March 20, 2023 • 35 mins
Augustin Daly is often described as a foundational figure of the U.S. theater. He wrote, adapted, and produced dozens of plays in the 19th century, and he created a theater company that produced many stars of the New York stage.
Research:
- “Augustin Daly Enjoins Dixey.” New York Times. March 22, 1896. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1896/03/22/105744198.html?pageNumber=3
- “Augustin Daly Recovers From Illness.” New Yor Times. June 6, 1899. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1899/06/06/118938057.html?pageNumber=7
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Augustin Daly". Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 Jul. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Augustin-Daly
- Powell, Wiliam S., ed. “Dictionary of North Carolina Biography.” North Carolina Press. 1979-1996.
- “Dramatic Copyright.” New York Times. Dec, 18, 1868. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1868/12/18/issue.html
- “Augustin Daly’s Victory.” New York Times. July 11, 1885. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1885/07/11/103630354.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- Daly, Augustin. “Divorce: A Play of the Period in Five Acts.” ACTED AT THE FIFTH AVENUE THEATRE FOR THE FIRST TIME, SEPTEMBER 5th, 1871. NEW YORK: PRINTED AS MANUSCRIPT ONLY, FOR THE AUTHOR. 1884. https://archive.org/stream/divorceplayofper00daly/divorceplayofper00daly_djvu.txt
- Brown, Thomas Alston. “A History of the New York Stage From the First Performance in 1732 to 1901.” (Reprint) Legare Street Press. 2022.
- “Mr. Daly’s Opening Play.” New York Times. October 5, 1888. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1888/10/05/106197330.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- “Mr. Daly’s New Drama.” New York Times. Oct. 25, 1888. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1888/10/25/106200311.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- “Funeral of Augustin Daly.” New York Times. June 19, 1899. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1899/06/19/100446037.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- Dithmar, Edward A. “The Career of Augustin Daly.” June 18, 1899. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1899/06/18/117925544.html?pageNumber=30
- “Intimate Glimpses of Augustin Daly.” New York Times. October 7, 1917. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1917/10/07/96274408.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- Jaworowski, Ken. “Review: ‘Leah, the Forsaken’ is an 1862 Drama With Modern Resonance.” New York Times. Feb. 21, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/theater/leah-the-forsaken-review.html
- Eytinge, Rose. “The Memories of Rose Eytinge: Being Recollections & Observations of Men, Women, and Events, during Half a Century.” New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1905.
- Daly, Joseph Francis. “Life of Augustin Daly.” Macmillan. 1927.
- “Augustin Daly.” New York Times. June 9, 1899. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1899/06/09/101231584.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Tracy, before we get into the show today, do
you want to do a little bit of thrilling housekeeping?
I sure, do we have. We have adventures on the horizon.
We do, we do. It's very exciting. Yeah. Do you
want to tell everybody where we are going for our stuff?
You missed in history class? Trip? This year? We are
going to Barcelona. I feel like I said that like
(00:24):
I was saying a new car bar Salona. I mean,
it feels like getting a new car. It's very exciting.
We're going from November second to the ninth this year,
twenty twenty three, which should be an absolutely beautiful time. Yeah,
if you live in the US, which I'm guessing most
of the folks who might come with us would be,
(00:46):
that does follow over election day. I'll just be voting
ahead of time so that i can go to Spain.
This is through Defined Destinations, which is the same company
that has handled our previous year European tours. We're going
to get to see so much good stuff. There's a
nice balance of like personal time that's not scheduled and
(01:08):
tours and exciting stuff that's scheduled. Yes, of course, we're
going to Sagrada Familia. Yeah. That was really one of
the big things that drew us to Barcelona because we
talked about a lot of different places to go, some
in Europe, some not. And I think since we did
that episode on Goudy way back, yeah, years ago, like
(01:29):
both of us have just been like, when can we
see this in person? And the answer is later this year. Yeah, yes,
And I mean there are a million other things we're doing.
There are going to be some city tours of Barcelona.
We are going to do some sangria and tap us tasting.
There is piea in my future which I can eat
(01:50):
my weight in piea. We're going to go to the
Picasso Museum. There are tons of really really just like
thrilling fun things that were going to do in addition
to getting some some leisure time where we can just
explore stuff on our own. Yeah yeah, or lie around
and take a minute to just catch the breath. Let's right, breast,
little little nap, Little nap, I'm a big fan of.
(02:14):
On all of our previous trips, I usually try to find,
oh a watering hole near our hotel and people are
always welcome to join if they want to hang out
and have cocktails in the evening and just kind of
rest because we're usually all exhausted at the end of
every day because there is so much to do and
a lot of it. You know, we often do some walking.
Even if we're not walking and we're like on a
(02:35):
bus or something, it's still tiring. We're ready to just
sit and hang out. So plenty of fun to come.
If you are interested in want to learn more, you
can go to Defined Destinations dot com slash Barcelona Dash
twenty twenty three. You can also just go to Define
Destinations dot com, click on their tours tab and go
to the one that says Barcelona twenty twenty three and
(02:57):
you'll get all of the scoop on our hire trip. Yeah, yeah,
I am very excited about it. Me too. We're gonna
have a great time, so we hope you're with us
for it. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(03:24):
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We are
going to do a little bit of US theatrical history today.
Augustine Day is often described as a foundational figure of
the US theater, and that is not unwarranted. He wrote, adapted,
and produced dozens of plays in the nineteenth century, like
(03:46):
Heading Up into the Triple digits, and he created a
theater company that produced a lot of stars of the
New York stage in that time. And he also was
a man who was undeniably, in my opinion, a workaholic
by today's standards. But every account you read of him
in his own time, all the contemporary accounts just talk
about how very passionate he was. But he didn't seem
(04:09):
to ever take a day off. And he may have
worked himself to death, which we will talk about. Yet,
unlike a lot of Holly's other picks recently, there it's
no one's it's not a murder episode. Pretty benign, Yeah, so.
John Augustin Daly was born in Plymouth, North Carolina, on
(04:30):
July twentieth, eighteen thirty eight. His mother, Elizabeth Duffy Daly,
was from an English family who had gone to Jamaica
when Augustine's grandfather's military career took him there. His father,
Captain Dennis Daly, was an Irish sailor who met Elizabeth
when his ship stopped in Foulmouth, Jamaica. At the same time,
(04:52):
that she was visiting friends there. The two of them
sailed with members of Elizabeth's family to New York, where
Elizabeth Dennis were married on July thirty first, eighteen thirty four.
The newlyweds eventually then moved to Plymouth, North Carolina. That
is where Dennis started a lumber business. After Augustine was born.
