(Diagram of stage and balcony. Wonderful period advertisem...)
Diagram of stage and balcony. Wonderful period advertisements. Program for the Week of June 28, 1926, Presented by Richard Herndon. "The Patsy," a comedy in three acts, opened on December 22, 1925 and ran through July, 1926. Staged by Allan Dinehart. Cast includes Joseph Allen, Lucia Moore, Herbert Clark, John Diggs, Claiborne Foster, Mary Stills, and others. Written by Barry Conners. Measures 5.25x7.75 inches. 16p.
https://www.amazon.com/Theatre-Program-Presented-Richard-Herndon/dp/B06WWCF4SP?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B06WWCF4SP
(Originally produced on Broadway in 1912, Snow White and t...)
Originally produced on Broadway in 1912, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a popular success with audiences and critics alike. Winthrop Ames, who was a prosperous Broadway director, producer, and playwright, was one of the first producers to devote themselves to producing serious plays on Broadway intended entirely for children. Writing under the pseudonym of Jessie Braham White, Ames spared no expense with his production and when the after school three-thirty performances started selling out, he was forced to add an extra performance every week at eleven o’clock on Saturday mornings. After its Broadway production, the acting edition was published by Samuel French and became a staple of children’s theatre throughout the first half of the 20th century. Ames’ version is also credited as the inspiration for Walt Disney's Academy Award winning animated movie.
https://www.amazon.com/Snow-White-Seven-Dwarfs-Broadway/dp/1546872833?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1546872833
Winthrop Ames was born on November 25, 1870 in North Easton, Massachusetts, United States. He was the fifth of six children and youngest of four sons, two of whom died in infancy, of Oakes Angier and Catherine (Hobart) Ames. His father was a partner and later president of the family shovel works, Oliver Ames & Sons. A grandson of Oakes Ames, Congressman and capitalist, young Ames came of a wealthy and socially prominent family.
Ames was educated at the Hopkinson School, Boston, and at Harvard, where he took part in the activities of the undergraduate Hasty Pudding Club, for which he wrote the libretto of an operetta, Proserpina, to music by Daniel Gregory Mason. Receiving his bachelor's degree in 1895, he returned to Harvard for a year of postgraduate study.
Ames was interested in pursuing the career in the theatre but because of family opposition, he entered a Boston publishing firm, Bates and Guild, for whom he founded and conducted two monthly magazines, Masters in Music and Masters in Art, and edited the Architectural Review. But his interest in the theatre refused to down, and in 1904, after a trip to Europe to study the management of some sixty theatrical and opera companies, he returned to Boston to become joint manager with Loren F. Deland of the Castle Square Theatre. For three years he directed this theatre's famous stock company, using it as a workshop for ideas suggested by his European observations. Although his experiments were somewhat too ambitious for a stock company, they called attention to his abilities, and in 1908 he was appointed managing director of the New Theatre, the largest playhouse in New York City.
The New Theatre, planned by Heinrich Conried after the example of state-supported theatres and opera houses in Europe, had been founded by a group of millionaires interested in advancing the arts. It was to have a repertory company, operating along the lines of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, free of the pressure of commercial exactions and presenting the best in classical and modern drama. Ames was assisted by Lee Shubert as business manager and John Corbin as literary adviser, but it was his taste and principles that determined the repertory and the organization. Shakespeare was to be the backbone of the theatre's offerings, with the modern plays of Maeterlinck, Galsworthy, Sheldon, and Pinero.
The New Theatre opened on November 6, 1909, with a lavish production of Antony and Cleopatra starring Julia Marlowe and Edward H. Sothern, and this was followed by other productions, including Maeterlinck's The Bluebird, Galsworthy's Strife, and revivals of Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and The School for Scandal. But the New Theatre proved too large for legitimate drama, and the habits of American audiences could not be adjusted to the vagaries of repertory; and after two seasons the founders, discouraged by an enormous deficit, abandoned the project. On March 12, 1912, he opened the Little Theatre, the smallest play-house in New York. A comfortable and tastefully decorated building, it was to be "a place of entertainment for intelligent people. "
On October 16, 1913, he opened the Booth Theatre with Arnold Bennett's The Great Adventure, and he continued to manage the two theatres into the 1930's, although he retired from actual producing in 1929. Among his notable productions of these years were Shaw's The Philanderer (December 30, 1913); William Archer's The Green Goddess (January 18, 1921) and Galsworthy's Old English (December 23, 1924), two of George Arliss's greatest successes; and Beggar on Horseback (February 12, 1924), by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly.
During World War I he organized the "Over There Theatre League, " which sent some 300 actors and vaudeville troupes overseas for the entertainment of the armed forces. He retired from theatrical management in 1932 because of ill health and returned to North Easton to live. He maintained his interest in the theatre, however, and joined a group of teachers and critics in establishing the Cambridge (Massachussets) School of Drama.
In addition to his activities as a producer, Ames translated The Merchant of Paris from the French of Edmund Flegg (1930) and wrote, under the pseudonym of Jessie Braham White, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1913), the first children's play to be given a major production in the American theatre.
Ames was a notable independent theatre owner and manager who directed his own plays, insisting on imaginative, functional settings and highly polished and carefully styled performances. In his management of the New Theatre, he chose plays that were of high literary and artistic quality without being experimental. Perhaps the most successful of all his efforts as producer was a series of Gilbert and Sullivan revivals staged at the Booth from 1926 to 1929, a milestone in American musical theatre. Ames was inducted, posthumously, into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.
(Originally produced on Broadway in 1912, Snow White and t...)
(Diagram of stage and balcony. Wonderful period advertisem...)
In 1929 Ames was elected a member of the Corporation (the board of trustees) of Harvard University, and in 1936 he became vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Ames was able to indulge his own impeccable taste without regard to public response. As a result he was looked upon by fellow managers and producers as someone apart from their profession.
Ames was a rather academic person in appearance, tall, stoop-shouldered, slender, soft-spoken, and habitually grave and pale.
Ames was married in London on September 28, 1911, to Lucy Katherine Fuller and had two daughters, Catherine Hobart and Joan.
