A Middleman’s Process: Booking and Managing Musical Theater Venues in Montreal from the 1880s to the First World War

The Companies of John B. Sparrow in Montreal and the Continental Integration of the Theater Industries

In the period after the American Civil War and Canadian Confederation, modern theater industries expanded across the North American continent. In the 1880s, traveling theater companies or touring stars from all over North America or from Europe were nothing new in Montreal. But during this decade, the visits of such troupes became more frequent with the development of consolidated touring routes along the railroad lines and in the context of rapid urbanization across the continent. ⁸ From 1881 to 1901, the city of Montreal had grown from more than 170,000 to about 325,000 inhabitants, including the suburbs. Its population had thus nearly doubled and further increased to almost 530,000 inhabitants in 1911. ⁹ Under these favorable conditions, more and more theaters opened in the city. ¹⁰

One of the most important promoters of the theater industries at the time was John Bolingbroke Sparrow (1852-1914). Born in Upper Canada, he had worked as a trader and bill poster in Montreal. In 1879, he started operating the Theatre Royal on rue Côté (the fourth theater of this name in the city’s history). He leased the house from its founder Jesse Joseph, a prominent Montreal businessman who was involved, among other things, in railway development, gas supply, and real estate. ¹¹ This was a major coup for Sparrow, as the Royal had been Montreal’s primary and most elegant theater since its opening in 1852.

Managing the Royal, Sparrow entered into competition with the other large high-class theater in Montreal, the Academy of Music, which had been built in 1875 by a company led by another wealthy Montreal businessman and financier, shipping magnate Sir Hugh Allan. ¹² The city had always struggled to sustain a professional stock company, so both houses predominantly offered shows by traveling companies and touring stars. These included a wide diversity of genres, such as variety entertainment, melodrama, opera, operettas, drama, musical comedies, and burlesque shows—mostly in English or French, but occasionally also in German, Italian, or other languages. Both theaters remained dependent on the available touring artists, with little predictability or coherence in the programming. ¹³ At the same time, however, this eclectic approach was the only viable option for both houses, given the culturally fragmented audiences in the city.

B. K. Sandwell, the theater critic of the anglophone newspaper Montreal Herald, pointed to this fundamental challenge that Montreal continued to pose both for the local managers of the houses and for the booking agencies involved:

. . . namely, that this is a bilingual city, that only one section of it, and that the smaller section, patronizes the spoken drama in English, and that even in music there is a surprising lack of co-operation between the two populations; so that really it should be considered as two cities, of slightly unequal size. The French-Canadians, with very few exceptions, have no interest in English dramatic performances, and the English are not attracted by the excellent performances of French works of great merit . . . The musical shows which visit the English theatres are more fortunate, for the French of Montreal, passionately devoted to dramatic music and to spectacle, are not only generous supporters of grand opera in their own tongue but frequent visitors of the more tuneful of the English and American comic operas, burlesques and extravaganzas. ¹⁴

Sandwell’s remarks, which address the conditions in the 1910s, show that it remained difficult to profile large venues along linguistic or cultural lines, especially in the highbrow sector. The situation in Montreal provides insights into the solutions entrepreneurs and producers found to deal with cultural diversity and attract the mass audiences needed to fill a house of 1,500 or more than 2,000 seats every night. While at first, they resorted to eclectic programming, in a next step they developed a social differentiation of the theater venues. This strategy became feasible through newly emerging regional supply networks that specialized in various genres of popular entertainment.

