DRAMA OF ST. JAMES
Hits & flops at historic Times Square theater
AS musical-comedy shrines go, it’s hard to top the staircase off the lobby of the St. James Theatre. Every night in the spring of 2001, Mel Brooks and his creative team sat on those steps in the theater’s back left corner, watching “The Producers” to make sure every joke brought down the house.
Apparently, it worked: “The Producers” went on to win 12 Tony Awards, more than any other show in Broadway history.
But not everyone appreciated such songs as “Springtime for Hitler.”
One night, a man charged up the aisle yelling, “This is terrible! I was in the war!” Seeing Brooks on the stairs, the man confronted him: “How dare you do this! I was in World War II.”
Brooks stood up and said, “I was in World War II, too, and I didn’t see you there!”
THAT anecdote and many others make for lively reading in the latest and third volume of Jennifer Ashley Tepper’s “The Untold Stories of Broadway: Tales From the World’s Most Famous Theaters.”
And there may be no theater whose history is livelier than the St. James, on West 44th Street. Since opening in 1927, it has been considered one of Broadway’s most desirable houses. With 1,600 seats, it’s large enough for musicals, yet intimate enough for plays.
But it has one problem: The stage is shallow, so productions with big sets have a hard time fitting into the theater.
Kevin Kline moves into the St. James this spring in a limited-run revival of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter.” After that, the theater will go dark for several months while the back wall is blown out and the stage expanded to accommodate Disney’s next multimillion-dollar musical, “Frozen,” which is scheduled to open in the spring of 2018.
As Tepper’s book demonstrates, the history of Times Square is tied up in Broadway’s 41 theaters. They have been home to legendary hits and legendary flops, great theater artists and diabolical showmen.
The St. James housed them all. It was built by one of Broadway’s most feared producers, Abe Erlanger. He presided over the Syndicate, a monopoly that controlled nearly every aspect of the American theater in the early 20th century. The critic Brooks Atkinson called Erlanger a “fat, squat, greedy, crude egoist” and “a dangerous enemy.”
As befitting an egomaniac, Erlanger named his theater, which he built for $1.5 million, for himself.
The first show at Erlanger’s Theatre was George M. Cohan’s “The Merry Malones.” During the dress rehearsal, leading man Arthur Deagon died of a heart attack after doing several handsprings across the stage.
Cohan, who hadn’t performed in 13 years, stepped into the role, and “The Merry Malones” became a hit.
THE Shubert brothers were the only people powerful enough to challenge Erlanger on Broadway. They built their own theaters across the street from the St. James and stared him down. When Erlanger went bust during the Depression, the Shuberts snapped up his theater. It was renamed the St. James in a nod, for no apparent reason, to St. James’ Palace in London. Erlanger’s name was erased from Broadway forever.
In 1943, the Shuberts booked a show that, if the rumors coming down from its out-of-town tryout in Boston were true, didn’t stand a chance in New York. It was called “Away We Go!” and, as one wag said of it, “No gags, no gals, no chance.” Its creators, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, changed the name to “Oklahoma!” — but so what? As one person who worked on the show said years later, “They named it after a state. Do me a favor and imagine somebody tells you your new show is going to be called ‘New Jersey.’ ”
There were empty seats all over the St. James when “Oklahoma!” opened on March 31. But the next day, as the raves rolled off the presses, the line of ticket buyers stretched down the block. “Oklahoma!” ran for 2,248 performances.
Rodgers and Hammerstein returned to the St. James in 1951 with another smash, “The King and I.” A few months into the run, its star, Gertrude Lawrence, fainted backstage. She was diagnosed with cancer and never returned to the show. The day she died, Yul Brynner — her co-star and lover — performed “Shall We Dance?” alone.
An anti-trust lawsuit forced the Shuberts to unload the St. James in 1957. William McKnight, the head of 3M, bought it. He turned it over to his son-in-law, James Binger, who then acquired four more theaters to create Jujamcyn, which is Broadway’s third-largest landlord. (The name is an amalgam of the names of Binger’s children: Judy, James and Cynthia.)
David Merrick produced “Subways Are For Sleeping” at the St. James in 1961. It was a charming, if second-rate, musical, but it became legendary because of a publicity stunt. After “Subways” opened to tepid reviews, Merrick went through the phone book and found people who had the same names as the drama critics. He bought them dinner at the Oak Room in The Plaza hotel and then took them to the show. They loved it, of course. Merrick then created an ad with the fake critics’ rave reviews. He slipped the ad past the editors of the New York Herald Tribune, triggering an uproar that helped the show run six months.
Irving Berlin followed Merrick into the St. James in 1962 with a musical called “Mr. President.” It opened with the largest advance sale in Broadway history, but ran only a few months. Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and James Brown had made Irving Berlin old-hat. “Mr. President” was his last show. He withdrew from the world, rarely venturing outside his Beekman Place mansion for the rest of his life.
MERRICK returned to the St. James in 1964 with a smash: Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly!” starring Carol Channing. The show won 11 Tony Awards, a record until “The Producers” came along.
Merrick, who delighted in picking fights with other producers, torturing his writers and baiting the press, leased office space above the theater. His office was all red — red walls, red carpet, red lampshades. “Really, the devil’s color,” said Richard Seff, an agent who negotiated with Merrick in that office.
(Today the office belongs to Jordan Roth, the son of billionaire real-estate developer Steve Roth and Broadway producer Daryl Roth. Jordan Roth bought Jujamcyn — and the St. James — in 2009. His sleek, modern office is all white: Not a speck of “the devil’s” red anywhere in sight.)
In 1983, the theater had a hit with Tommy Tune’s “My One and Only.” Not only did Tune star in that Gershwin musical — opposite former supermodel Twiggy — but he did double duty as the director, leaping off the stage when he wasn’t in a scene and scrambling up to the balcony to watch the show from a seat that stands by itself at the end of the last row. As a kid, he sat in that lonely seat and watched “Hello, Dolly!” It’s now called the “Tommy Tune” seat, and whenever he’s seeing a show in the St. James, that’s where he sits.
Notable shows that played the theater in the 1990s included “The Secret Garden,” “The Who’s Tommy,” and a revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” starring Nathan Lane, laying the groundwork for a career that would explode with “The Producers.”
THE St. James made it to the big screen in the Oscar-winning movie “Birdman.” Director Alejandro Iñárittu spent 30 days shooting in and around the theater, where Michael Keaton’s has-been movie actor tries to make a comeback. His photo appears on the St. James marquee as the star of a fictional play based on Raymond Carver’s short stories. The real-life boxoffice staff would laugh whenever passers-by walked up to their window to see if there were any tickets available for the “Michael Keaton play.”
If you watch “Birdman” closely, you can catch a glimpse of the staircase where Brooks and the gang from “The Producers” congregated. That staircase will remain untouched during the upcoming renovations. It will be there for the creators of “Frozen,” to lean on the railing, scrutinize their show and make the changes necessary to keep the St. James packed for years to come.