The 1900s: The Arts: People in the News

THE 1900s: THE ARTS: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

Maude Adams, actress, starred in James Barrie's Peter Pan, which opened on 6 November 1905 and ran for six months.

On 23 August 1905 director G. M. Anderson released Raffles, Amateur Cracksman, for Vitagraph Studios; it was the most elaborately produced film to date.

Ethel Barrymore uttered the famous line "that's all there is, there isn't any more" in Thomas Raceway's Broadway show Sunday, which premiered 15 November 1904 and ran for ten weeks.

On 4 September 1909 John Barrymore appeared in his first nonmusical hit production, Ongley and Smith's The Fortune Hunter. The play ran for 345 performances.

Producer-playwright David Belasco discovered Blanche Bates and starred her in two productions, Naughty Anthony and Madame Butterfly, in 1900. In 1906 Bates starred in the Girl of the Golden West.

On 20 November 1900 French actress Sarah Bernhardt arrived in the United States for her first visit since 1896; in 1906 "the Divine Sarah" began an American tour that grossed $1 million—an unprecedented amount of money for the day.

Italian opera star Enrico Caruso maded his first recording in the United States on 2 February 1904. On 23 November 1906 Caruso was fined ten dollars for annoying a young lady, Miss Hannah Graham, in the Central Park Zoo monkey house. On 13 August 1908, in London, Caruso's wife ran off with a lover; Caruso said, "It is the very thing I desired."

A major exhibition of American Impressionist Mary Cassatt's work opened in New York City on 24 August 1907. Born in Pittsburgh to a wealthy railroad-owning family, Cassati had lived in France most of her life. Her "modern madonnas"—paintings of mothers with their children—did much to forward the cause of Impressionism in America.

On 7 November 1904 George M. Cohan opened on Broadway in the first show he wrote and staged alone, Little Johnny Jones; his song "Give My Regards to Broadway" was an immediate hit.

On 4 January 1906 Berlin police forbade American dancer Isadora Duncan to dance in public.

On 18 December 1908 Thomas Edison and his partners formed the Motion Picture Patents Company. The incorporation centralized the operation of the "movie business."

On 23 May 1909 police stopped a lecture being given by Emma Goldman, anarchist, feminist, and editor of Mother Earth magazine. Authorities charged that Miss Goldman digressed from her topic, "Modern Drama, the Strongest Disseminator of Radical Thought," to discuss Joan of Arc.

In 1906 inventor Eldridge Johnson introduced the Victrola, the first phonograph with a playback horn located in the body of the machine.

Austrian composer Gustav Mahler made his American debut, conducting Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera House on 1 January 1908.

On 20 February 1909 Italian artist Filippo Marinetti published his "Futurist Manifesto," which praises speed, violence, and anarchism; Futurism, although short-lived, influenced American artists such as Joseph Stella in decades to come.

Movie director Wallace McCutcheon created the first filmed chase scene in Personal, produced by Biograph Studios in June 1904.

On 15 February 1901 temperance advocate Carry Nation took a hatchet to saloons in Topeka, Kansas; later in the decade she reprised the role in her vaudeville act, selling souvenir hatchets to audience members.

On 5 March 1900, after twenty-nine performances of Clyde Fitch's play Sappho, actress Olga Nethersole was arrested for "indecency."

On 22 October 1907 Ringling Brothers bought Barnum and Bailey's circus for $410,000.

On 30 October 1905 the New York production of Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession, which deals with prostitution, was halted as unfit for audiences; on 7 July 1906 courts ruled that the content was suitable for performance.

In 1903 singer Fritzi Scheff deserted the Metropolitan Opera for Broadway, opening in the musical Babette.

In 1903 Sam and Lee Shubert made their first New York real-estate transaction, purchasing property on Thirty-ninth Street. In 1905 they formed the Shubert Theatrical Corporation, the first serious challenge to the monopoly of the Theater Syndicate.

Ruth St. Denis began her successful U.S. tour with her dance performance of Radha in July 1906.

On 15 October 1900 writer Mark Twain returned from Europe, telling reporters, "I am absolutely unable to speak of my plans, inasmuch as I have none."

On 26 January 1906 the Oscar Wilde-Richard Strauss production of Salome was withdrawn from the Metropolitan Opera after one performance. The "dance of the seven veils" and the onstage portrayal of the decapitated head of John the Baptist were too much for New York City audiences to accept.