At the Royal, Sparrow started offering popular shows after losing ground against the newer and larger Academy. This strategy became more pronounced when, in 1884, he entered into a partnership with the U.S.-American show entrepreneur Henry R. Jacobs who had visited Montreal with a tent show of variety amusements the summer before. Jacobs in turn was partner with Frederick F. Proctor, another U.S.-American theater entrepreneur, from 1884 until 1888. Together, they operated a theater chain across the Eastern United States and pioneered a show format consisting of vaudeville and melodrama at very low prizes, starting with 10 cents. Through his partnership with Jacobs, Sparrow’s Theatre Royal joined the Jacobs-Proctor circuit and secured a steady supply of this new form of popular entertainment for Montreal. ¹⁵

In this way, Sparrow participated in a development that profoundly transformed the business organization in North American theater at large. With the rise of traveling combination companies, theatrical shows were not produced by a resident stock company for a particular house any more, but were put together in a production center and then sent on tour, where most of the profit was made. In his classic account of the economic history of American theater, Alfred L. Bernheim underlined that this “separation of the function of theatre owning from that of play producing” kicked off the industrial revolution in the theater. ¹⁶ Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, regional circuits of geographically related theaters were formed along favorable touring routes, such as the one by Jacobs and Proctor. ¹⁷ From now on, the “middleman’s process” ¹⁸ of booking became a fundamental operation and made it possible to dominate large parts of the theater industries.

This consolidation process reached a new quality in 1896, when a group of powerful U.S.-American circuit leaders, show producers, and booking agents, led by Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, formed the Theatrical Syndicate in New York City. In their agreement, they explained the need to further centralize the theater industries with the high expenses of ineffective touring routes and a “great loss from indiscriminate bookings, in consequence of which similar attractions of the first class repeatedly oppose each other in the same point and thereby injure the other.” ¹⁹ To avoid this kind of direct competition (or “opposition”), they agreed on exclusive and centralized booking across their respective circuits. Taking control of most of the first-class theaters in North America, they were then able to decide what would be the most profitable touring route for a show, and what house in a city would be able to present the best quality of play-based dramatic or musical shows, so-called legitimate theater. Fifteen years later, at the height of their power, they reportedly controlled the booking of up to seven hundred theaters in the United States and Canada. ²⁰

Sparrow quickly started cooperating with the Syndicate and made use of their booking power to extend his business in Montreal from popular to high-class theater venues. A closer look at his company’s strategies gives insights into the ways the expansion of trans-regional circuits played out in a particular urban sphere and underlines the so far mostly overlooked role that Canadian cities played in the process. It also helps to identify different types of mediators beyond the New York booking offices that were essential for integrated North American theater industries to take shape. Local theater owners and managers took on an active and indispensable role in the middleman’s process of bringing shows to towns across the continent.

Centralized Booking and the Differentiation of Theaters

Sparrow, through his cooperation with U.S.-American circuit managers, operated at the forefront of circuit building in the North American theater industries and used this new strategy to reorganize the theatrical sphere of Montreal. Together with Jacobs, he acquired more houses in the city: Queen’s Theatre in 1891 (it only remained active until the building collapsed in 1899) and, his former competitor, the Academy of Music in 1896. They also controlled the Grand Opera House in Toronto and the Grand Opera House in Ottawa. ²¹ In 1898, Jacobs and Sparrow dissolved their partnership and Sparrow took over the Canadian part of the circuit. Around this time, he started to book his shows with the Theatrical Syndicate. While this secured him steady access to the best shows available, he also became increasingly dependent on the syndicate as source of supply. In 1903, he took a further step in consolidating his stronghold in the theatrical scene of Montreal, and possibly also in trying to increase his bargaining power vis-à-vis the central booking offices. He incorporated the J. B. Sparrow Theatrical and Amusement Company (Limited) together with the theater manager William A. Edwards and the local hardware merchant David S. Walker. ²² The three Canadians merged their control of the principal anglophone houses in the city. Sparrow, who became president of the company, held the lease of the Theatre Royal. Walker, who became vice president and treasurer, owned the Academy of Music (which he had leased to Sparrow in 1896) and the Théâtre Français. Edwards, who acted as general manager, held the lease of His Majesty’s Theatre, the most elegant of the large houses in the city.

