here: the poem was a song from a play William Hughes Mearns, 1875-1965, wrote at Harvard in 1899.) 

Another spirit encounter, the sighting of a “man who wasn’t there,” was reported by YPT’s director of operations.  He’d also come in to work early one day, around 6:30 in the morning.  He was coming from the basement up to the Green Room, and as he reached the top of the stairs, he saw the theater’s cleaner pushing her janitor’s cart out of the Green Room.  (An explanation of what the Green Room is is provided in Part 1 of this series.)

Following behind the cleaner, the ops director saw a tall man with no facial features wearing a brown suit.  The ops director glanced away for a second, wondering who the man could be at that early hour.  He had an eerie, bad feeling—and by the time he looked up again, no one was following the cleaner.

Most of the theater ghost stories are about unnamed or unidentified spirits appearing or leaving traces in the theater.  Some have presumed identities, like the spirit of Carrie Hamilton at the Pasadena Playhouse.  Another named ghost manifested itself at the GALA (Grupo de Artistas LatinoAmericanos) Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C., as told by the company’s production manager.

Established in the old Tivoli Theatre, opened in 1924 as one of the largest movie palaces in D.C., the theater has experienced a series of weird occurrences.  Mysteriously, the production manager explained, the lights would turn off in the middle of meetings, static would come out of the speakers, the thermostat would be turned all the way down, and the staffer said that she heard someone “when locking up the building before.  One of my painters said she saw [someone] when she was doing an overnight paint call.”

To whom was all this spectral activity attributed?  Harry Crandall, who built the Tivoli and owned a chain of movie houses in the Nation’s Capital. “The rumor,” noted the production manager, “is that he hung himself inside the Tivoli.”

The truth is that Crandall (1879-1937), despondent over the collapse in a two-day blizzard in Washington of his Knickerbocker Theater and the subsequent bankruptcy of his company, killed himself by gas in his apartment.  Reginald Geare, 1889-1927, architect of the Knickerbocker and the original designer of the Tivoli—he was fired after the roof of the Knickerbocker fell in—also committed suicide over the disaster, which killed 98 moviegoers, including a congressman, along with a number of prominent political and business leaders.

(Side note: Geare also designed D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre, one of Crandall’s houses, which has a connection to my family, as I describe in “Lincoln & Howard Theatres: Stages of History,” posted on Rick On Theater on 2 December 2011.)

A number of staffers at the Alley Theatre of Dallas have reported feeling “presences” or sensing figures rushing by them in or around the Hubbard Theatre, housed in the building that’s been the company’s home since 1968.  The theater’s also been the setting of a number of eerie experiences.

The troupe’s director of operations and events himself has several tales of ghostly presences.  One’s an experience that even led some of the housekeeping staff to quit.  One night after a performance, the husband-and-wife cleaning team “witnessed a bloody female figure standing onstage,” and “screamed, ran out of the theatre . . . .”  That act seemed to have unnerved another housekeeper in the lobby and they left the building and didn’t return.

The Alley ops-and-events director continued,

We investigated, of course [and] . . . there was nobody here, but everybody that’s in the housekeeping department said they had been seeing things like somebody walking into the restrooms at night, assuming it was a staff member, but they never came out.  So that when they went into the restrooms, there was just nobody there.  I had several members that were very nervous after that and would refuse to clean anything by themselves.

                                                                                                 

At the Pittsburgh Playhouse, there are several ghosts who haunt the complex in the Oakland section of the city off the campus of Point Park University, of which the theater’s now a division.  At least two have legends connected to the theater or its buildings.  (Pittsburgh Playhouse moved out of its complex of converted buildings three miles from the university campus in 2018.  These tales are associated with the old facilities; I don’t know if the ghosts followed the company.)

“The Lady in White haunts the Rauh Theatre,” said the Pittsburgh’s producing director, referring to its prior main performance space in the former 19th-century German Club.  The story dates back to the late 1920s or early 1930s when the theater was still the German social hall.  A woman in a white nightgown came stalking her wayward husband. In one version of the legend, she was an actress who’d discovered her husband was having a tryst with one of the ladies from the upstairs bordello.  In some tellings, this occurred on their wedding day.