They had another son, Joseph Francis, in eighteen forty Although
(05:16):
Captain Daly had given up his life at sea to
stay with the family, and he kind of managed ships
that were going out with his lumber business. In September
of eighteen forty one, a ship called the Union was
in desperate need of a commander when the scheduled captain
became too sick to make the voyage, and so Dennis
Daily stepped in to cover the home. Captain Daily contracted
(05:37):
an illness while he was at sea, and he died
from it. Elizabeth moved with her sons at that point
to Norfolk, Virginia, and there, according to an account written
by her son Joseph, two years later, the two boys
saw their first theatrical performances at the Avon Theater. They
each saw a different play. Augustine's first experience was at
(05:57):
a production of Rookwood, based on a novel by William
Harrison Ainsworth. Augustine was instantly enthralled with the theater, and
he immediately started devising his own productions, which he performed
for the neighborhood children in the family Woodhouse and a
bit of fortuitous happenstance, Elizabeth decided not long after Augustine
(06:17):
had fallen in love with theater to move to New
York City. She did this at the urging of her sister,
Mary Ann Woodgate. Elizabeth took sewing jobs to support herself
and her sons, and Augustine started taking clerking jobs anywhere
that needed that kind of assistance, while also going to
night school to finish his education. Augustine also started joining
(06:39):
various amateur theatrical societies. His brother Joseph later recounted that
Augustine was one of the few people in such circles
who just had no interest in acting. He was far
more fascinated with how theaters were run and how plays
were staged. But Elizabeth, their mother, was not enthused about
any of this, because theaters and the people who were
(07:00):
worked in them were considered immoral and certain to run
a young man into ruin. Joseph Daley referred to this
time as quote the day of the talented Drunkard. But
that reputation also led Augustine, as he matured and continued
to follow a career in theater, to put rules in
place for his own businesses and productions that did not
(07:20):
allow many of the behaviors that had given the theatrical
professions such a bad reputation for so many years. Just
as he had back in Plymouth, Augustine started putting on
backyard plays with his peers in New York. He wrote
original material for them as early as age sixteen. By
the time he was eighteen, his ideas had become grander.
(07:42):
He wanted to rent a real theater and put on
a play. The only space available to them was a
small theater on the third floor of a building in Brooklyn,
and there Augustine and his friends put on an evening's
entertainment that consisted of a farce called Poor Piccadilly, as
well as the second act of Macbeth, a comic song,
(08:04):
and then two acts of one of the kids doing
his version of a popular character known as mister Tootles.
Apparently there were a handful of paying customers that went
to that that evening. At the age of twenty one,
Daily started writing as a drama critic. This came about
in a kind of low key but straightforward manner. He
(08:25):
wrote up several articles about things that had been happening
around Brooklyn, and then he carried those articles in his
pocket to the offices of the Sunday Courier. He walked
into the editor's office and started talking to him. By
the time he walked out, he had a new job
as a general writer, which was a salaried position, and
when the drama critic for the Courier left just several
weeks later, Day just stepped into that position. It's interesting
(08:50):
because he didn't really know any other journalists. He certainly
didn't know any other drama critics. He was only twenty
one and he was suddenly thrust into this group of
professional colleagues who were a lot older than him and
had no idea who he was or how he had
suddenly become one of them. But he really rose to
the challenge of the situation. His approach to writing reviews
(09:13):
of theater in the city was direct. It was less
flowery than his professional peers, and that difference in tone
really felt very fresh to readers, and he became very popular.
His insights were also pretty fresh, and soon he was
writing reviews for multiple papers in New York. It's worth
noting that this transition to a career in theater journalism
(09:35):
was happening when that position came with some conflict. The
relationship between theater and critic was often contentious, and theaters
would pull advertisements from a paper if they thought a
critic had been overly harsh in their assessment of a production.
Daily was also working in this role when the eighteen
sixty three Draft riots happened in New York. Previous hosts
(09:59):
of the show, Sarah and Dablina, covered the Draft riots
in twenty eleven, and then we re ran that episode
as a Saturday Classic in July of twenty eighteen. At
one point, Daley was mistaken for an abolitionist rabble rouser,
which to a lot of men meant that he was
part of the war's cause, and he was attacked by
(10:20):
a mob but managed to get away from them. During
these events, he was also warned that he might be
mistaken for a draft officer because he was apparently dressed
in a similar style. People told him he needed to
keep a low profile, so it was more of a
difficult time. Yeah, there's one story about how he got
(10:40):
out of a building that he thought was going to
be set on fire, and then the next guy he talked,
he was like, and also, take off your coat on
your way home, because everyone is going to come after you.
And now he just wanted up his coat under his arm,
and even though it was cold out, he just kind
of toddled home in the cold with no outer garment on.
Though Augustine had been right since he was a teenager
(11:01):
and had put on some ambitious for his age and
means style productions. In eighteen sixty two he had his
first real success in professional theater with a play he
wrote and stage titled Leah the Forsaken. This was an
adaptation of an eighteen forty nine German language play by
Salomon Hermann Mosenthal titled Debrah, and The plot features an
(11:23):
Austrian magistrate's son who falls in love with a Jewish
woman the titular Leah, and conflict unfolds as their relationship
is jeered at by the people of the male protagonist community.
It is in the style that was popular at the time,
meaning it is a dramatic writing about a twenty seventeen
staging of Daily's adaptation, New York Times critic Ken Jaworowski
(11:47):
described the style of this play in this way, quote
to be sure, Augustine Daily, the playwright was generous with
the melodrama, characters deliver expositional soliloquies, and emotions run deep,
and Sarah b The play made its first run in Boston, Massachusetts,
in December of eighteen sixty two, before moving on to
the New York stage in January of the following year.
(12:11):
The role of Leo was played by an actor named
Kate Bateman, who had been a stage actor since she
was a child. After New York, the play went on
to London and ran there for several years. While critics
were not exactly in love with the show, it was
obviously extremely popular and one of the roles that Bateman
was associated with for her entire career. She even wrote
(12:33):
a memoir about playing Leah. But though Daily was very
friendly with Kate Bateman, her father, who was also her manager,
was really another matter. The two of them quarreled about
the way money from the production was split. This escalated
to the point that Hezekiah Bateman sued Daily over it.
Augustine won the court battle, though, yeah, there are lots
(12:57):
of court battles. We'll talk about some others, but litigious life.
The success of Leah the Versaken meant that Daily became
sought after to create more plays, and he had already
slowed his output of journalism work, and over time he
ended up stepping away from it entirely so that he
could pursue a theatrical career full time. But he did
(13:17):
write as a theater critic for about eight to ten years.
The Olympic Theater asked Daily to provide a comedy script
for production, and for that he adapted Victor Yann Sautdu's
play Le Papillon that became Taming the Butterfly, which opened
in eighteen sixty four. And coming up, we're going to
talk about the original play that really put Daily on
(13:38):
the map as a playwright, But first we will pause
for a word from our sponsors. Augustine Daily premiered his
play Under the Gas Light in eighteen sixty seven, and
it became one of his most lasting accomplishments. This play
(14:00):
makes his realism and melodrama to tell stories around New York,
and the play's action is set in motion due to
a socialite's life seeming to fall apart in rapid fashion.
Her betrothed finds out that his beloved is not a
high society girl by birth, but a woman born in
poverty who was adopted by wealthy parents. That secret was
(14:23):
exposed in the play by a mysterious figure who appeared
in all black and turned out to be from her past.
So obviously this entire thing is pretty melodramatic by today's standards.