The Sparrow Company now held a number of theater venues that were distributed widely across the city. The oldest house, the Theatre Royal, was located in the old city center, while the newer buildings lined up further north along Sainte-Catherine Street, which by the late nineteenth century had become the modern city’s main commercial axis and entertainment hub. It connected the mostly francophone neighborhoods in the east with the anglophone residential areas in the west. The Sparrow theaters thus reached all relevant social and cultural groups in the city. Moreover, with the increasing supply of theatrical shows from booking agencies, it was now possible to variegate the profiles of the houses from popular to high-class entertainment. In the decade after the founding of the Theatrical Syndicate, actors in other theatrical genres across North America had followed suit, building and merging circuits and establishing central booking in the fields of vaudeville, burlesque, popular melodrama, and so on. ²³ The Sparrow Company used their services to differentiate its theaters according to those genres, driving a fundamental and at times volatile reorganization of the theatrical landscape of Montreal.

The Academy of Music continued as the place for first-class drama and music, booked by the Theatrical Syndicate. The Theatre Royal, its days as the city’s prestige theater long gone, remained in the field of burlesque and vaudeville shows with low ticket prices starting at 10 cents. The Théâtre Français was a former dime museum, located in close proximity to the francophone east of the city. A group of wealthy francophone Montrealers rebuilt the venue in 1893 and turned it into the Opéra Français playing French grand and comic opera. This endeavor failed in 1896 as it did not become financially viable or attract large enough audiences. ²⁴ The memory of this episode lived on in the name Theatre Francais (as was the spelling in English), but the house returned to anglophone popular melodrama. Her or His Majesty’s experienced a different kind of whirlwind trip—in this case from high- to lowbrow and back. Farthest to the west of Sainte-Catherine Street, it had been built in 1898 as the new prestige house of the largely anglophone elite of Montreal. It could, however, not compete with the booking power of the Theatrical Syndicate. ²⁵ In 1901, it was leased to Proctor, who again integrated a Montreal theater into his circuit of vaudeville and popular drama, but soon gave up the house. Under the management of Sparrow Amusement, it would eventually take over the role from the older Academy, which closed in 1910, as their first-class house.

These examples show that during the 1890s and 1900s, the city’s theatrical landscape was highly dynamic. More and more theaters were built, and the profiles of some houses shifted repeatedly in attempts to align them with particular audiences and supply networks. Local managers and booking agents could not redistribute genres and audiences freely across the venues. They had to take into account their location in the city and accessibility to the targeted audiences, as well as the architecture of the houses. They rebuilt and modernized theaters or, when the opportunity arose, acquired new ones. The venues had to meet the requirements of the supply networks, such as a minimum number of seats for profitability, a large stage with modern technical equipment for the big revues and spectacles, or a luxurious décor for the high-class shows.

The theaters specialized in particular highbrow or popular theatrical genres, which implied a social differentiation of patrons. In addition, other forms of profiling emerged and became driving forces for the further transformation of the city’s theatrical landscape. They grew out of a mounting dissatisfaction with the cultural eclecticism that had long characterized the theatrical programming in Montreal on one hand, and the increasingly critical views of the Americanization of the city’s public sphere on the other. Sparrow’s theaters had always hosted touring shows from different countries and cultural backgrounds and also at times housed local stock companies or longer runs of French and English opera companies. For decades, there was hardly a steady offer for all the different cultural orientations that were present in the city, and not enough patrons in each group to sustain their own venues. Moreover, with the consolidation of continental touring circuits and the emergence of new theatrical and musical genres such as vaudeville, Broadway musicals, and burlesque shows, the U.S.-American repertoire became increasingly dominant in Montreal. Its share in the musical theater repertoire rose sharply, as over 60 percent of the imported new works shown in Montreal between 1896, the year the Theatrical Syndicate was founded, and 1913 were U.S.-American. ²⁶

