Lee (1873?-1953)
Samuel S. (1875?-1905)
Jacob J. (1879?-1963)

The Shubert brothers were theatrical managers and producers of the largest theater empire in the 20th century. They were Lee Shubert (1873?-1953), Samuel S. (1875?-1905), and Jacob J. (1879?-1963).

Samuel S., Jacob J., and Lee Shubert were born in Eastern Europe on uncertain dates in the latter part of the 19th century. Their parents, David and Catherine, brought the family to Syracuse, New York, in 1882. David Shubert, an alcoholic, could not support his family in their new home, and the boys were forced to go to work. At the age of ten Lee Shubert began selling newspapers in front of a local theater. He was soon joined by his brother, Sam, who found his way inside of the theater when he was cast in a small part in a play directed by David Belasco, a prominent theater director. Sam quickly fell in love with the glamour of the theater and adopted many of Belasco’s mannerisms. He went from actor to program boy at the Bastable Theatre, to assistant treasurer of the Grand Opera House, to treasurer of the Wieting, Syracuse’s most distinguished theater.

As Sam Shubert was ascending the ladder of theatrical management, a pattern was established among the brothers of backing each other’s work. This pattern would remain with them throughout their careers. When Sam Shubert was named manager of the Bastable Theatre (1897), Jacob, the youngest brother, was working at the Wieting, and Lee was the bookkeeper for both theaters. By keeping their hands in as many theaters as possible the Shubert brothers began building what was to become the largest theatrical empire in the United States.

Their first business venture in the theater was to attain the New England touring rights to Hoyt’s “A Texas Steer.” Shortly after this success the brothers formed their own theater, the Baker, in Rochester. While Jacob Shubert turned the Baker into a successful stock company (with shows running in repertory), Sam and Lee acquired the Grand Opera House in Syracuse. By 1900 the brothers managed five theaters in New York state. They had also defined their individual roles in the business — Sam was the creative leader, Lee developed the business, and Jacob dealt with out-of-town productions.

The brothers had raised themselves swiftly out of poverty and had become respected theater managers. But this was not enough. They wanted to produce their own plays, and their intense ambitiousness drove them to New York City. In 1900, with borrowed money, the brothers moved to New York City and acquired the Herald Square Theatre. Although they didn’t produce their own plays, they turned the Herald Square into one of the most successful theaters in New York with smash hits such as “Arizona,” the first Western, by Augustus Thomas and featuring Lionel Barrymore, and “The Belle of New York,” an English import. By 1904, after ten years in the business, they had acquired ten theaters, including the Casino and the Princess in New York City; the Hyperion in New Haven, Connecticut; the Dearborn in Chicago; and the Colonial in Boston. Around 1901 the brothers had also begun to produce plays of their own, with successful productions including “The Chinese Honeymoon” and “Emerald Isle” (1902).

On May 12, 1905, at the age of 30, Sam Shubert died of injuries sustained in a train wreck near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. At the time of his death he had 13 theaters that included one in London, a string of producing credits, and a play (“Fantasia”) to his credit. He was also involved in a theatrical war. The rapid growth of the Shubert Company was a threat to the Syndicate, a group of producers and theater owners who literally controlled American theater in the early 20th century. The Syndicate, led by Abe Erlanger and several other producers, owned three quarters of the theaters in the country; therefore, if someone wanted to work in the theater they were practically forced to work for the Syndicate.

After Sam’s death Lee Shubert was ready to sell out to the Syndicate, until Erlanger made the mistake of insulting Sam’s memory. From then on the Shuberts fought the Syndicate fiercely, until they won the battle and eventually turned into the same kind of controlling force they had once publicly decried. If they knew anything it was how to publicize. The brothers claimed to be on the side of the theater workers by breaking the Syndicate’s control. The newspapers and theater people loved them for it. They produced a farewell tour for the idolized actress Sarah Bernhardt, and when the Syndicate closed them out of a city they produced the show in tents. The press sympathized with their plight. (In actuality, a tent held more seats than a theater, so they were making more money.)

This was only the beginning. In 1924 the Shuberts had 86 theaters in the United States alone; they were making $1 million a week in ticket sales; and they controlled 60% of the legitimate theater in the United States. In addition, they owned their own ticket brokerage, a dancing and singing school, and an enormous amount of real estate. They were also producing one quarter of the plays in America, and Lee Shubert was on the board of MGM.

In 1924 the Shuberts had 86 theaters in the United States alone.

