Belasco, David

Belasco, David (1853–1931), playwright, producer, and director. He was born in San Francisco to parents of Portuguese‐Jewish origin whose name had once been Velasco, and his father had played in London pantomimes. Details about his early years are obscure, but the boy apparently came under the tutelage of a Father McGuire and, even after he ran away from home, Belasco retained an affection for the priest and later claimed his affectation of wearing a clerical collar to be in his honor. It is believed that he made his acting debut in 1864 playing the young Duke of York opposite Charles Kean's Richard III, and at the age of twelve he wrote his first play, Jim Black; or, The Regulator's Revenge. By 1873 he was a callboy at the Metropolitan Theatre in San Francisco, but he continued to act as well, performing with John McCullough, Edwin Booth, and other leading players. A year later in Virginia City, Nevada, he met Dion Boucicault, from whom he learned much about acting, directing, and playwriting. Returning to San Francisco, Belasco became an assistant stage manager for Thomas Maguire and then managed the Baldwin Theatre for James A. Herne. Some of his earliest plays, such as La Belle Russe, a tale of female treachery, and The Stranglers of Paris, which William Winter called “a repulsive sensation melodrama” and Belasco himself later dismissed as “buncombe,” were first mounted at the Baldwin in 1881. The next year he came to New York, where he served as stage manager of the Madison Square Theatre, later serving in the same capacity for Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum. During this time he also wrote a number of plays with Henry C. de Mille, including, The Wife (1887); Lord Chumley (1888), centering on an English eccentric; The Charity Ball (1889); and Men and Women (1890). In 1888 Belasco staged Sophocles' Electra for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in a mounting years ahead of its time in its stark simplicity. Thereafter his luck seemingly ran out until Charles Frohman asked him to write a play to open the Empire Theatre. The result was a collaboration with Franklin Fyles, The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893), whose love story was set against a background of soldiers and Indians. He firmly established himself as a playwright, producer, and director with the Civil War romance The Heart of Maryland (1895), followed by the French adaptation Zaza (1899), the slight farce Naughty Anthony (1900), the Japanese tale Madame Butterfly (1900), the period piece Du Barry (1901), the touching melodrama The Auctioneer (1901), the gripping Oriental drama The Darling of the Gods (1902), the charmer Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1903), the costume tragedy Adrea (1905), the frontier romance The Girl of the Golden West (1905), the Spanish‐American melodrama The Rose of the Rancho (1906), the domestic drama A Grand Army Man (1907), the supernatural character piece The Return of Peter Grimm (1911), the tragic revenge play The Son‐Daughter (1919), and the French adaptation Kiki (1921). Several of these were cowritten with playwrights John Luther Long, Charles Klein, and others. Among the many plays that Belasco produced but in which he had little or no hand in writing were The Music Master (1904), The Fighting Hope (1908), The Easiest Way (1909), The Woman (1911), The Boomerang (1915), Polly with a Past (1917), Tiger Rose (1917), Daddies (1918), and Lulu Belle (1926). In 1901 he leased the Republic Theatre, renaming it the Belasco; but in 1906 he built his own house, calling it the Stuyvesant at first but later gave it his own name.

Belasco was obsessed with realism on stage, in one play re‐creating a Child's restaurant in which fresh coffee was brewed and pancakes made. Although many critics felt his determined “archrealism” of setting masked a lack of artistic seriousness, Walter Prichard Eaton attempted a balanced assessment when he wrote, “What Mr. Belasco has done has been to write pieces for the play‐house, not criticisms of life . . . he has bent his mind to devise them with all possible air of probability and with all possible fidelity of pictorial setting. Especially in the latter respect he has succeeded as no other man of our time has.” Many of his better plays, as well as those of fellow authors that he mounted, retain a theatrical effectiveness and might well succeed in an open‐minded theatre that does not largely reject its past. Belasco's off‐stage life was in some ways as extravagant and carefully staged as his plays. One favorite trick was a temper tantrum in which he would stamp on his own watch, smashing it into uselessness. Close associates knew he kept a stock of cheap, secondhand watches for just such occasions. Biography: The Bishop of Broadway, Craig Timberlake, 1954.