With the growing population and the increasing number of theater venues in Montreal, various groups in the city started new initiatives to create theatrical institutions that could serve for the expression of local cultural identities and rising national sentiments. The anglophone elite had been at the forefront of Montreal’s theater development since the 1820s. After Sparrow and the Syndicate had taken hold of the Academy of Music, Her Majesty’s Theatre became the local elite’s new highbrow institution. It combined an imperial orientation with local pride in an attempt to counter the U.S.-American booking agencies but could not secure enough alternative trans-regional supply to assert itself. In the 1910s, such efforts culminated in calls for an Anglo-Canadian theater, sparking initiatives to import more shows from Britain and to strengthen the production and distribution networks in the framework of the British Empire. ²⁷

Since the 1890s, initiatives also multiplied to establish francophone theater institutions. After a number of short-lived projects, the most prominent being the French Opera at the Théâtre Français, the first permanent francophone theaters emerged around 1900. ²⁸ Initially, the new venues were either multifunctional, such as the Monument-National, built as center for culture, arts, and education for the French-Canadian national movement, or smaller houses such as the Théâtre des Nouveautés and the Théâtre National Français. They were part of a longer institutionalization process that included forming audiences, building houses, booking French artists, professionalizing local companies, and developing a French–Canadian repertoire. ²⁹ They covered a spectrum from French and French-American models to increasingly independent French-Canadian orientations, forming the basis for an institutional differentiation of anglophone and francophone theater landscapes in Montreal. These diverging national ambitions resembled national movements in musical and theatrical life that were taking hold in many countries at the time. Other ethnic communities in Montreal also started to organize their own supply, for instance, Yiddish and Chinese theater performances. ³⁰

The “Burlesque Wars”: Trans-Regional Rivalries in the Urban Sphere

The Sparrow Company had actively promoted and shaped the institutional differentiation of Montreal’s theatrical landscape and now had to come to terms with the newly emerging diversity. Musical theater continued to attract a variety of patrons despite the growing number of other options outside of the U.S.-American theatrical offers. While the company retained its capacity to connect audiences and houses, its success also depended on its ability to secure enough suitable shows. However, the increasing consolidation and centralization of the North American theater industries brought with them business rivalries in the different theatrical branches. In the years around 1900, they extended across the continent and soon affected Montreal as well. One example are the business conflicts in the sphere of burlesque theater in which the Sparrow Company played a prominent role. They offer detailed insights not only into the agency of participants from Montreal but also in the range and mechanisms of the trans-regional supply networks.

Since the late 1860s, as part of the standardization of popular theatrical genres, burlesque became a distinct form of comedic musical performance and visual spectacle in North America. Based on a parody or caricature of a well-known play, story, or genre, the shows typically also included a chorus line of girls who displayed their legs in skin-colored tights. Burlesque catered mostly to male, working-class, and younger audiences. ³¹ It was highly successful in Montreal, attracting both anglophone and francophone patrons. Similar to the other theatrical genres, burlesque developed its own forms of centralized business organization. These included the Traveling Managers’ Association, a trade association of burlesque show producers that had been founded in 1900, and two dominant circuits. ³² The Cincinnati-based Empire Circuit in the west had been incorporated in 1897, while the eastern, New York-based Columbia Circuit split from the existing organization in 1902.

The two circuits organized the so-called “burlesque wheel,” a joint booking scheme for initially about thirty to forty shows that moved around the circuits in a theatrical season. Two of the circuit houses were in Canada—in Toronto and Montreal. The burlesque managers aimed to resolve booking and touring problems similar to those that had inspired the founding of the Theatrical Syndicate. In this case, however, the booking was not controlled by a few dominant interests but decided upon between all members by the drawing of lots. The burlesque booking wheel matched the number of shows and houses, thereby regulating competition and rationalizing the booking process. No member was allowed to open additional houses or produce additional shows. However, the field was engaged in a series of business conflicts or “burlesque wars” ³³ between the eastern and western circuits.

