(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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(Edited By Alan S. Downer.)
Edited By Alan S. Downer.
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George Crouse Tyler was born on April 13, 1867 in Circleville, Ohio, and raised in nearby Chillicothe. His parents, George H. Tyler, founder and publisher of one of Chillicothe's two newspapers, and Harriet (Parkhurst) Tyler, were leading citizens in the conservative town of some 10, 000 people.
Frequent theatergoing in Chillicothe, Columbus, and Cincinnati was an important influence in Tyler's childhood.
His formal education ended when he was twelve.
After being apprenticed in his father's print shop for almost a year, he ran away from home three times during the 1880's to work as a tramp-printer, going as far west as San Francisco and as far south as Sanford, Fla.
During the winter of 1887-1888 Tyler's father rented Clough's Opera House in Chillicothe for his son to manage. The youth renamed it Clough's Grand and booked in such stars as Thomas Keene, Nat Goodwin, Clara Morris, May Irwin, and Julia Marlowe.
Tyler's first theater management did not last even a full season, however, because he guaranteed any terms the touring companies requested.
His idealism was far greater than the box-office receipts. After nearly a year in the Government Printing Office in Washington, D. C. , Tyler went to New York and took various jobs, such as a printer at the World and a reporter for the Dramatic News and the Dramatic Mirror.
For the next five years he was an advance agent for, among others, the Hanlon Brothers and, in 1894, James O'Neill.
After producing several financially disastrous shows and spending one more season as an advance agent, he began his first respectable theatrical venture. He obtained the financial backing of Theodore A. Liebler, a former lithographer with $3, 000 to invest, for The Royal Box, written by and starring Charles Coghlan. That production in 1897 marks the founding of Liebler and Company, a partnership of Tyler's organizational and promotional expertise and Liebler's money. Their first play was artistically successful but financially unprofitable, but their next production, The Christian (1898), starring Viola Allen, established them financially. During its three years it netted the company over $500, 000.
Until 1914 Liebler and Company produced or managed over 300 first-class attractions in New York and on tour. With the inevitability of financial loss on some shows, Tyler's company earned a profit of almost $3 million on seven of their productions during their first ten years. In scope their ventures were outranked only by the Theatrical Syndicate and the Shubert empire of that period. Most important were Tyler's management of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who first toured America in 1901; he brought Eleonora Duse to this country in 1902 and managed Arnold Daly, who introduced several early George Bernard Shaw plays to America, and Madame Rejane.
He brought the Abbey Theatre Company to New York in 1911, coping with the accompanying riots in objection to the image of the Irishman as seen in Playboy of the Western World. That tour was the first of four he managed for the company in the United States. He worked with many well-known actors and produced the works of a wide variety of playwrights during that time.
In the spring of 1910 he gave Eugene O'Neill his first professional theater job--assistant company manager for The White Sister tour. In 1911 Tyler assumed management of the New Theatre, renaming it the Century, where he staged some of his most elaborate productions and experimented with children's theater. In 1914 he brought Joseph Urban, a leader in the new stagecraft movement, to Broadway to design The Garden of Paradise, one of the company's most ambitious productions. Unfortunately they had invested at a time when credit was tight and theater attendance was cut by the effects of World War I; as a result the company filed for bankruptcy.
Between 1915 and 1918 Tyler produced shows with Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger's backing. Although his first production, Moloch (1915), lost Tyler some $30, 000, later productions proved successful. His Pollyanna (1916) starred Helen Hayes. In 1916 and 1917 he featured Laurette Taylor in three financially successful shows. Twenty-three benefit performances of one of them, Out There, with an allstar cast, raised $683, 248 for the Red Cross. Tyler became an independent manager in 1918, continuing to produce new plays and a few revivals. Of particular interest were Booth Tarkington's Clarence (1919), starring Alfred Lunt; experimental productions of Eugene O'Neill's Chris Christopherson (1920)--an early version of Anna Christie (1921)--with Lynn Fontanne as Anna, and The Straw (1921); Dulcy (1921), the first collaboration of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly; and Macbeth (1928), the only production in America that utilized the talents of the famous British designer Gordon Craig.
From then until his last production, For Valor (1935), Tyler was most concerned with his all-star revivals. Providing the public the best of the past, he brought back such stars as Mrs. Fiske, John Drew, and William Gillette.
He published his autobiography, Whatever Goes Up, in 1934 in collaboration with J. C. Furnas.
His strong loyalties were to Booth Tarkington and James O'Neill, to fellow producers such as the Frohmans and Erlanger, and to the traditions of the nineteenth-century theater.
In 1943 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was admitted to McKinney Sanitarium, Yonkers, N. Y. , where he remained until his death from a heart attack. He died penniless and was buried in Chillicothe, Ohio.
George Crouse Tyler is best known for his introduction of European talent to America and his ability to elicit new dramatic material from other than theater sources. Some 90 percent of his 350 productions were new plays. As the theater began to move toward psychological realism and social radicalism, Tyler became increasingly adamant about the virtues of the past.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
(Edited By Alan S. Downer.)
Quotations: "Compared with the call to produce, " he once said, "the call of the wild is as the chirp of the bullfinch. "
Tyler, known as the little Napoleon of the theater, was five feet, six inches tall, rotund and round-faced. He was a cigar-smoking gambler who thrived on the risks of theatrical production.
He avidly disliked the shallowness of the motion picture industry and the competitiveness of the Shubert brothers.
Tyler never married.
