Background
Abraham Lincoln Erlanger was born in Buffalo of Jewish parents, Leopold and Regina Erlanger, but most of his early life was spent in Cleveland.
manager producer theatrical booking agent
Abraham Lincoln Erlanger was born in Buffalo of Jewish parents, Leopold and Regina Erlanger, but most of his early life was spent in Cleveland.
With practically no education he began his theatrical apprenticeship as cloak-room attendant and call boy at the Academy of Music, and subsequently rose to a position of some influence in the financial management of the Euclid Opera House.
For a number of years after leaving Cleveland he traveled as advance agent, and later as manager, for theatrical companies sent out from New York, and came to realize the inefficiency of the existing system of “booking. ”
In theory, operating managers of local theatres were anxious to keep their “time” filled throughout a season; while producing managers in New York were anxious to “book time” so as to provide an uninterrupted succession of performances for their road companies and reduce to the minimum haulage and traveling expenses.
In practise, the machinery required to preserve such a delicate balance was lacking; individual agreements between local theatre owners and New York managers were arrived at haphazardly, and often broken without compunction.
These two men, who had been thrown together while serving as advance agents on the road, purchased in 1886 one of the small booking agencies in New York and two years later drew up formal articles of partnership.
Although during the next few years they made a number of independent theatrical productions and were busy extending their control over a chain of theatres in the South, they owed their increasingly assured position primarily to their activities as booking agents.
In August 1896, in association with four other leading managers, Charles Frohman, A. I. Hayman, S. F. Nixon, and J. F. Zimmerman, they organized the Theatrical Syndicate, professedly to bring about certain sorely needed reforms in the booking of shows.
The execution of these reforms was entrusted to the firm of Klaw & Erlanger, which was made the booking agency for all attractions presented in theatres controlled by the syndicate.
Erlanger, as the more active executive in the firm, came more and more to exercise almost autocratic prerogatives.
His office became the clearinghouse for actor, producer and manager.
Relishing the endless details of problems involved in the routing of shows over an entire continent, he worked incessantly.
Backed by a monopolistic organization, he brooked no opposition from actors or producers.
Moreover it has been stated that he was able to give preferential booking to his own productions even over those of Charles Frohman, who was the syndicate member commonly credited with having final jurisdiction over the mass production of shows for syndicate consumption.
Erlanger’s power rested on the solid economic basis of mounting financial returns to the syndicate and increased financial security to the various elements in the theatrical profession.
The scattered idealists who had denounced the syndicate as a commercial monopoly destructive of the art of the theatre, and its members as “adventurers of inferior origin, ” tried on various occasions to rally, but with little success.
The breakdown of the monopoly, when it finally came, was partly the result of a weakening inside the syndicate caused by its inability to furnish satisfactory attractions in sufficient numbers to meet the demands of such a vast chain of theatres, and more particularly the result of the inroads of the Shuberts, a group of rival theatrical managers formerly associated with the syndicate and operating along somewhat similar lines.
After the dissolution of partnership with Klaw in 1920, Erlanger continued, as producer and manager, to be one of the outstanding financial powers in the American theatre.
Extensive plans for expanding his activities to keep pace with the new era of the talking pictures were interrupted by his death.
backed by a monopolistic organization