The role that the Sparrow Company played in these conflicts highlights the complex interactions between different mediating actors and trans-regional circulations. The company booked its shows for the Theatre Royal (and temporarily for the Théâtre Français) through the wheel, and manager Edwards was a founding member of the eastern circuit. They were equal participants in the burlesque wheel, giving them a much stronger position than in the Syndicate booking, where their negotiating power as clients rested mostly on their dominance in the theatrical scene of Montreal. Moreover, at the beginning of the season of 1904/1905, the Sparrow Company decided yet again to expand. It announced a new circuit of theaters for vaudeville, burlesque, and musical extravaganzas, with houses in Boston, Providence, Montreal, Ottawa, and later potentially more cities across the Eastern United States. ³⁴ This caused widespread turmoil in the burlesque field, as with this move, the firm broke the rule against establishing opposition houses that offered similar attractions to existing theaters in a city. In consequence, the eastern circuit expelled Edwards, and many of the touring shows boycotted Montreal. The Sparrow Company sued the eastern circuit and the show managers over this and became a member of the western circuit. Existing rifts between both circuits heated up even more, and in 1905, their joint booking ended with a split into two rival wheels. ³⁵ Now, the two circuits entered into exactly the kind of cutthroat competition that the booking agreement had meant to avoid. As each side entered into the others’ territory, they opened more and more opposition houses in the cities along the circuits.

The Sparrow Company was not able to sustain its own circuit in the way that it had planned but continued playing burlesque shows in Montreal as part of the western circuit. In 1908, the eastern circuit opened a newly built opposition house in Montreal, the Princess Theatre, where they played for just one season, and later opened the Gayety Theatre in 1912. That same year, however, the eastern and western burlesque circuits entered into a territorial agreement to reduce the number of opposition houses that had undermined the profitability of the business in many cities. As part of this deal, the western circuit agreed to leave the city of Montreal to the eastern circuit and the Gayety Theatre. The Sparrow Company lost its steady supply from the burlesque wheel and now had to search for shows themselves.

While this was a serious blow, the company might have recovered had it not gotten into trouble on the city level at the same time. The burlesque shows had regularly encountered strong opposition in Montreal since the 1890s. The Catholic and Protestant churches regarded these shows as a threat to public order and morality, and in particular to the city’s youth. ³⁶ In 1909, Archbishop of Montreal Mgr. Paul Bruchési banned Catholics from attending the shows. The Catholic Church was especially strong in the province of Quebec and waged regular campaigns against theater and cinema to guard its influence in the urban public sphere. Clerics did not only target burlesque shows but also opera performances or traveling stars such as Sarah Bernhardt. ³⁷ While such attacks did not stop the swift development of the modern entertainment industries in Montreal, they could throw a vulnerable theater off balance. This was the case when the Dominion Temperance Alliance started another campaign against the Theatre Royal. In December 1912, a burlesque troupe playing at the house was arrested and later put on trial for immoral performances. This time, the public movement against the Royal was so successful that the lessor of the house protested against the “objectionable” performances and the theater was at risk of losing its license. ³⁸ Religious and moral opposition in the city added to the loss of access to the trans-regional supply networks and led to the decision to close the house in January 1913.

The Shubert-Syndicate Business Wars and their Effects on Theater Venues in Montreal

Since the 1890s, the Sparrow Company had been the dominant player in Montreal, offering a variety of shows in its houses that it acquired mostly from U.S.-based circuits and booking agencies. The city’s theatrical scene thus developed in close interaction with the continental integration of the North American theater industries. A mutual dependency emerged as local investors, managers, and mediators in each city provided the infrastructure and expertise that made the expansion of trans-regional circuits possible and in turn increasingly relied on those suppliers to keep their theaters in business. As a result, theater operators in Montreal became embroiled in large-scale business conflicts between competing touring circuits and booking conglomerates. The situation was especially unstable in the decade before the First World War, when several of these competitive struggles heated up and intersected. The burlesque wars were only one example; other business wars broke out in the fields of vaudeville and legitimate theater. As part of these latter confrontations, a new rival of the Syndicate, the Shubert corporations, opened a theater in Montreal. The first turbulent phase in which the theatrical landscape of Montreal had been reorganized through specialization along social and linguistic differences overlapped with a second volatile period marked by trans-regional circuit rivalries that were fought out in the city.