While the brothers had essentially formed their own trust and were in constant litigation, the Shuberts did introduce to the stage many of the finest actors of the time, including the Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, Jack Benny, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Bert Lahr, the Barrymores, Spencer Tracy, and dozens more. They also add to their credit the U.S. premiere of the innovative director Max Reinhardt’s production of “Sumurun” (1911); the premiere of the well-known “Children’s Hour” (1934) by Lilian Hellman; the production “Hellzapoppin” (1938), one of the longest running plays in history; and the development of the “spectacle,” with the creation of a 40-foot-deep water tank at the Hippodrome.

Yet despite the fact that Lee had written a play and Jacob directed frequently, their contribution to the theater was not artistic — it was strictly business. Ironically, it was Lee who was named head of the Little Theatre, America’s first attempt at creating a national theater based on artistic rather than commercial aims.

At the time of Lee Shubert’s death in 1953 at the age of 80, the brothers had produced 600 shows under the credit of “Mssrs. Shubert presents.” They had also booked 1,000 shows into their numerous theaters. They had essentially stopped producing their own shows and were primarily backing other productions and booking companies around the country. In 1956 they were faced with an anti-trust suit and were forced to stop their booking business, yet their vast acquisitions of theater real estate continued to make the Shubert Corporation one of the largest theater operations in the country. Still controlled by the Shubert family in the mid-1980s, the company continued to lease theaters and manage real estate.

The Shubert brothers developed new theater districts all over the United States. They employed thousands of theater people over the years. They were partially responsible for the formation of Actor’s Equity (the actors needed a union in order to face their power). They had also turned theater into a large scale, commercial business which concerned itself with popular taste rather than art.

Jacob Shubert died in 1963 at the age of 85.

Source: Excerpted from ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD BIOGRAPHY, 2ND ED. 17 VOLS, Gale Research, © 1998 Gale Research. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Photo credits: Photofest and Culver Pictures

Born to salesman Isaac Hirschfeld and his Russian wife, Rebecca, in St. Louis, just after the turn of the century, the young artist moved with his parents and brothers Milton and Alexander to New York City when he was 12. Hirschfeld studied at the Art Students League but had to drop out of school at age 16 to begin earning a living. He started as an office boy in a movie studio, worked for David O. Selznik as an art director, and wound up for a time in the art department of Warner Bros.

In 1924 the bug that pestered so many young artistic souls of the time bit Hirschfeld and he moved to Europe to make his way working and studying. He focused his attention on a classical training that included drawing, sculpting, and painting and actually intended to make something of himself as a sculptor. But on a return visit to New York, he happened to do a sketch of French actor Sacha Guitry in performance and showed it to a friend, who in turn took it to a contact at the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE. It was published on the theater page and a career was launched.

By 1927, the 24-year-old was theater correspondent in Moscow for the HERALD TRIBUNE. He was soon submitting caricatures to THE NEW YORK TIMES (and today guesses he has produced at least 3,000 drawings just for that paper), and began selling theater drawings to several other New York papers. He continued to indulge his more abiding interest, social issues, and produced numerous political sketches and lithographs for leftist organizations, usually without pay.

Another major trip in the early 1930s, this time to the Far East and most notably to Bali, had a profound and lasting affect on his style. He was intrigued by the expressiveness of simple lines and no color. As he was quoted as saying in PEOPLE, “In Bali the sun bleaches out the color and leaves shadows. You begin to think in lines.” Works from this period were included in his book HARLEM, published in 1941 with text by William Saroyan.

Around this same time, Hirschfeld collaborated with well-known New York writers on books, magazine series, and even a play. He and S. J. Perelman wrote the best-seller WESTWARD HA! OR, AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHT CLICHES, published in 1948. He illustrated Fred Allen’s TREADMILL TO OBLIVION (1954) and MY YEAR IN THE WHITE HOUSE DOGHOUSE, by Ralph Schoenstein (1969). “Show Business is No Business” was Hirschfeld’s first one-man show, held in 1951. As author and illustrator, he successfully attempted to strip Broadway of its glamour and egotism with text and drawings. HIRSCHFELD FOLIO (1964), THE WORLD OF HIRSCHFELD (1970), and HIRSCHFELD BY HIRSCHFELD (1979) are among the published collections of his works.

In a 1989 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW essay on 64 years of illustrating covers for THE NEW YORKER magazine, Hirschfeld wrote: “It is amazing, in flipping through this remarkable collection, to discover how our lives have changed and still remain the same.” The same might be said of the timeless work that has come from Hirschfeld’s hands and mind in eight decades of this century.