As the young woman runs away, distraught that the truth
of her origin has caused so much pain, she sets
off a chain of events that plays out in the
streets of New York, encountering a variety of characters who
(14:47):
represent many social classes and moral viewpoints. It's part morality play,
part social commentary, and it was completely unique among the
plays of the day. You have probably seen that very
common trope in older films or even modern pieces satirizing
them of a mustache twirling villain tying someone to a
(15:09):
railroad track and then that person being rescued at the
very end. You can thank Augustin Daly for that and
it appeared in Under the Gaslight first, and Under the
Gaslight was very very popular, so much so that it
invited imitation, but Daily was not having it. In eighteen
sixty eight, the year after the play premiered, another play
(15:33):
titled After Dark, used the exact same convention of a
person tied to the train tracks by a villain with
a daring last minute escape, and Daly, who had copyrighted
his play, filed an injunction against the managers of the
theater where After Dark was running, wanted to prevent performance
of the play. The filing against After Dark was reported
(15:55):
in the New York Times, and the write up is
a pretty charming description of the scene quote. The particular
cause of such success Daily's play is what was commonly
called after such public performance, the railroad scene, at the
end of the third scene in the fourth act, in
which one of the characters is represented as secured by
another and laid helpless upon the rails of a railroad
(16:18):
track in such manner and with the presumed intent that
the railroad train momentarily expected shall run him down and
kill him, and just at the moment when such a
fate seems inevitable, another of the characters contrives to reach
the intended victim and to drag him from the track
as the train rushes in and passes over the spot
(16:41):
that this incident and scene was entirely novel and unlike
any dramatic incident known to have been heretofore represented on
any stage or invented by any author before the plaintiff
so composed, produced and represented the same. Yeah. The interesting
note in that is that Daily his original version is
(17:01):
actually kind of the opposite of the way we often
have seen it. The heroine is not the one that
is tied to the tracks. It is the hero, and
the heroine is the one who saves him. Normally, you
see the woman in distress on the train tracks in
a lot of films, but that was not how Daily
wrote it. Daily incidentally won his case, and it was
the first of many legal battles that he would have
(17:22):
while ardently protecting his copyrights. He did not shy away
from a lawsuit, and even when people in distant states
tried to stage one of his plays without paying a royalty,
or thought they might be able to sneak a scene
into one of their productions that borrowed heavily from Daily's work,
Augustine Daly always seemed to hear about it, and he
always took legal action to stop it. Daly was still
(17:45):
on an upswing of success when he married Mary Duff
on January ninth, eighteen sixty nine. Mary was the daughter
of a business peer of Daily's, John A. Duff. John
Duff's Olympic Theater was the most successful and profitable entertainment
venue in New York at the time. The couple lived
at two fourteen West twenty fifth Street, where Augustine's brother
(18:07):
and mother also lived. The following year, the couple welcomed
their first son, Leonard, and they had a second son
named Francis Augustine, who went by Austin. In eighteen seventy three,
two years after Under the Gas Light became popular, Augustine
Daily formed his own theater company, the Fifth Avenue Theater
on twenty fourth Street. This theater building had its own
(18:30):
rich and sometimes sortid history. It started as an opera
house and then became a burlesque theater. After a murder
in which a show manager killed a colleague, the theater
shut down for a year. It reopened as a venue
for French operettas before Daily took it over and for
almost four years, from eighteen sixty nine to eighteen seventy three,
(18:50):
Daily staged his productions there, but on New Year's Day
of eighteen seventy three, it burned down. While that level
of loss would be deeply stressful, Daily seemed to manage
all right. Three weeks later he opened his theater company
again at a new location he had leased. He also
called this Daily's Fifth Avenue Theater. Daily's theater company was
(19:13):
really well known for its core of actors. He would
select actors and develop them rather than chasing after the
big names, and a lot of successful stage careers started
with Daily. He didn't only cast to type, as most
theaters did, with actors playing one sort of character all
the time. He urged actors to develop a range that
(19:35):
could include everything from broad comedy to serious drama. One
of the plays that Augustine Daily produced before the first
Fifth Avenue Theater burned was a show that he wrote
titled Horizon, an original drama of contemporary New Society and
of American Frontier perrols. This play is considered one of
the early instances of literature that focuses on stories and
(19:58):
themes about North America and the United States rather than Europeans,
but it also, unsurprisingly has a lot of very awkward
and outdated language about indigenous people. He also wrote Divorce
in eighteen seventy one that opened on September fifth of
that year, and it had a successful two hundred night run.
(20:19):
The play unpacks the topic of divorce, which was becoming
more and more common in the nineteenth century. Playwrights in
Europe had been using the topic for dramatic purposes already,
but Daily's play is considered the first US play to
cover it. Daily's script was kind of didactic, showing that
selfishness is often the seed that leads to discord in
(20:41):
a marriage. In eighteen seventy seven, Daily was continuing to
find new ways to draw crowds with his skill as
a writer, his ability to shepherd talent into stardom, and
sometimes by simply innovating the space that he staged his work.
In that year, air conditioning was installed in the Fifth,
a new theater on West twenty eighth Street, making it
(21:02):
the first US theater to offer that luxury. In eighteen
seventy nine, Daily opened another Daily's Theater location in New
York City. This time at Broadway in thirtieth Once the
Second New York Theater was opened, Daily found he couldn't
keep cranking out original works and managed all of his
other businesses, so he started to focus exclusively on adaptations,
(21:25):
which he was quite good at. He adapted numerous works
from French and German literature into stage place. Late in
eighteen eighty four, Daily, who professionally was experiencing so much prosperity,
suffered a huge personal loss. His sons, Leonard and Austin,
who were fourteen and eleven at the time, both developed
(21:45):
dipsyria during the Christmas season, and in the new year
things only got worse. On January fifth, eighteen eighty five,
the two boys died within half an hour of each other.
Daily's brother, Joseph, described his brother as to help any
and every child he encountered. After the deaths of his sons,
he wrote quote, he seemed now to behold in all
(22:08):
the young, and especially in little wanderers his own. I
have seen him stop a crying child in the street
to inquire its trouble, take it by the hand, and
restore it to its home. In countless ways he sought
to help the helpless because of the prominence of Daily's
name in New York, condolences really flooded into the family.
(22:29):
But though he grieved very deeply, Daily was right back
to work, probably finding some comfort in the familiar and
busy pace of the theater. Coming up, we are going
to talk about Daily's theatrical adventures into Europe, but before
we do that, we will pause for a little sponsor break.
(22:55):
Beginning in the eighteen eighties, Augustine Daily took his style
of theater historians have described as really setting the standard
for the US stage, and he toured Europe with it.
When Daily's Troop debuted, she would and she would not.
In England, it was a huge success. That play is
a comedy that was written in seventeen o two by
(23:15):
a popular entertainer of the day named Collie Sibber. It
was merely the start of several years of tours that
took Daily in his company to Germany and France, as
well as England. There is a certain fun turnabout in
this success of his tours, as Daily made his name
in the US theater scene, combining his adaptation of European
plays with his original work, building on the traditions of
(23:39):
the countries that he eventually toured while also creating something new.