The business practices of the Theatrical Syndicate had been highly controversial. Performing artists, theater managers, and booking agents fought against its control of the market and the contractual conditions—high costs and exclusivity of the booking—it had imposed. The brothers Lee Shubert (1873?–1953) and J. Jacob Shubert (1878?–1963) had started out as theater managers and show producers in Upstate New York in the late 1890s. ³⁹ They had sided with the “independents” and successfully used this coalition to form an alternative theater conglomerate by building, leasing, or booking houses, and by producing shows or importing them from Europe. They extended their business to New York City in 1900 and already controlled about fifty houses across the United States by mid-1906. ⁴⁰ Within just a few more years, the Shuberts asserted themselves in the competition with the Syndicate. This is one of the best-known parts of American theater history of the early twentieth century. Looking at their endeavors through the lens of theater venues in Montreal, however, adds insights into local factors in the competition of continent-wide theater networks and into the concrete mechanisms of the booking and management process. ⁴¹

Trans-regional theatrical circuits and the central booking agencies that controlled them had aimed at matching touring shows with suitable venues across the continent but, just as importantly, at eliminating competition in each city to make the tours profitable. While the formation of the Theatrical Syndicate had institutionalized a mechanism to control the number of first-class houses in a city and to bring order into the booking process, the rise of the Shuberts had shifted the balance again. In their struggle for dominance, both sides built more and more houses in cities across North America that offered the same kind of high-quality dramatic and musical shows and thus operated in direct opposition to each other. This soon led to overcapacity of houses and a shortage of shows. Just like in the case of burlesque, their rivalry created structural imbalances that posed a serious risk for the theater business at large. The opponents repeatedly limited or suspended their conflicts and entered into strategic coalitions to reduce the costs and risks for all involved, but these were always temporal solutions.

The different waves of confrontation and (partial) cooperation between the Shuberts and the Syndicate also affected theaters in Montreal. This started during a short period of collaboration, when they briefly suspended their rivalry in the field of legitimate theater. In April 1907, Klaw and Erlanger from the Theatrical Syndicate signed an agreement with the Shuberts to play a certain number of houses from both parties with vaudeville shows. ⁴² To that end, they booked hundreds of vaudeville acts across North America and especially from Europe and entered into direct competition with the existing circuits and booking conglomerates in that field. Just like legitimate theater and burlesque, vaudeville was organized through consolidated circuits. Centralization had reached a peak in 1906 and early 1907, as vaudeville managers from the most powerful circuits in the western, midwestern, and eastern parts of the United States had joined to form the so-called Combine and centralized the booking process through the United Booking Office (UBO). The Syndicate-Shubert alliance thus confronted the dominant player in that industry who controlled the majority of vaudeville houses on the continent and a “vaudeville war” ensued.

As a consequence, two houses began offering high-quality vaudeville in Montreal at the start of the 1907/1908 season. Sparrow’s Academy of Music, which was affiliated with the Syndicate, changed its profile and now played the Shubert-Syndicate offers of “advanced vaudeville.” In direct competition, the UBO supplied shows for the newly opened Bennett’s Theatre, which was part of a Canadian theatrical circuit. Theater critic B. K. Sandwell analyzed this curious situation and explained the reasons behind the sudden oversupply of vaudeville shows to his readers:

Meanwhile every town in Canada, except little old Montreal, has developed its variety theatre and taken its place in somebody’s circuit. At last we are to be like other people, and as usual in this business rival novelties come upon us with a rush. Mr. Edwards [of the Sparrow Company] says there is no vaudeville war, which is reassuring. We are also tempted for a moment to believe that a second vaudeville house in this city is a necessity. As a matter of fact, of course, it depends on the sense in which you use the term war. He is undoubtedly perfectly correct in ascribing the Klaw & Erlanger invasion of vaudeville to the superabundance of theatres caused by the Shuberts’ building enterprise. But the description might go a little further. What it really amounts to is an attempt to throw the loss resulting from this superabundance, in part if not in whole, on the shoulders of the old vaudeville houses and take it off those of the Klaw-Shubert interests. ⁴³

