Better Times Opens at the Hippodrome

Today’s guest-post is by Sunny Stalter-Pace , Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University (Bio below.) See her previous guest-post here.

One hundred years ago today … the New York Hippodrome spectacle titled Better Times opened at the 5200-seat theater on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets. The sketches in Jefferson Merhamer’s “The Stage and Its People” column for the New York Tribune give some sense of the sheer variety of the acts.

Since its opening in 1905, the Hippodrome had been the site for unique popular performances that combined circus acts, musical comedy numbers, high diving, operatic arias, and other, uncategorizable forms of entertainment. 

From 1916-1923, Hippodrome artistic director R.H. Burnside wrote both the book and lyrics for the shows and served as the dominant force crafting their aesthetic. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Burnside drew on British pantomime traditions. 

Especially after the Great War, he designed shows with storybook characters and comic animal acts that appealed to children first and foremost. With Better Times he seems to have succeeded: Variety founder Sime Silverman’s review of Better Times calls it “the best matinee show the Hip has ever had” and says “It as now as much for kids as grownups.” 

At the same time, he was especially adept at staging scenes heavily dependent on abstraction, with chorus girls casting giant shadows, quickly switching their costumes from black to white, or creating a large-scale pattern. Critic Gilbert Seldes’s book The Seven Lively Arts included a tribute to these numbers where he writes, “I like also the complete annihilation of personality in the chorus. When you see three hundred girls doing the same thing it becomes a problem in mass – I recall one instance when it was a mass of white backs with black lines indicating the probable existence of clothes – the whole thing was quite unhuman.” Precision dance acts were popular in this era – the Tiller Girls appeared at the Ziegfeld Follies earlier that summer, and the Rockettes were founded in 1925 – but the Hippodrome chorus operated at a far larger scale than any other troupe.  

Indeed, the kitschy mass movement of chorus girls was vital to the Hippodrome, as it was one of the guaranteed methods to produce a striking visual effect in such a large space. In Better Times, the chorus moved as a group in several numbers. They bounced on pogo sticks and jumped rope. They dressed as silk and lace fans. For the show’s finale called “The Harbor of Prosperity,” eighty girls in golden costumes marched into the Hippodrome stage’s water tank and disappeared. They re-emerged on a golden ship that emerges from the water as prima donna Nanette Flack sang “My Golden Dream Ship.”

It would be the last of the classic Hippodrome shows. Owner Charles Dillingham learned that the Hippodrome lease had been taken over by a company planning to demolish the theater and construct a hotel in its footprint. Though the company didn't know the theater would be closed until after the bill for Better Times was set, the show provided an ideal retrospective. It included acts who had become synonymous with the venue, especially Powers’ Elephants and the clown Marceline. The company typically celebrated the theater’s opening with an annual April show. In this case, it was titled “The Eighteenth and Farewell Anniversary of the Hippodrome” and included a tribute to Hippodrome architect and co-founder Fred Thompson which his widow attended. 

After further negotiations, the Keith-Albee company bought the Hippodrome, planning to keep the theater as a crown jewel in their vaudeville circuit. The new owners undertook extensive renovations, tearing out the stage apron and water tank to add more seats. The new “super-vaudeville” programs in this era included headliners from touring vaudeville acts, performers from the Ziegfeld Follies and local cabarets, classical musicians, and newsreels. Many of the acts were supplemented with the precision dance of the Allan K. Foster Girls or the large-scale ballet performances of the Hippodrome corps. But Better Times was the last spectacle that took place in what New Yorkers fondly termed “The Old Hippodrome.”

– Sunny Stalter-Pace, September 2, 2022

Sunny Stalter-Pace is Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University. She is the author of Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway (2013) and Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance (2020). Her current book project is Backstage at the Hippodrome: The Show People Behind New York City’s Most Spectacular Playhouse.

Stalter-Pace’s Hippodrome website: https://www.sunnystalterpace.com/hippodrome

Twitter: @slstalter

TAGS: vaudeville, theater, spectacle, entertainment