Joseph Daily wrote of his brother's earliest tours in Germany, quote,
it was to be expected that the American manner and
speech would be found strange, and that the transformation of
German into foreign types might occasion discontent. The Americans were,
in fact allowed to be fascinating, but declared not true
(24:02):
to life. In eighteen eighty eight, Daily and his company
of performers, fresh off of a European tour, prepared for
a new season. The play that opened the season was
titled Lottery of Love, and it was an adaptation of
a French play titled at a Suprise de Divorce. Daily
took the opportunity of introducing two new actors to his
(24:23):
New York audiences with the anticipated play. Those were Sarah
Chalmers and Kitty Cheetham. Sarah Chalmers was of particular interest
to Daily's regulars. She had never been on stage anywhere before. Yeah,
it was kind of like saying, here is the next
great star, and you can see her first performance. The
New York Times wrote about the anticipation of this new season, quote,
(24:45):
the opening night will be as it always is at
Daily's an occasion of note in society circles. Every seat
in the house had been ordered long before mister Daily returned,
and the orders called for more places that could be
furnished in two such theaters. The old and only save
rule of filling the orders according to the date of
their receipt has been followed, but this will necessarily disappoint
(25:08):
a great many whom the management would have been pleased
to gratify. The singular feature of all this is that
until the announcement now made, the general public has had
no actual knowledge of what mister Daily intended to produce
for his opening play, so that purchasers of seats had
bought blindly, knowing nothing of what they were to see
(25:29):
that season. Daily also introduced a subscription plan for Tuesday
night plays. This was a popular trend in Paris in
the eighteen eighties, and Daily adopted it for New York audiences,
so he had what was essentially a season ticket audience
for nights that would normally be slow. It also let
him stage encore performances of audience favorites without having to
(25:52):
work them into the regular season schedule. The subscription also
gave participants a chance at first class seats at the
day views of new shows. The subscription plan was not
the only way that Daily plussed up the eighteen eighty
eight season. He had taken advantage of the theater having
no shows to quietly renovate it to be more luxurious
(26:12):
than ever. There was new carpet, new art and better
sound baffling, as well as plush new seats and an
elaborately carved precnium arch. According to the paper, Daily had
also taken control of a building behind the theater which
was connected to it, to build out an entirely new
set of dressing rooms for his players. They're right up
(26:34):
in the Times concluded quote, Daily's theater when it reopens
Tuesday will be one of the best appointed houses in
the world. There's a cute note to that, which is
it write ups about this renovation which was going on
while Daily and the Trooper in Europe was so quiet.
No one in the neighborhood even knew it was happening.
And I don't know why that was such a point
of like pride for everyone, but it's very charming. In
(26:57):
eighteen ninety three, Augustine Daily opened another theater, this time
in London, England. Daily's theater, which was situated off Leicester Square,
opened on June twenty seventh, eighteen ninety three. It had
been custom built for his company, which was different from
his New York theaters, which he had acquired already existing.
But even though Daily had been really successful in New
(27:18):
York running theaters, he just did not have the same
good fortune in his Cranbourne Street location. After a pretty
good initial run with Taming of the Shrew and several
other Shakespearean plays, Daily had companies from Europe play there
before he returned with his own staging of an adaptation
called The Railroad of Love. That show didn't do especially well,
(27:40):
and neither did the next two Shakespearean plays. In eighteen
ninety five, he turned the theater over to George Edwards,
a British producer who found great success mounting musicals there.
The theater itself retained Daily's name, though that had to
have been painful for him to some degree, and an
account written after his death, Daily's relationship with his theaters
(28:02):
was described this way. Quote his theaters he loved his personalities.
For one, the Fifth Avenue, he had Oliver Wendell Holmes
pen and address for the opening On another occasion, for
the opening season of eighteen ninety two, he tried to
procure the services of Eugene Field for a poetic address.
Here his sentiment came in again. Yeah, he clearly loved
(28:24):
those buildings. He would always talk about his houses being
his home, his houses meaning theater houses. So to have
one that just didn't work out after he had gone
to the trouble to have it custom built probably felt
very jarring. On May thirteenth of eighteen eighty nine, Augustine
and Mary set sail for Europe, where the Daily Company
(28:45):
was once again set to give a tour, and where
Daily was going to settle a financial dispute with George
Edwards over the split of revenue from the theater. After
that transition, Augustine felt quite ill on the voyage, but
he wired his brother on May twenty ninth, quote much better,
all danger over. On June fifth, papers reported that he
(29:05):
was just fine. The following ran in the New York
Times on June sixth, having been wired from London, quote,
Augustine Day has quite recovered from his recent sickness and
has gone to Paris for a few days with Missus
Daly and Missus Ada. Rhian. He will return on June
twentieth for the hearing of the case against George Edwards,
resulting from a dispute regarding sharing the profits of Daily's
(29:27):
London Theater, of which Edwards is the owner and Daily
the Lessee. Augustine wrote his brother a letter dated May thirtieth,
in which he described the stress of the theater season
launch and his impending legal hearings and quote financial anxieties
having taken its toll on his health. He described being
(29:47):
very ill even before he boarded the ship bound for London,
and how a weekend to the trip he had a
very real crisis, he wrote, quote A combination of pneumonia
and brain fever were the foes I was fighting, and
thank god, by Thursday I had conquered both. He assured
his brother Joseph that the following winter he was going
(30:07):
to quote let up a bit on the strain and
devote more time to leisure. But by the time that
letter arrived, Augustine Daly was dead. His brother and mother
had already received a telegram that he had died on
June seventh of eighteen eighty nine, at the age of
sixty one in the Continental Hotel in Paris, he had
felt much better, and he had traveled to France, as
(30:29):
he said, with his wife and actor Ada Rhian, who
started a lot of his productions, and after getting to
the Continental Dally just got much worse. And on the seventh,
as his wife, Mary and Aida had lunch in the suite,
he called out from the bedroom that he needed a doctor,
but he died before and he could arrive. Mary Daly
had Augustine's body shipped back to New York for a
(30:50):
funeral at Saint Patrick's Cathedral on June eighteenth. One of
the biggest impacts Daily had on literature and theater in
the US was not through his own works, but through
his support an encouragement of other artists. Bronson Howard, who
was a very successful playwright in the late nineteenth century,
had three of his four first plays produced by Daily
(31:14):
before any other theater. Daily is also credited with encouraging
Mark Twain to start writing for the theater, as well
as short story author Bret Hart. Yeah, there are a
lot of other people that he really encouraged to turn
their pens to playwriting, which is one of the reasons
he's considered so influential and his obituary read in part quote,
(31:35):
Never a jester, yet a maker, and a purveyor of
the most delightful comedy. Al was a man of few words,
yet singularly successful in the development of the most human
and social of the arts. Never popular in the common sense,
yet always respected and admired by his foes and opponents.
It seems he died much too soon, for his vitality
(31:56):
had not yet begun to diminish perceptibly, and the shock
of his sudden going has been keenly felt by thousands
who knew him only by name, Oh Augustin Day. Some
of those ones. We don't hear his name very often,
but he was like it for a long time. Just
an interesting, interesting dude. Give some listener mail for us,
(32:18):
Oh I do. It's a listener mail that solves a mystery.
Oh good. It is from our listener, Carrie, who wrote
Chicken and Dumblings with lots of exclamation points. Carrie writes, Holly,
I am a similar experience with chicken and dumplings. What
you are describing from your childhood is very similar to
that of my childhood, except my mom slash Grandma would cook,
(32:40):
slash steam the dough on top of the Chicken. I
have always wondered why my Chicken and Dumblings was so
much different than anyone else's. I asked my mom, and
she said her mom was not one to make up recipe,
so she decided to check my grandma's old cookbooks. Lo
and behold, my mom found a recipe in Betty Crocker
that she thinks is where it came from. It was
(33:01):
so exciting for me to finally have an answer to
my family's mystery. Perhaps your recipe has similar origins. I
am attaching a few photos to show you said recipe.