The rationale behind the Shubert-Syndicate invasion of vaudeville is not fully clear. They might simply have intended to create a permanent foothold in that rapidly growing field. In Sandwell’s view, it was a reaction to the tensions in the overheated competition in legitimate theater, where too many opposition houses had been built and the rival parties could now switch some of them to another theatrical genre while still taking the profits. Another possibility is that Klaw and Erlanger used “advanced vaudeville” to limit the scope of action and future expansion of both the Shubert enterprise and the UBO. ⁴⁴ In any case, the venture ended already in November 1907 for a variety of reasons, among them the financial panic of October 1907, supply and organization problems, and the stiff competition of the UBO. Klaw and Erlanger, and the Shuberts accepted from the UBO the sum of US$250,000 and in turn committed to staying out of vaudeville for at least 10 years.

With the end of their collaboration, the Shubert-Syndicate conflicts in legitimate theater heated up again across the continent. The opposition of vaudeville houses in Montreal ended with Sparrow’s Academy of Music abandoning vaudeville and returning to its earlier programming of high-class Syndicate shows. In the end, this trans-regional business war had an ironic effect on Montreal, as it imported tensions and led to a risky duplication of theaters’ profiles in the carefully balanced theatrical scene. While there had been no opposition to the Syndicate house in the city in 1907, the vaudeville war led to exactly this unwanted situation. The Shuberts did not leave Montreal altogether, but took control of the Princess Theatre in 1909 and played legitimate theater there. In doing so, they opened another opposition front, this time against the Academy of Music. Unlike in previous decades, however, the city could now sustain two first-class venues and the next few years were profitable, especially with musical shows.

A Shubert House in Montreal: The Role of Local Investors

The trans-regional business wars brought more and more competitors of the Sparrow Company to Montreal. By leasing the Princess Theatre, the Shuberts gained their own, permanent foothold in the city, but they relied heavily on Canadian partners. They did not build their own house, as they had done in other cities, but cooperated with local investors and managers while keeping them under strict and close supervision. The following sections will take a closer look at the role that those actors played in the operation of the theater.

The Princess Theatre was situated at a prime location in the center of Montreal on Sainte-Catherine Street. The house had been erected by a group of investors that in 1907 had formed the Canadian Theatre Company, Limited, with a capital stock of CAD250,000. Major stockholders and president/vice president of the company were two men from Montreal, Douglas W. Ogilvie, a real estate dealer, and S. Arnold Finley, the architect responsible for building the theater. ⁴⁵ The house opened in 1908 and was first leased by the eastern burlesque circuit, which after its conflict with Sparrow and the split of the wheel had been left without a theater in Montreal. However, the owners of the Princess were not happy with the burlesque shows. They feared that these would lower the value of their investment and were looking for a new lessee. ⁴⁶ Given the long history of public opposition against burlesque shows in Montreal, it could, however, not have come as a great surprise to them that the shows did not meet the expectations of first-class performance. In May 1909, while negotiations with the new lessee were underway, another burlesque scandal broke out and the archbishop banned Catholics from attending the shows at the opposition house, the Theatre Royal. ⁴⁷ After just one season of burlesque, the owners of the Princess secured a more highbrow supply of shows when the Shuberts started operating the theater in September 1909.

The Shuberts needed a large, well-situated, and very elegant house in the city, and local investors such as the Ogilvie family provided the suitable location for their shows. The Ogilvies owned a flour milling business and were among the most influential and prominent industrialists in Montreal and Canada at large. ⁴⁸ John Ogilvie, one of three brothers who had built the milling empire, owned Queen’s Hall, a concert hall that later became Queen’s Theatre. After his death in 1888, his brother, Senator Alexander W. Ogilvie, managed the estate. He leased the house to J. B. Sparrow who operated it from 1896 until the building collapsed in 1899.

