David Belasco, Arturo Toscanini, and Giacomo Puccini after the successful premiere of Puccini's opera "La Fanciulla del West" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
(The Girl of the Golden West is a theatrical play written,...)
The Girl of the Golden West is a theatrical play written, produced and directed by David Belasco, set in the California Gold Rush. The four-act melodrama opened at the old Belasco Theatre in New York on November 14, 1905 and ran for 224 performances. Blanche Bates originated the role of The Girl, Robert C. Hilliard played Dick Johnson, and Frank Keenan played Jack Rance.
David Belasco was an American theatrical producer and playwright. He was a pioneer of the Little Theater Movement, which advocated close contact between audience and actors. Belasco attempted to bring veracity to the popular melodrama through meticulous detail in setting and lighting.
Background
David Belasco was born on July 22, 1853 in San Francisco, California, United States to Portuguese-Jewish parents. He was the son of Abraham H. Belasco and Reyna (Nunes) Belasco. His father was an actor at several London theatres and his mother possessed an impetuous temperament. His parents moved from London to California during the California Gold Rush. He had nine siblings.
Education
David Belasco made his debut as an actor when he was eleven, playing a young prince in Charles Kean’s production of "Richard III". When Belasco was only twelve, he wrote his first play, "Jim Black" or "The Regulator’s Revenge". He attended Lincoln Grammar School from 1865 to 1871.
Career
From 1873 to 1881 he was associated with several San Francisco theaters. In 1873 he became a call-boy at the Metropolitan Theatre. In 1876 he was appointed a stage manager at the Baldwin Theatre. Circa the late 1870s, Belasco was a stage manager at the Grand Opera House and later Metropolitan Theatre.
Theatrical manager Daniel Frohman brought Belasco to New York City in 1882, hiring him to work as a stage manager at the Madison Square Theatre in New York until 1884. In 1886 when Frohman left the Madison Square for the new Lyceum Theatre, he took Belasco along as a stage manager and worked until 1890. While at the Lyceum, Belasco cowrote several hit plays, among them "The Charity Ball" and "Lord Chumley", with playwright and good friend Henry C. De Mille. In later years Belasco would serve as mentor to De Mille's two sons, playwright William C. and Hollywood legend Cecil B. De Mille.
At the beginning of 1890, he became a producing manager and playwright. His Civil War melodrama "The Heart of Maryland" became a runaway success in New York, in London, and on tour across the United States. Belasco wrote the play as a showcase for the particular talents of a fledgling actress who would be the first in a long line of "Belasco stars" - a notorious, flame-haired society divorcee named Mrs. Leslie Carter. Working closely with her for several arduous years, Belasco had taught Mrs. Carter everything there was to know about acting. The two of them soon became known as an inseparable theatrical duo. Leslie Carter was America's greatest "emotional actress". In her sixteen years with Belasco, Mrs. Carter starred in such plays as "Zaza", "DuBarry", and "Adrea".
In 1901 he began his association with the actor David Warfield in Charles Klein's "The Auctioneer". In 1902 he opened the first Belasco Theatre, which had opened as the Republic in 1900, His first production in his new theatre was an adaptation of a short story, "Madame Butterfly", first performed on March 5, 1900, and where several of his most famous plays were first seen including Klein's "The Music Master" (1904), "Adrea" (1905), and The Girl of the Golden West (1905).
His success enabled him to build a new theater which opened in 1907 as the Stuyvesant Theater with Warfield in "A Grand Army Man" and was renamed the Belasco in 1910 (the earlier Belasco Theatre reverted to its original name). It was here that he staged "The Return of Peter Grimm (1911), considered by many his finest work. In the years that followed, he produced thirty-two plays in New York. As time passed and his kind of theatre began to ebb away, Belasco was both honored by various authorities and reviled by a new generation of American dramatists, who had sounder grounds of criticism than Shaw’s terse "bunkum". He trooped on until a serious bout with pneumonia greatly weakened his health, and a subsequent heart attack took his life on May 14, 1931.
Quotations:
"If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea."
"Lights are to drama what music is to the lyrics of a song. The greatest part of my success in the theatre I attribute to my feeling for colors, translated into effects of light."
"We mustn't waste time; for that's the stuff life's made of."
"Up is never where you are now."
Membership
The Lambs Club
,
United States
1893 - 1931
Personality
In later life, David Belasco wore a quasi-clerical garb which may have earned him the name "the Bishop of Broadway".
Quotes from others about the person
Mary Pickford: "To me, David Belasco was like the King of England, Julius Caesar and Napoleon rolled into one."
Connections
From 1873 David Belasco was married to Cecilia Loverich until her death on December 25, 1925. They had two daughters, Reina and Augusta.
David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre
Based on a rich body of primary sources, among which are Belasco's promptbooks and papers, the book synthesizes the aims, methods, and techniques inherent in the naturalistic production style that Belasco developed during the six decades of his career. The elements of that style―the magic reality of his stage settings, his innovations in plastic lighting, his directorial method - are also seen in the context of theatrical developments elsewhere.