Edward Harrigan was an American actor, playwright, and theater producer. Together with his partner, Tony Hart, Harrigan formed what was called the first famous collaboration in American Musical Theatre.
Background
Edward Harrigan was born on October 26, 1845, in New York City, New York, United States. His ancestors had emigrated to Canada in the eighteenth century, one of them giving his name to Cape Harrigan on the northern coast of Labrador. William Harrigan, his father, was born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, and was a sea-captain and ship-builder. In Norfolk, Virginia, he met and married Helen Rogers, daughter of Matthias Rogers of Charlestown, Massachusetts, who was killed in the War of 1812. Mrs. Harrigan had learned in Norfolk a great many negro songs, stories, and dances which she taught her son when he was a child.
Education
Edward received a valuable training in the active theatrical life of California and became expert in impersonations, one of his most successful being that of Horace Greeley.
Career
Leaving home on account of disagreements arising from his father’s second marriage, Edward Harrigan went to San Francisco by way of Panama and in 1861 was singing duets with Lotta Crabtree at the Bella Union Theatre and elsewhere. Forming a partnership with another comedian, Sam Rickey, he returned to the East, playing first in New York at the Globe Theatre, November 21, 1870, in A Little Fraud. It was, however, after his union in 1872 with Anthony Cannon, or “Tony Hart, ” as he was known on the stage, that the firm of Harrigan and Hart became widely known. In December of that year they appeared at the Theatre Comique, 514 Broadway, New York, in The Day He Went West and The Big and Little of It. In August 1876 they became managers of this house and made it a center of attraction until 1881, when it was torn down.
Between 1870 and 1879 Harrigan wrote and produced nearly eighty vaudeville sketches, dealing with politics, life insurance, baseball, the army, the militia, and other themes, and exploiting Irish, German, Italian, and negro types. The programs of the Theatre Comique show that these sketches grew from a mere song to a duet, from a duet to a dialogue, and then to a one-act play, which later developed into several scenes and finally into a well-articulated play. Harrigan’s work was soon known abroad.
The most famous of Harrigan’s productions began in 1873 when he presented a sketch, The Mulligan Guard, in Chicago and later in New York. It was a burlesque upon the excursions of military organizations which sprang up in New York City as “tributes” to a local politician, and which led sometimes to riots. Harrigan stated in 1874 that he composed the sketch as a protest against “this nuisance. ’’ In The Mulligan Guards and the Skidmores (1875) he dramatized the conflict between the Irish and the negroes, and in The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879), the racial pride and rivalry of the Irish and the Germans were celebrated. Dan Mulligan, an Irish immigrant who had fought in the Civil War with “the Sixty-Ninth, ” and, from his corner grocery ruled his political clan, is the hero of the Mulligan cycle of plays, which had its best expression in Cordelia’s Aspirations (1883) and Dan’s Tribulations (1884). Harrigan acted Dan and made that warm-hearted, courageous, quarrelsome character a real person to the audiences that thronged the Theatre Comique. When his mate Cordelia has social ambitions which lead him against his better judgment to move to Madison Avenue, to his consequent financial ruin, he returns to Avenue with a quiet stoicism that is very appealing.
Harrigan of course treated other phases of New York life. In Squatter Sovereignty (1882) he pictured the conflict between the owners of the rocky land near the East River about Eighty-second Street and the squatters who had taken possession of property which seemed then of little value. In The Major he played the central figure of the adventurer, Major Gilfeather. With this play Harrigan and Hart opened the New Theatre Comique, at 728 Broadway, August 29, 1881. It was destroyed by fire December 23, 1884. Undaunted by the heavy loss, Harrigan leased the Park Theatre at Thirty-fifth Street and Broadway, which he conducted as Harrigan's Park Theatre, with slight interruptions, until April 13, 1891. In 1890 he built a theatre on Thirty-fifth Street near Sixth Avenue, which is now known as the Garrick Theatre.
Of his later plays, Pete (1887), a drama of Southern life, in which he acted a negro servant, and Reilly and the Four Hundred (1890) were the best, although his last full-length play, Under Cover (1903), was enthusiastically received. He continued to act, especially in his own creations, one of his favorites being Old Lavender in a romantic play by that name, which had been one of his earliest successes. His last appearance in the legitimate drama was in His Wife’s Family, at Wallack’s Theatre, October 6, 1908. He died in New York City.
Achievements
Edward Harrigan is considered one of the founding fathers of modern American musical theatre. Throughout his career, Harrigan wrote lyrics for more than twenty-five Broadway musicals, thirty-nine plays, in all of which he acted the leading part, and one novel, The Mulligans (1901). His songs were set to the music of Dave Braham, and reveal a lyric power which lifts his work above that of nearly all the other writers of farce-comedy of his time.
Harrigan's ambition was to write of real people, and he studied his audiences carefully. In his own description of his methods, he said he had treated the common people because their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, were more numerous and varied than those in other strata of society. He created “types” because he found them popular. The reason he dealt so often with the Irish immigrant and the negro was that these two races care most for the song and dance.
Connections
In 1870, Harrigan married Annie T. Braham, the daughter of the composer.