The wedding reception was being held in the downstairs restaurant of the German Club. The Lady in White climbed the steps in a rage, found her husband in flagrante delicto with his paramour, and shot them both dead.  Then she leapt off the balcony to her death, the gun still in her hand.  Reportedly, she still paces that balcony.  (In other versions, the Lady in White shot herself after killing her husband and his woman.)

In recent times. the spirit of the Lady in White appeared as a woman in a long, white nightgown who paced the Rauh balcony, said the producing director, “back and forth calling her dead husband’s name.”

The Lady in White is a disconsolate spirit, said the staffer, but John Johns, another presence at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, is a different matter when he often frequents the Rockwell Theatre, another of the company’s venues.  Johns was an actor at the playhouse starting in the 1930s—though by day, it’s said, he was an accountant.  (The troupe has its origins in 1933.)  

One evening in the 1950s or ’60s, Johns was performing at the Rockwell, costumed in a tuxedo, when he suffered a heart attack onstage.  His castmates carried the actor up to his dressing room, number 7, to wait for the ambulance, but Johns died before they could get him into the room.

In some versions of the account, Johns wasn’t performing that evening, but attending a banquet in the restaurant downstairs.  He customarily wore a tux in the evening; he was reported to have been a handsome man who liked to dress elegantly.  In any case, since that night, people claimed to have heard disembodied footsteps climbing the stairway to dressing room 7, always stopping just outside the door.

“On nights when the theatre has no audience,” recounts the Pittsburgh’s producing director, “he has been known to pop in many different theatre seats clapping for those rehearsing onstage.”  He’s also known to check the props and help with the set construction.  Always dressed in his tux, he’s been seen dancing on stage with the Lady in White as well.

(There’s a caveat regarding John Johns: research shows that the actor did exist and was a Playhouse regular, but there’s no published obituary for him.  Furthermore, a former staffer at the Pittsburgh who knew Johns affirmed that he died at the Oakland Veterans Hospital, not at the theater.)

The David Henry Hwang Theater in Los Angeles, is the Little Tokyo home of the East West Players.  The theater’s in the Union Center for the Arts, built in 1922 as the first Union Japanese American Church.  The EWP director of production explained that during World War II, when Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated to concentration camps, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos moved into the neighborhood, which became known as Bronzeville during the war period; a predominantly black congregation moved into the church.

EWP staffers say they’ve had a number of unexplained experiences at the theater.  The director of production affirmed that he’d heard many stories during his time at the theater “of an old man (the former groundskeeper of the building) who sits in the balcony (the old choir loft).”  He adds, “Actors have complained about people watching auditions when no one was actually there.  Some employees have encountered specific smells when he’s around, but he seems to be a pretty benign spirit.”

A member of the Penobscot Theatre Company, which occupies the Bangor Opera House in Maine, claimed he’s had many ghost encounters at the theater.  The Opera House, built in 1920, is located in the city that inspired the fictional town of Derry, author Stephen King’s frequent setting for his horror and supernatural fiction. has been the troupe’s home since 1997.  Bangor’s oldest performance space, the opera house stands on the site of another theater which opened in 1882 and burned down in 1914.  

One story tells of a firefighter who died in that blaze and still haunts the new theater.  Penobscot actors frequently see a dark apparition in the former balcony that now serves as a storage space, and some believe that it’s the firefighter.

A recent appearance happened during a production of Wait Until Dark in the fall of 2018.  The longtime troupe member, who was in the cast (as “Sgt. Carlino,” one of the bad guys in Frederick Knott’s terror play), described the specter as a “big, tall man in the balcony,” and dark “like a shadow.”  The actor noticed this figure while onstage during a recent performance. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he says, “because spot-ops [spotlight or followspot operators] can be up there.  But no one is up there for this show.”

Among the other ghosts that haunt the Bangor theater, most are poltergeists (German for “noisy ghost” or “noisy spirit,” from the combining form of poltern, ‘to make a rumbling sound’).  They cause occurrences like eerie plumbing phenomena.  But another haunt in the opera house is the manifestation of a “little girl in a light dress with long, flowing hair.  Transparent and kind of fuzzy, not in focus,” according to a troupe production stage manager.

New Orleans is rife with spirits, ghosts, and ectoplasmic emanations.  At Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré in the city’s famed French Quarter, founded in 1916, there are many tales of hauntings, including one of the spirit of an actress who “threw herself from the catwalks, got caught by a rope from the fly system on her way down,” and died, all for the unrequited love of the production’s leading man, according to the theater’s former technical director.