Hirschfeld died on January 20, 2003, at his home in Manhattan, New York. He was 99.

Source: Excerpted from NEWSMAKERS 1992, ISSUE CUMULATION, Gale Research, © 1992 Gale Research. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Photo credits: Photofest, and ©Al Hirschfeld (Art reproduced by special arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York)

This noted British designer began his career at age 22 with the 1957 Broadway production of Noël Coward’s “Conversation Piece.” Walton alternated between designing for the London and New York stage throughout the late 1950s and early ’60s. He entered films as costume designer and visual consultant on Disney’s MARY POPPINS (1964), which starred his then-wife Julie Andrews. His eye-popping, late Edwardian costumes for this landmark film that included a mix of animation and live action earned him the first of five Oscar nominations. He went on to create the futuristic world of FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966) and the Roaring Twenties look of Ken Russell’s backstage musical version of THE BOYFRIEND (1971). THE SEA GULL (1968), with its 19th-century Russian settings, marked the first of seven screen collaborations with Sidney Lumet. Walton went on to earn Oscar nominations for his elegant costumes for the director’s MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974) and for both sets and costumes for Lumet’s misguided THE WIZ (1978). Walton finally shared a statuette (with Philip Rosenberg) for Bob Fosse’s superb ALL THAT JAZZ (1979), which required the creation of not only contemporary Manhattan settings but also elaborate fantasy and flashback sequences, most notably a hospital setting.

Walton, however, has been one of the preeminent stage designers since the 1960s. Beginning with his witty costumes and sets for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1963, he has created the look for many successful musical productions, including the Fosse-directed “Pippin” (1972), with its Carolingian setting; “Chicago” (1975), set in the ’20s; the Tommy Tune-staged “A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine” (1980), which re-created the Tinseltown glamour of the ’30s; “Grand Hotel” (1989), set in prewar Berlin; and the acclaimed revival of “Guys and Dolls” (1992). Walton has frequently worked with Mike Nichols, creating everything from the barracks of “Streamers” (1977) to the contemporary English settings of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” (1984). More recently, Walton has branched out into directing, staging and designing a well-received 1996 revival of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

Source: Excerpted from Baseline. BaselineStudioSystems — A Hollywood Media Corp. Company.

Photo credits: Photofest and AP/Wide World

Since he designed “Hair,” the breakthrough musical that altered the look of American theater in the late 1960s, Robin Wagner’s personal style of large-scale, fast-moving, automated scenery has set a standard for contemporary design in America. During the 1970s Wagner designed the scenery for “Lenny,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Sugar,” “Seesaw,” “Mack & Mabel,” “A Chorus Line,” “On the Twentieth Century,” and “Ballroom”; since 1980, he has designed the musicals “42nd Street” and “Dreamgirls.” These have won him all of the major theater design awards. In addition to his work on Broadway, Wagner has designed scenery for the Vienna State Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the American Ballet Theatre, the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, as well as for television, film, and rock group tours.

Robin Wagner’s structural, sometimes minimal, technologically exciting, visually simulating, and kinetic work will be remembered as the classic scenic design of the 1970s and 1980s. He is not a set designer in the old-fashioned sense of the term. He is not painterly; he does not design traditional box sets or painted drops. His work cannot be called delicate or decorative. He does not sketch pretty pictures for the scene shop, but rather, builds models of good scale, models that work, models that show how the scenery works.

The most memorable facet of Wagner’s scenery is that it moves. Automation plays a key role in all of his designs, which are in constant motion — movement that is full of surprises. No one who saw “Jesus Christ Superstar” can forget the floor slowly rising in the back as though it were hinged at the footlights, then bodies beginning to crawl, and finally the floor continuing to rise almost straight upwards. And what about the excitement of the train speeding across the night sky in “On the Twentieth Century” and then, three-dimensionally, the train with its headlight gleaming, heading down the track right towards the audience? And in “Dreamgirls,” constantly moving light towers created different spaces as they pivoted and moved back and forth across the stage.

The second memorable aspect of Wagner’s scenery is its scale: the larger structural scenery in “Lenny,” the tall light towers in “Dreamgirls,” the cavernous spaces in “A Chorus Line” and in “Ballroom.” Also, he seems to work well with lighting designers, and his scenery allows for the theatricality of light. His sets are filled with lights — not the lighting designer’s lamps hung from rails or at the sides of the stage, nor footlights, nor follow spots, but lights that are part of the scenery, lights that can be seen from the audience, lights that are part of the action of the show. The train lights in “On the Twentieth Century” not only lit the stage, they were part of the moving scenery. The theatrical lights of “A Chorus Line” and “Dreamgirls” similarly served a dual purpose. The lights surrounding the Stardust Ballroom created the space and mood of “Ballroom.”

