The First 50 Years

One January night 50 years ago, way uptown at Broadway and 40th Street, there was opened a luxurious, "absolutely fireproof" theater, its facade all carved stone, its interior all red and gilt. On that evening in 1893 Manhattan did not realize that its great theater district of the future was taking root. The new Empire Theater seemed a rather ambitious venture, even for Producer Charles Frohman and his famous stock company. It was baptized with a melodrama laid in an Army post, called The Girl I Left Behind Me (by David Belasco and Franklyn Fyles). When the Empire celebrated its soth birthday last week it was the oldest and most distinguished legitimate theater on Broadway, and way downtown.

Five decades had brought to it almost every great theater figure from Ellen Terry to Helen Hayes. On its stage Sarah Bernhardt played in Camille, Olga Nethersole in Carmen, Mrs. Fiske in A Doll's House, Julia Marlowe in When Knighthood Was in Flower, William Gillette in Sherlock Holmes, Katharine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

There Ethel Barrymore and Ruth Gordon made their debuts. There, in 1895, at the height of the Oscar Wilde scandal, The Importance of Being Earnest had a panicky U.S. premiere, closed in a week. There, in 1927, Edouard Bourdet's subtle, Lesbian The Captive was closed by the police. There, for over three years and 1,300 performances, Life With Father has been playing.

Even after a long lapse of years the fragrance of one name still clings to the Empire more insistently than any other--Maude Adams. Her own name always linked with Barrie's, she charmed a whole generation in The Little Minister, Peter Pan, What Every Woman Knows, A Kiss for Cinderella.

For last week's birthday Manhattan's famous Players Club took over the house. After the performance of Life With Father the audience stayed for an even more nostalgic show. Still dressed as Father, Howard Lindsay brought on the stage such Empire-builders as Billie Burke, Lady Mendl, Ruth Gordon, Ilka Chase, Gilbert Miller; and from among the playgoers, the Wendell Willkies.

Actress Gordon read a letter which Maude Adams had written from Missouri to Alexander Woollcott, who had died in the interim (TIME, Feb. 1). Wrote 70-year-old Actress Adams: "The Empire is so dear to me it is difficult to speak of her. It seems almost like praising one's mother." Sixty-nine-year-old Edna Wallace Hopper (looking incredibly young) and 76-year-old Cyril Scott played a scene from The Girl I Left Behind Me in which they had appeared on the Empire's opening night.

In misty-eyed farewell, the audience sang Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, only to discover that old acquaintance had been forgot indeed--from the wings, a little anticlimactically, entered Elsie Ferguson, Judith Anderson, Katharine Cornell.

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