Madison Square Theatre

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Madison Square Theatre (New York). In 1879 Steele MacKaye gutted what had been Augustin Daly's first Fifth Avenue Theatre and which had been restored only two years before after a disastrous fire in 1873. He redesigned the playhouse into one of the world's most ingenious theatres, with an elevator stage that allowed rapid scene changes, with the orchestra playing from a box above the proscenium, and with the first attempt at a primitive air‐conditioning system. The house seated only about seven hundred playgoers and was so arranged as to give the impression of a drawing room. George Odell recalled, “The exquisite interior, in which no color seemed to prevail at the expense of others. . .gave an effect of rich, simple elegance hitherto unknown in New York theatres.” MacKaye's intention was to form a stock company on the order of the Comédie Française. Although the theatre housed Hazel Kirke, the longest‐running drama up to its time under MacKaye, its actual owners, the Mallory brothers, editors of a religious publication, squeezed out the often‐impractical playwright. It then came under the management first of Daniel Frohman, then of Albert M. Palmer, and later of Charles Hoyt, who temporarily called it Hoyt's Theatre. By the time of Hoyt's death, the theatre district had moved away from the area and, though the original name had been restored, bookings became difficult. The building was demolished in 1908.

Madison Square Theatre, New York, on the south side of 24th Street, west of 5th Avenue. This was built on the site of Daly's first Fifth Avenue Theatre and was adapted by Steele Mackaye for use as a repertory theatre on Continental lines, with a company made up of students whom he had trained himself. It opened in 1879, but soon failed and was taken over by Daniel Frohman who reopened it in 1880 with Mackaye's Hazel Kirke, a domestic drama which ran for nearly two years. Viola Allen made her first appearance in New York here in 1882, in Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and in the same year Bronson Howard's Young Mrs Winthrop, one of the first good American plays, was seen. Albert M. Palmer took over the management in 1885, and in 1889–90 Richard Mansfield appeared in a series of revivals and new plays, including the first straight-foward translation of A Doll's House which, with Beatrice Cameron as Nora, first brought Ibsen to the attention of the American public. In 1891 the theatre was taken over by Charles Hoyt, and from 1905 it was known by his name. The building was demolished in 1908.