You might remember I wrote once years ago to tell
you how my baby loved hollies laugh, but she would
always laugh in response to it. That baby is turning
six on Sunday. Happy birthday, Winnifred. Also, we got a
(33:23):
new puppy this winter, so I'm including a photo of
five month old Daisy, a very playful cavapoo. Thank you
both for all you do for the podcast. I hope
you can make it to Portland, Oregon someday soon for
a live show. Me too, Okay, Carrie, thank you, because
I felt like I was losing my mind because no
one else made it this way, but she scanned in
(33:43):
bless her she either scanner took variod photographs this Betty
Crocker cookbook from nineteen seventy six, and there is a
photograph of the chicken and dumblings as described. They look
exactly like the ones that I grew up eating. I
really thought my mom had just misinterpreted a recipe. It
was just like, I'm not putting broth in here. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure that we have that exact Betty Crocker
(34:07):
cookbook in our home somewhere. Problem. I mean, it was
very standard, Yeah, homes in the US. Yeah, Like, I
think we have one that belonged to someone. And then
I'd like, I'm I for sure remember it in my parents'
house when I was growing up. Amazing. Also, yes, happy
birthday to Winnifred. I hope it was wonderful. By now,
(34:28):
the birthday would have been quite a few weeks back,
since we were recording a little ahead of the game.
But that is a very cute dog. I would be
in danger around that dog because I would give whenever
it wanted, even if it were something very dangerous. Again,
I cannot thank you enough. This would have made me
(34:51):
tell a fib that I thought my mom was just
making stuff out because she sometimes would nisum, But now
I know no. Betty Crocker, may mystery solved. If you
would like to write to us, you could do so
at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
find us on social media as Missed in History pretty
(35:13):
much everywhere, and if you haven't subscribed, you can do
that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(35:34):
your favorite shows.
Hey, Tracy, before we get into the show today, do
you want to do a little bit of thrilling housekeeping?
I sure, do we have. We have adventures on the horizon.
We do, we do. It's very exciting. Yeah. Do you
want to tell everybody where we are going for our stuff?
You missed in history class? Trip? This year? We are
going to Barcelona. I feel like I said that like
(00:24):
I was saying a new car bar Salona. I mean,
it feels like getting a new car. It's very exciting.
We're going from November second to the ninth this year,
twenty twenty three, which should be an absolutely beautiful time. Yeah,
if you live in the US, which I'm guessing most
of the folks who might come with us would be,
(00:46):
that does follow over election day. I'll just be voting
ahead of time so that i can go to Spain.
This is through Defined Destinations, which is the same company
that has handled our previous year European tours. We're going
to get to see so much good stuff. There's a
nice balance of like personal time that's not scheduled and
(01:08):
tours and exciting stuff that's scheduled. Yes, of course, we're
going to Sagrada Familia. Yeah. That was really one of
the big things that drew us to Barcelona because we
talked about a lot of different places to go, some
in Europe, some not. And I think since we did
that episode on Goudy way back, yeah, years ago, like
(01:29):
both of us have just been like, when can we
see this in person? And the answer is later this year. Yeah, yes,
And I mean there are a million other things we're doing.
There are going to be some city tours of Barcelona.
We are going to do some sangria and tap us tasting.
There is piea in my future which I can eat
(01:50):
my weight in piea. We're going to go to the
Picasso Museum. There are tons of really really just like
thrilling fun things that were going to do in addition
to getting some some leisure time where we can just
explore stuff on our own. Yeah yeah, or lie around
and take a minute to just catch the breath. Let's right, breast,
little little nap, Little nap, I'm a big fan of.
(02:14):
On all of our previous trips, I usually try to find,
oh a watering hole near our hotel and people are
always welcome to join if they want to hang out
and have cocktails in the evening and just kind of
rest because we're usually all exhausted at the end of
every day because there is so much to do and
a lot of it. You know, we often do some walking.
Even if we're not walking and we're like on a
(02:35):
bus or something, it's still tiring. We're ready to just
sit and hang out. So plenty of fun to come.
If you are interested in want to learn more, you
can go to Defined Destinations dot com slash Barcelona Dash
twenty twenty three. You can also just go to Define
Destinations dot com, click on their tours tab and go
to the one that says Barcelona twenty twenty three and
(02:57):
you'll get all of the scoop on our hire trip. Yeah, yeah,
I am very excited about it. Me too. We're gonna
have a great time, so we hope you're with us
for it. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(03:24):
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We are
going to do a little bit of US theatrical history today.
Augustine Day is often described as a foundational figure of
the US theater, and that is not unwarranted. He wrote, adapted,
and produced dozens of plays in the nineteenth century, like
(03:46):
Heading Up into the Triple digits, and he created a
theater company that produced a lot of stars of the
New York stage in that time. And he also was
a man who was undeniably, in my opinion, a workaholic
by today's standards. But every account you read of him
in his own time, all the contemporary accounts just talk
about how very passionate he was. But he didn't seem
(04:09):
to ever take a day off. And he may have
worked himself to death, which we will talk about. Yet,
unlike a lot of Holly's other picks recently, there it's
no one's it's not a murder episode. Pretty benign, Yeah, so.
John Augustin Daly was born in Plymouth, North Carolina, on
(04:30):
July twentieth, eighteen thirty eight. His mother, Elizabeth Duffy Daly,
was from an English family who had gone to Jamaica
when Augustine's grandfather's military career took him there. His father,
Captain Dennis Daly, was an Irish sailor who met Elizabeth
when his ship stopped in Foulmouth, Jamaica. At the same time,
(04:52):
that she was visiting friends there. The two of them
sailed with members of Elizabeth's family to New York, where
Elizabeth Dennis were married on July thirty first, eighteen thirty four.
The newlyweds eventually then moved to Plymouth, North Carolina. That
is where Dennis started a lumber business. After Augustine was born.
They had another son, Joseph Francis, in eighteen forty Although
(05:16):
Captain Daly had given up his life at sea to
stay with the family, and he kind of managed ships
that were going out with his lumber business. In September
of eighteen forty one, a ship called the Union was
in desperate need of a commander when the scheduled captain
became too sick to make the voyage, and so Dennis
Daily stepped in to cover the home. Captain Daily contracted
(05:37):
an illness while he was at sea, and he died
from it. Elizabeth moved with her sons at that point
to Norfolk, Virginia, and there, according to an account written
by her son Joseph, two years later, the two boys
saw their first theatrical performances at the Avon Theater. They
each saw a different play. Augustine's first experience was at
(05:57):
a production of Rookwood, based on a novel by William
Harrison Ainsworth. Augustine was instantly enthralled with the theater, and
he immediately started devising his own productions, which he performed
for the neighborhood children in the family Woodhouse and a
bit of fortuitous happenstance, Elizabeth decided not long after Augustine
(06:17):
had fallen in love with theater to move to New
York City. She did this at the urging of her sister,
Mary Ann Woodgate. Elizabeth took sewing jobs to support herself
and her sons, and Augustine started taking clerking jobs anywhere
that needed that kind of assistance, while also going to
night school to finish his education. Augustine also started joining
(06:39):
various amateur theatrical societies. His brother Joseph later recounted that
Augustine was one of the few people in such circles
who just had no interest in acting. He was far
more fascinated with how theaters were run and how plays
were staged. But Elizabeth, their mother, was not enthused about
any of this, because theaters and the people who were
(07:00):
worked in them were considered immoral and certain to run
a young man into ruin. Joseph Daley referred to this
time as quote the day of the talented Drunkard. But
that reputation also led Augustine, as he matured and continued
to follow a career in theater, to put rules in
place for his own businesses and productions that did not
(07:20):
allow many of the behaviors that had given the theatrical
professions such a bad reputation for so many years. Just
as he had back in Plymouth, Augustine started putting on
backyard plays with his peers in New York. He wrote
original material for them as early as age sixteen. By
the time he was eighteen, his ideas had become grander.