The TD insisted that he’s “[n]ot much of a believer in the ghostly apparitions” and never paid much attention to the stories of the paranormal at the Petit Théâtre.  As he put it, things changed one early morning about 3 a.m. when he was working alone in the theater, preparing for the next production.

Uncharacteristically, the TD recounted, the French Quarter, usually alive with sound and movement at all hours, was quiet.  At one point,

he was facing the stage from the edge of the apron, with his back to the house.  “With no warning, a loud swoosh was heard from the stage right leg curtain [see part 2], and it fluttered just like something was rapidly sliding down it, jerking near the bottom and waving about as if someone was shaking up against it.  Nearly as quickly as it started, the curtain became calm, swinging from upstage to downstage like a lazy pendulum from near its base, till it settled finally on its own, as if nothing untoward had occurred.”

“Hello?!” he called out, his voice shaking “from the injection of adrenaline I’d just been dosed with.”  He shouted the names of the few others with keys to the building—he doubted that someone would stop in at that hour on a weeknight with an early call the next day, but there was no other explanation.  “Slowly I made my way to the center of the stage, eyes locked on the now quiescent curtain, hoping against hope to see someone putzing about or staged behind the curtain, ready to laugh at my reaction, combined with a hearty back slap and a, ‘Go home, Alex!’ Nothing.”

He continues, “On profile now with the errant velour, looking directly stage right at it, I took a quick glance to see if the air conditioning could cause such calamitous careening from the curtain.”  The air conditioning was off. “Nothing had fallen from the defunct catwalk, nor the batten the leg was hung from.  As I dared to get closer, now slightly more cautious than a moment before, I started to hear the sound again.  Right in front of me!  The billow began its fateful trip down the inky black, inherently flame-retardant fabric, almost frenzied this time.”

At that point [the tech director] dropped his work, raced out of the theatre, “swore not to work in that place alone at night again, and dodged the foot traffic on Bourbon and Chartres Streets on my bike all at the same time and before the cursed ghost of showmances past could complete the reenactment of her fateful fall.”

The TD admitted that “Le Petit may very well not be haunted.”  He’s “still on the fence about the paranormal,” he continued.  He couldn’t explain what happened in the theater early that morning, and he added,  “[D]arned if anyone else can either!”

The Tenth Avenue Arts Center (also known as the Tenth Avenue Theater) in San Diego is home to at least four spirits and one suspected spectral visitor.  Built in 1924 as the First Baptist Church of San Diego’s chapel for military personnel and converted to a performance space in 2007, the theater seems to revel in its ghostly history. 

It authorized Alex Matsuo, an actor, director, playwright, and paranormal researcher, to research and write The Haunting of the Tenth Avenue Theater (2015; Llewellyn Publications) and it stages performances that evoke (if not invoke) the haunted reputation of the theater.  The theater also hosts a Halloween “paranormal investigation” by an organization called TheDeadTalk. 

Participants might expect to meet some or all of the theater’s spooks, which began to appear as soon as the old chapel started serving as a theater.  According to the website of the Association of Paranormal Study, manifestations include “voices from a child running up and down the stairs to orders being barked in a British accent” and more.  

The child is a little girl called “Missy” who died in the 1960s by falling down the stairs while playing “a chasing game” with one of the church’s ministers.   The minister with whom Missy was playing hanged himself out of guilt over causing the little girl’s death.

The barked orders heard in the theater come from a British World War II lieutenant who was killed in Japan. His spirit possessed the doctor who had treated him; the doctor came to San Diego and to the chapel to pray for the men who’d perished.  The lieutenant’s ghost then left the doctor’s body but apparently stayed around the chapel building even after it was converted into a theater.

The fourth ghost at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center is a woman named Carol Laroc (or Lorac, but I think that’s a typo; I’ll call her Carol to be safe).  Carol was a devoted member of the church congregation; she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and still keeps an eye on the building.

There may be a fifth ghost in the theater, suspected because of unexplained occurrences in the early mornings, but the source hasn’t been identified yet.  It’s thought to be a young boy haunting the building’s basement.