Finally, Wagner’s scenery has substance; it never consists of painted canvas flats. There is wood and metal and weight. The act “curtain” in “On the Twentieth Century,” made of contemporary materials such as formica-covered plywood, weighed 6,000 pounds.

Source: Excerpted from CONTEMPORARY DESIGNERS, 3RD ED., St. James Press, © 1997 St. James Press. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Photo credits: Photofest

In a tribute, the late director Harold Clurman said, “I know of no designer since (Robert Edmond) Jones who more unequivocally deserves the title of master visual artist of the stage than Boris Aronson.” As early as 1926, Kenneth MacGowan referred to Aronson’s work in THE NEW YORK TIMES as “futuristic.” Born in Kiev in 1898, Aronson studied art and stage design with Alexandra Exter, Tairov’s leading designer and an exponent of radical stage design. From this exposure to the Russian experimental school (circa World War I), he began to formulate his theories of stage design: the set should permit varied movement, each scene should contain the mood of the whole play, and through the fusion of color and form, the setting should be beautiful in its own right. He would add, however, that a set is only complete when the actors move through it.

After brief stays in Berlin and Paris, he came to America to ply his craft with the Yiddish Art Theater and the Unser Theater, where he designed sets and costumes. While creating costumes for “A Chassidic Dance,” he said that it was necessary to examine the rhythm of the dancer, then to turn it into scenic construction. Design, to Aronson, dealt with the relationship of the actor to his environment. This inward approach, through the performer, marked most of his work. His early designs, however, reflected the Russian constructivism of his training. These influences can easily be seen in the sets for “Tenth Commandment,” in which he represented Hell as inside a human skull, or in “Little House in the Woods,” which takes place inside a house with walls and a roof that open up in full view of the audience.

For the Broadway stage, his work was equally inventive. “Walk a Little Faster” featured curtains, one of which was shaped like an iris lens, one that unzipped from top to bottom, and another which covered the performers’ bodies except their dancing feet. “Do Re Mi”‘s curtain of juke boxes evoked a cathedral’s stained glass effect.

Aronson stated that his settings stemmed from either a “documentary,” researched approach or from his imagination. The productions that he did with Harold Clurman during his Group Theater days, “Awake and Sing” and “Paradise Lost,” for example, showed the naturalistic, poor dwellings of the Depression era, while many of his other shows, such as “Archibald MacLeish’s J. B.,” with its starry circus tent, explored the reaches of his and the audience’s imagination.

He often stated that the theater is a collective art, and nowhere was this more evident than in his relationship with Harold Prince toward the latter years of his career. Aronson’s Yiddish Art Theater experience came full circle with Prince’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and his Berlin days, as well, with “Cabaret.” Prince brought out the pure versatility of his designer as evidenced by Zorba’s monochromatic settings and “Company”‘s steel, plexiglas, and projections, which contrasted with the pastoral color of “A Little Night Music,” “Follies’ ‘Loveland,'” and the Japanese-print style of “Pacific Overtures.”

Aronson was a technical innovator who, by employing projected scenery in “Battleship Gertie” (1935) and in Eugene Loring’s ballet “The Great American Goof” (1940), became one of the first exponents of its use. In 1947, the Museum of Modern Art featured his projected scenery for the stage in a show called Painting With Light. He used modern materials to solve design problems, such as in deciding to build a giant mirror for “Cabaret” (in which the audience was to see itself) out of lightweight mylar instead of the usual weighty, and thus dangerous, glass. He even took advantage of new technology to aid the design process, as is illustrated by his use of a color copying machine to work out the pattern designs on the model of “Pacific Overtures.”

His work in ballet and opera, especially Mikhail Baryshnikov’s “Nutcracker” and the Metropolitan Opera’s “Mourning Becomes Electra,” proved that he was a well-rounded designer. Aronson’s design of two synagogue interiors, writing of two books, and successful career as a painter and sculptor who had many one-person shows further distinguished him as one of the few leading figures in 20th-century scene design.

Source: Excerpted from CONTEMPORARY DESIGNERS, 3RD ED., St. James Press, © 1997 St. James Press. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Photo credits: Photofest, Robert Galbraith, and Lisa Aronson