(07:42):
He wanted to rent a real theater and put on
a play. The only space available to them was a
small theater on the third floor of a building in Brooklyn,
and there Augustine and his friends put on an evening's
entertainment that consisted of a farce called Poor Piccadilly, as
well as the second act of Macbeth, a comic song,
(08:04):
and then two acts of one of the kids doing
his version of a popular character known as mister Tootles.
Apparently there were a handful of paying customers that went
to that that evening. At the age of twenty one,
Daily started writing as a drama critic. This came about
in a kind of low key but straightforward manner. He
(08:25):
wrote up several articles about things that had been happening
around Brooklyn, and then he carried those articles in his
pocket to the offices of the Sunday Courier. He walked
into the editor's office and started talking to him. By
the time he walked out, he had a new job
as a general writer, which was a salaried position, and
when the drama critic for the Courier left just several
weeks later, Day just stepped into that position. It's interesting
(08:50):
because he didn't really know any other journalists. He certainly
didn't know any other drama critics. He was only twenty
one and he was suddenly thrust into this group of
professional colleagues who were a lot older than him and
had no idea who he was or how he had
suddenly become one of them. But he really rose to
the challenge of the situation. His approach to writing reviews
(09:13):
of theater in the city was direct. It was less
flowery than his professional peers, and that difference in tone
really felt very fresh to readers, and he became very popular.
His insights were also pretty fresh, and soon he was
writing reviews for multiple papers in New York. It's worth
noting that this transition to a career in theater journalism
(09:35):
was happening when that position came with some conflict. The
relationship between theater and critic was often contentious, and theaters
would pull advertisements from a paper if they thought a
critic had been overly harsh in their assessment of a production.
Daily was also working in this role when the eighteen
sixty three Draft riots happened in New York. Previous hosts
(09:59):
of the show, Sarah and Dablina, covered the Draft riots
in twenty eleven, and then we re ran that episode
as a Saturday Classic in July of twenty eighteen. At
one point, Daley was mistaken for an abolitionist rabble rouser,
which to a lot of men meant that he was
part of the war's cause, and he was attacked by
(10:20):
a mob but managed to get away from them. During
these events, he was also warned that he might be
mistaken for a draft officer because he was apparently dressed
in a similar style. People told him he needed to
keep a low profile, so it was more of a
difficult time. Yeah, there's one story about how he got
(10:40):
out of a building that he thought was going to
be set on fire, and then the next guy he talked,
he was like, and also, take off your coat on
your way home, because everyone is going to come after you.
And now he just wanted up his coat under his arm,
and even though it was cold out, he just kind
of toddled home in the cold with no outer garment on.
Though Augustine had been right since he was a teenager
(11:01):
and had put on some ambitious for his age and
means style productions. In eighteen sixty two he had his
first real success in professional theater with a play he
wrote and stage titled Leah the Forsaken. This was an
adaptation of an eighteen forty nine German language play by
Salomon Hermann Mosenthal titled Debrah, and The plot features an
(11:23):
Austrian magistrate's son who falls in love with a Jewish
woman the titular Leah, and conflict unfolds as their relationship
is jeered at by the people of the male protagonist community.
It is in the style that was popular at the time,
meaning it is a dramatic writing about a twenty seventeen
staging of Daily's adaptation, New York Times critic Ken Jaworowski
(11:47):
described the style of this play in this way, quote
to be sure, Augustine Daily, the playwright was generous with
the melodrama, characters deliver expositional soliloquies, and emotions run deep,
and Sarah b The play made its first run in Boston, Massachusetts,
in December of eighteen sixty two, before moving on to
the New York stage in January of the following year.
(12:11):
The role of Leo was played by an actor named
Kate Bateman, who had been a stage actor since she
was a child. After New York, the play went on
to London and ran there for several years. While critics
were not exactly in love with the show, it was
obviously extremely popular and one of the roles that Bateman
was associated with for her entire career. She even wrote
(12:33):
a memoir about playing Leah. But though Daily was very
friendly with Kate Bateman, her father, who was also her manager,
was really another matter. The two of them quarreled about
the way money from the production was split. This escalated
to the point that Hezekiah Bateman sued Daily over it.
Augustine won the court battle, though, yeah, there are lots
(12:57):
of court battles. We'll talk about some others, but litigious life.
The success of Leah the Versaken meant that Daily became
sought after to create more plays, and he had already
slowed his output of journalism work, and over time he
ended up stepping away from it entirely so that he
could pursue a theatrical career full time. But he did
(13:17):
write as a theater critic for about eight to ten years.
The Olympic Theater asked Daily to provide a comedy script
for production, and for that he adapted Victor Yann Sautdu's
play Le Papillon that became Taming the Butterfly, which opened
in eighteen sixty four. And coming up, we're going to
talk about the original play that really put Daily on
(13:38):
the map as a playwright, But first we will pause
for a word from our sponsors. Augustine Daily premiered his
play Under the Gas Light in eighteen sixty seven, and
it became one of his most lasting accomplishments. This play
(14:00):
makes his realism and melodrama to tell stories around New York,
and the play's action is set in motion due to
a socialite's life seeming to fall apart in rapid fashion.
Her betrothed finds out that his beloved is not a
high society girl by birth, but a woman born in
poverty who was adopted by wealthy parents. That secret was
(14:23):
exposed in the play by a mysterious figure who appeared
in all black and turned out to be from her past.
So obviously this entire thing is pretty melodramatic by today's standards.