(Some research was conducted on the ghost stories connected with the theater, but no confirmation could be found for either the tragic tale of Missy or the putatively suicidal priest.  There’s no record of any accidental fall at the church, either.  No word concerning the other suspected supernatural stories was provided.)

The Lincoln Square Theater in Decatur, Illinois, is known as one of most haunted places in the area, and possibly even in the whole country. The Lincoln Theater (the name was simplified at one point in its long history, dropping the “Square”) was built on the same plot where the Priest Hotel burned down in 1915, and the new theater opened in 1916.  Two men died in the fire, but there were also hotel guests who were never accounted for after the fire, so the death toll is believed to be much higher. 

Starting in the 1930s, ghost stories began to circulate.  One story is about “One-Armed Red,” a stage hand during the vaudeville era.  The legend is that during a performance, Red—his real name is lost to history—fell off a grid 75 feet above the stage and his arm got caught by a hook and torn from his body.  The story says he died almost immediately. 

Red’s spirit stalks the theater, but he’s not the only one.  Sightings include a woman in a long, white, old-fashioned dress, for instance.  Many other manifestations have appeared to theater workers, but most haven’t matched Red’s description.  (For one thing, Red had distinctive, bright auburn hair.) 

Some people believe that the other spirits are the ghosts of the victims of the hotel fire.  Reported encounters at the theater have included footsteps, cold chills, hooded figures, and being touched by someone.

The legend aside, Red did die at the Lincoln Theater, but not from a fall.  He also had really lost an arm, but it was from combat in Europe in World War I—and he was a phenomenon back stage at the theater, out-working his younger fellow stage hands and doing it all with one arm.  One afternoon, Red took a nap back stage and simply never woke up.

The Orpheum Theatre in Memphis, Tennessee, was originally built in 1890 as the Grand Opera House; in 1907, the theater became known as the Orpheum.  Principally a vaudeville house, it burned down in 1923.  The new building opened in 1928 and is listed on the National Registrar of Historic Places.  According to rumors, the theatre is haunted by the ghost of a 12-year-old girl named Mary.

Mary had no connection to the Orpheum in life, and stories vary concerning how she came to haunt the theater.  The most common explanation is that she was killed nearby in an accident.  In one version, young Mary was injured in a car accident in 1921, while in another she was struck by a trolley in 1928.  In both tellings, the injured Mary was carried into the Orpheum, where she died and her spirit stayed in the theater.

In 1979, a group of paranormal investigators from what was then Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) examined the Orpheum using séances and a Ouija board and determined that the little girl died in 1921 in a falling accident in downtown Memphis.  Mary’s ghost simply wandered into the Orpheum after the accident.  She liked it there, so she stayed.

Apparently Mary, described by those who’ve seen her as a shy little girl with brown braids and a white dress, likes to play pranks on the living.  People have reported hearing her giggle or walking up and down the aisles.  Other reports include doors opening and closing on their own, flickering lights, tools emptied into toilets, and doors swinging open and shutting loudly.

Such happenings even spooked Yul Brynner (1920-85) while he was rehearsing for The King & I in 1982.  A séance was also performed in 2019 by the touring cast of Fiddler on the Roof to try to contact Mary and anyone else haunting the theater.  While her blank stare and ethereal appearance have unnerved some of those who’ve seen her, Mary’s never been known to disrupt a performance.

Some people connected with the Orpheum claim to know of as many as six other spirits in addition to Mary who inhabit the theater.  One has a curious relation to the little girl’s spirit.  He’s known as David (though that’s just a name of convenience) and he’s waiting to escort Mary to “the other side.”  Since she likes the beautiful old theater and refuses to leave, however, David can’t leave either and therefore he must spend eternity in the Orpheum with her.

[There are nearly endless stories of haunted theaters, almost always of old buildings and usually associated with tragedies or accidents in the theaters—though not always.  I’ve selected a few of the ones I found for retelling here, but this barely scratches the surface.

[“Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions,” Part 3, has focused on the ghost tales of theaters around the country (plus one in Canada) outside of New York City.  On Sunday, 23 August, I’ll post the fourth and final installment of this series, which retells several of the ghost stories about some of the country’s theater capital’s 41 Broadway houses.  Please return to Rick On Theater for the completion of my spooky series.

[Just remember what Tevye says, though . . . .]