As the young woman runs away, distraught that the truth
of her origin has caused so much pain, she sets
off a chain of events that plays out in the
streets of New York, encountering a variety of characters who
(14:47):
represent many social classes and moral viewpoints. It's part morality play,
part social commentary, and it was completely unique among the
plays of the day. You have probably seen that very
common trope in older films or even modern pieces satirizing
them of a mustache twirling villain tying someone to a
(15:09):
railroad track and then that person being rescued at the
very end. You can thank Augustin Daly for that and
it appeared in Under the Gaslight first, and Under the
Gaslight was very very popular, so much so that it
invited imitation, but Daily was not having it. In eighteen
sixty eight, the year after the play premiered, another play
(15:33):
titled After Dark, used the exact same convention of a
person tied to the train tracks by a villain with
a daring last minute escape, and Daly, who had copyrighted
his play, filed an injunction against the managers of the
theater where After Dark was running, wanted to prevent performance
of the play. The filing against After Dark was reported
(15:55):
in the New York Times, and the write up is
a pretty charming description of the scene quote. The particular
cause of such success Daily's play is what was commonly
called after such public performance, the railroad scene, at the
end of the third scene in the fourth act, in
which one of the characters is represented as secured by
another and laid helpless upon the rails of a railroad
(16:18):
track in such manner and with the presumed intent that
the railroad train momentarily expected shall run him down and
kill him, and just at the moment when such a
fate seems inevitable, another of the characters contrives to reach
the intended victim and to drag him from the track
as the train rushes in and passes over the spot
(16:41):
that this incident and scene was entirely novel and unlike
any dramatic incident known to have been heretofore represented on
any stage or invented by any author before the plaintiff
so composed, produced and represented the same. Yeah. The interesting
note in that is that Daily his original version is
(17:01):
actually kind of the opposite of the way we often
have seen it. The heroine is not the one that
is tied to the tracks. It is the hero, and
the heroine is the one who saves him. Normally, you
see the woman in distress on the train tracks in
a lot of films, but that was not how Daily
wrote it. Daily incidentally won his case, and it was
the first of many legal battles that he would have
(17:22):
while ardently protecting his copyrights. He did not shy away
from a lawsuit, and even when people in distant states
tried to stage one of his plays without paying a royalty,
or thought they might be able to sneak a scene
into one of their productions that borrowed heavily from Daily's work,
Augustine Daly always seemed to hear about it, and he
always took legal action to stop it. Daly was still
(17:45):
on an upswing of success when he married Mary Duff
on January ninth, eighteen sixty nine. Mary was the daughter
of a business peer of Daily's, John A. Duff. John
Duff's Olympic Theater was the most successful and profitable entertainment
venue in New York at the time. The couple lived
at two fourteen West twenty fifth Street, where Augustine's brother
(18:07):
and mother also lived. The following year, the couple welcomed
their first son, Leonard, and they had a second son
named Francis Augustine, who went by Austin. In eighteen seventy three,
two years after Under the Gas Light became popular, Augustine
Daily formed his own theater company, the Fifth Avenue Theater
on twenty fourth Street. This theater building had its own
(18:30):
rich and sometimes sortid history. It started as an opera
house and then became a burlesque theater. After a murder
in which a show manager killed a colleague, the theater
shut down for a year. It reopened as a venue
for French operettas before Daily took it over and for
almost four years, from eighteen sixty nine to eighteen seventy three,
(18:50):
Daily staged his productions there, but on New Year's Day
of eighteen seventy three, it burned down. While that level
of loss would be deeply stressful, Daily seemed to manage
all right. Three weeks later he opened his theater company
again at a new location he had leased. He also
called this Daily's Fifth Avenue Theater. Daily's theater company was
(19:13):
really well known for its core of actors. He would
select actors and develop them rather than chasing after the
big names, and a lot of successful stage careers started
with Daily. He didn't only cast to type, as most
theaters did, with actors playing one sort of character all
the time. He urged actors to develop a range that
(19:35):
could include everything from broad comedy to serious drama. One
of the plays that Augustine Daily produced before the first
Fifth Avenue Theater burned was a show that he wrote
titled Horizon, an original drama of contemporary New Society and
of American Frontier perrols. This play is considered one of
the early instances of literature that focuses on stories and
(19:58):
themes about North America and the United States rather than Europeans,
but it also, unsurprisingly has a lot of very awkward
and outdated language about indigenous people. He also wrote Divorce
in eighteen seventy one that opened on September fifth of
that year, and it had a successful two hundred night run.
(20:19):
The play unpacks the topic of divorce, which was becoming
more and more common in the nineteenth century. Playwrights in
Europe had been using the topic for dramatic purposes already,
but Daily's play is considered the first US play to
cover it. Daily's script was kind of didactic, showing that
selfishness is often the seed that leads to discord in
(20:41):
a marriage. In eighteen seventy seven, Daily was continuing to
find new ways to draw crowds with his skill as
a writer, his ability to shepherd talent into stardom, and
sometimes by simply innovating the space that he staged his work.
In that year, air conditioning was installed in the Fifth,
a new theater on West twenty eighth Street, making it
(21:02):
the first US theater to offer that luxury. In eighteen
seventy nine, Daily opened another Daily's Theater location in New
York City. This time at Broadway in thirtieth Once the
Second New York Theater was opened, Daily found he couldn't
keep cranking out original works and managed all of his
other businesses, so he started to focus exclusively on adaptations,
(21:25):
which he was quite good at. He adapted numerous works
from French and German literature into stage place. Late in
eighteen eighty four, Daily, who professionally was experiencing so much prosperity,
suffered a huge personal loss. His sons, Leonard and Austin,
who were fourteen and eleven at the time, both developed
(21:45):
dipsyria during the Christmas season, and in the new year
things only got worse. On January fifth, eighteen eighty five,
the two boys died within half an hour of each other.
Daily's brother, Joseph, described his brother as to help any
and every child he encountered. After the deaths of his sons,
he wrote quote, he seemed now to behold in all
(22:08):
the young, and especially in little wanderers his own. I
have seen him stop a crying child in the street
to inquire its trouble, take it by the hand, and
restore it to its home. In countless ways he sought
to help the helpless because of the prominence of Daily's
name in New York, condolences really flooded into the family.
(22:29):
But though he grieved very deeply, Daily was right back
to work, probably finding some comfort in the familiar and
busy pace of the theater. Coming up, we are going
to talk about Daily's theatrical adventures into Europe, but before
we do that, we will pause for a little sponsor break.
(22:55):
Beginning in the eighteen eighties, Augustine Daily took his style
of theater historians have described as really setting the standard
for the US stage, and he toured Europe with it.
When Daily's Troop debuted, she would and she would not.
In England, it was a huge success. That play is
a comedy that was written in seventeen o two by
(23:15):
a popular entertainer of the day named Collie Sibber. It
was merely the start of several years of tours that
took Daily in his company to Germany and France, as
well as England. There is a certain fun turnabout in
this success of his tours, as Daily made his name
in the US theater scene, combining his adaptation of European
plays with his original work, building on the traditions of
(23:39):
the countries that he eventually toured while also creating something new.
Joseph Daily wrote of his brother's earliest tours in Germany, quote,
it was to be expected that the American manner and
speech would be found strange, and that the transformation of
German into foreign types might occasion discontent. The Americans were,
in fact allowed to be fascinating, but declared not true
(24:02):
to life. In eighteen eighty eight, Daily and his company
of performers, fresh off of a European tour, prepared for
a new season. The play that opened the season was
titled Lottery of Love, and it was an adaptation of
a French play titled at a Suprise de Divorce. Daily
took the opportunity of introducing two new actors to his
(24:23):
New York audiences with the anticipated play. Those were Sarah
Chalmers and Kitty Cheetham. Sarah Chalmers was of particular interest
to Daily's regulars. She had never been on stage anywhere before. Yeah,
it was kind of like saying, here is the next
great star, and you can see her first performance. The
New York Times wrote about the anticipation of this new season, quote,
(24:45):
the opening night will be as it always is at
Daily's an occasion of note in society circles. Every seat
in the house had been ordered long before mister Daily returned,
and the orders called for more places that could be
furnished in two such theaters. The old and only save
rule of filling the orders according to the date of
their receipt has been followed, but this will necessarily disappoint
(25:08):
a great many whom the management would have been pleased
to gratify. The singular feature of all this is that
until the announcement now made, the general public has had
no actual knowledge of what mister Daily intended to produce
for his opening play, so that purchasers of seats had
bought blindly, knowing nothing of what they were to see
(25:29):
that season. Daily also introduced a subscription plan for Tuesday
night plays. This was a popular trend in Paris in
the eighteen eighties, and Daily adopted it for New York audiences,
so he had what was essentially a season ticket audience
for nights that would normally be slow. It also let
him stage encore performances of audience favorites without having to
(25:52):
work them into the regular season schedule. The subscription also
gave participants a chance at first class seats at the
day views of new shows. The subscription plan was not
the only way that Daily plussed up the eighteen eighty
eight season. He had taken advantage of the theater having
no shows to quietly renovate it to be more luxurious
(26:12):
than ever. There was new carpet, new art and better
sound baffling, as well as plush new seats and an
elaborately carved precnium arch. According to the paper, Daily had
also taken control of a building behind the theater which
was connected to it, to build out an entirely new
set of dressing rooms for his players. They're right up
(26:34):
in the Times concluded quote, Daily's theater when it reopens
Tuesday will be one of the best appointed houses in
the world. There's a cute note to that, which is
it write ups about this renovation which was going on
while Daily and the Trooper in Europe was so quiet.
No one in the neighborhood even knew it was happening.
And I don't know why that was such a point
of like pride for everyone, but it's very charming. In
(26:57):
eighteen ninety three, Augustine Daily opened another theater, this time
in London, England. Daily's theater, which was situated off Leicester Square,
opened on June twenty seventh, eighteen ninety three. It had
been custom built for his company, which was different from
his New York theaters, which he had acquired already existing.
But even though Daily had been really successful in New
(27:18):
York running theaters, he just did not have the same
good fortune in his Cranbourne Street location. After a pretty
good initial run with Taming of the Shrew and several
other Shakespearean plays, Daily had companies from Europe play there
before he returned with his own staging of an adaptation
called The Railroad of Love. That show didn't do especially well,
(27:40):
and neither did the next two Shakespearean plays. In eighteen
ninety five, he turned the theater over to George Edwards,
a British producer who found great success mounting musicals there.
The theater itself retained Daily's name, though that had to
have been painful for him to some degree, and an
account written after his death, Daily's relationship with his theaters
(28:02):
was described this way. Quote his theaters he loved his personalities.
For one, the Fifth Avenue, he had Oliver Wendell Holmes
pen and address for the opening On another occasion, for
the opening season of eighteen ninety two, he tried to
procure the services of Eugene Field for a poetic address.
Here his sentiment came in again. Yeah, he clearly loved
(28:24):
those buildings. He would always talk about his houses being
his home, his houses meaning theater houses. So to have
one that just didn't work out after he had gone
to the trouble to have it custom built probably felt
very jarring. On May thirteenth of eighteen eighty nine, Augustine
and Mary set sail for Europe, where the Daily Company
(28:45):
was once again set to give a tour, and where
Daily was going to settle a financial dispute with George
Edwards over the split of revenue from the theater. After
that transition, Augustine felt quite ill on the voyage, but
he wired his brother on May twenty ninth, quote much better,
all danger over. On June fifth, papers reported that he
(29:05):
was just fine. The following ran in the New York
Times on June sixth, having been wired from London, quote,
Augustine Day has quite recovered from his recent sickness and
has gone to Paris for a few days with Missus
Daly and Missus Ada. Rhian. He will return on June
twentieth for the hearing of the case against George Edwards,
resulting from a dispute regarding sharing the profits of Daily's
(29:27):
London Theater, of which Edwards is the owner and Daily
the Lessee. Augustine wrote his brother a letter dated May thirtieth,
in which he described the stress of the theater season
launch and his impending legal hearings and quote financial anxieties
having taken its toll on his health. He described being
(29:47):
very ill even before he boarded the ship bound for London,
and how a weekend to the trip he had a
very real crisis, he wrote, quote A combination of pneumonia
and brain fever were the foes I was fighting, and
thank god, by Thursday I had conquered both. He assured
his brother Joseph that the following winter he was going
(30:07):
to quote let up a bit on the strain and
devote more time to leisure. But by the time that
letter arrived, Augustine Daly was dead. His brother and mother
had already received a telegram that he had died on
June seventh of eighteen eighty nine, at the age of
sixty one in the Continental Hotel in Paris, he had
felt much better, and he had traveled to France, as
(30:29):
he said, with his wife and actor Ada Rhian, who
started a lot of his productions, and after getting to
the Continental Dally just got much worse. And on the seventh,
as his wife, Mary and Aida had lunch in the suite,
he called out from the bedroom that he needed a doctor,
but he died before and he could arrive. Mary Daly
had Augustine's body shipped back to New York for a
(30:50):
funeral at Saint Patrick's Cathedral on June eighteenth. One of
the biggest impacts Daily had on literature and theater in
the US was not through his own works, but through
his support an encouragement of other artists. Bronson Howard, who
was a very successful playwright in the late nineteenth century,
had three of his four first plays produced by Daily
(31:14):
before any other theater. Daily is also credited with encouraging
Mark Twain to start writing for the theater, as well
as short story author Bret Hart. Yeah, there are a
lot of other people that he really encouraged to turn
their pens to playwriting, which is one of the reasons
he's considered so influential and his obituary read in part quote,
(31:35):
Never a jester, yet a maker, and a purveyor of
the most delightful comedy. Al was a man of few words,
yet singularly successful in the development of the most human
and social of the arts. Never popular in the common sense,
yet always respected and admired by his foes and opponents.
It seems he died much too soon, for his vitality
(31:56):
had not yet begun to diminish perceptibly, and the shock
of his sudden going has been keenly felt by thousands
who knew him only by name, Oh Augustin Day. Some
of those ones. We don't hear his name very often,
but he was like it for a long time. Just
an interesting, interesting dude. Give some listener mail for us,
(32:18):
Oh I do. It's a listener mail that solves a mystery.
Oh good. It is from our listener, Carrie, who wrote
Chicken and Dumblings with lots of exclamation points. Carrie writes, Holly,
I am a similar experience with chicken and dumplings. What
you are describing from your childhood is very similar to
that of my childhood, except my mom slash Grandma would cook,
(32:40):
slash steam the dough on top of the Chicken. I
have always wondered why my Chicken and Dumblings was so
much different than anyone else's. I asked my mom, and
she said her mom was not one to make up recipe,
so she decided to check my grandma's old cookbooks. Lo
and behold, my mom found a recipe in Betty Crocker
that she thinks is where it came from. It was
(33:01):
so exciting for me to finally have an answer to
my family's mystery. Perhaps your recipe has similar origins. I
am attaching a few photos to show you said recipe.
You might remember I wrote once years ago to tell
you how my baby loved hollies laugh, but she would
always laugh in response to it. That baby is turning
six on Sunday. Happy birthday, Winnifred. Also, we got a
(33:23):
new puppy this winter, so I'm including a photo of
five month old Daisy, a very playful cavapoo. Thank you
both for all you do for the podcast. I hope
you can make it to Portland, Oregon someday soon for
a live show. Me too, Okay, Carrie, thank you, because
I felt like I was losing my mind because no
one else made it this way, but she scanned in
(33:43):
bless her she either scanner took variod photographs this Betty
Crocker cookbook from nineteen seventy six, and there is a
photograph of the chicken and dumblings as described. They look
exactly like the ones that I grew up eating. I
really thought my mom had just misinterpreted a recipe. It
was just like, I'm not putting broth in here. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure that we have that exact Betty Crocker
(34:07):
cookbook in our home somewhere. Problem. I mean, it was
very standard, Yeah, homes in the US. Yeah, Like, I
think we have one that belonged to someone. And then
I'd like, I'm I for sure remember it in my parents'
house when I was growing up. Amazing. Also, yes, happy
birthday to Winnifred. I hope it was wonderful. By now,
(34:28):
the birthday would have been quite a few weeks back,
since we were recording a little ahead of the game.
But that is a very cute dog. I would be
in danger around that dog because I would give whenever
it wanted, even if it were something very dangerous. Again,
I cannot thank you enough. This would have made me
(34:51):
tell a fib that I thought my mom was just
making stuff out because she sometimes would nisum, But now
I know no. Betty Crocker, may mystery solved. If you
would like to write to us, you could do so
at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
find us on social media as Missed in History pretty
(35:13):
much everywhere, and if you haven't subscribed, you can do
that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(35:34):
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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