John’s son Douglas then continued the family’s involvement with theater by founding the Princess. He took an active role in its operation, visiting the house for weekly inspections. ⁴⁹ He also proved to be a tough negotiator who the Shuberts repeatedly struggled with, mostly over the costs for renovations. This was the case before the opening in 1909, when the house was refurbished to elevate it from its former popular appeal to a more highbrow class of shows and audiences, and during the rebuilding of the theater after it had been damaged by fire in September 1915. On that latter occasion, a gallery was taken out to enlarge the seating capacity to almost 2,400, which increased the profitability of the house. Ogilvie insisted on splitting the costs with his lessee. In reaction, the Shuberts’ Canadian manager Lawrence Solman complained to J. J. Shubert in New York City that “they have an awful nerve, as we have only four years to run” before the lease expired, adding: “They are a foxy bunch and will stand a whole lot of watching.” ⁵⁰ Investors and owners were often actively engaged in the theater business and could exert considerable pressure in negotiations with the lessees and suppliers of the houses.

The anglophone elite played a major part in the industrialization of the city of Montreal in general and took on a pioneering role in the theater industries, as well. Business magnates, financiers, and real estate developers provided the investments and built the theaters that the theatrical corporations then operated. They not only depended on the trans-regional supply of shows but also profited from the investment opportunities that arose from the continent-wide reorganization of the entertainment business. They made use of the competitive rivalries of the theatrical circuits by meeting the growing demand of modern theater buildings. The involvement of the Ogilvie family in Montreal’s theater industries is just one case of members of the city’s business and political elite investing in theater companies and buildings, often as part of larger urban development strategies. ⁵¹ Jesse Joseph and his estate, the owner of the Theatre Royal, and Hugh Allan and his family, owners of the Academy of Music, were other prominent examples. By taking the initiative to build and rebuild theaters, and in some cases entering into booking arrangements and sharing in the profits of the shows, they were not merely recipients but active promoters of the booming theater industry.

The Management and Booking Process at the Princess Theatre

The trans-regional integration of Montreal’s music and theater venues took shape through a concerted effort of investors, managers, and booking agents at different positions across the expanding supply networks. A closer investigation of the management and booking process at the Sparrow Company already showed its varying degrees of influence over the operation of its houses and the circuits at large. The company acted as client of the Theatrical Syndicate, as equal member of the burlesque wheels that played a decisive role in heating up the trans-regional burlesque war, and almost as bystander as it was drawn into the vaudeville war. The Princess Theatre, which was directly controlled from corporate headquarters in New York, is yet another variation of the different ways in which the middleman’s process could be organized.

The management and booking of the Princess Theatre were carried out by a series of intermediary agents and companies, and also through direct involvement of the Shubert brothers in New York. The Shuberts had already extended their business to Canada, most notably by booking the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, which opened in 1907. Its local manager Lawrence Solman then became general manager for Shuberts’ Canadian business. ⁵² To that end, he incorporated the company Entertainments Limited in Canada in late 1908 and became its president and general manager. The company acquired the lease of the Royal Alexandra in Toronto as well as that of the Princess in Montreal. Solman held 51 percent of the shares and the Shuberts 49 percent. ⁵³ The foundation of a separate company to operate the two Canadian theaters was not unusual for the Shuberts who ran several, closely interrelated corporations and were major shareholders in about a dozen affiliated companies. ⁵⁴ In the case of Entertainments Limited, this construction had the additional benefit to shield their main corporations from registering in the Dominion of Canada.

The Princess Theatre was booked by the Shubert office in New York, overseen by Solman from Toronto and operated by local managers in Montreal. ⁵⁵ The booking agreement between Entertainments Limited and the Shuberts specified that the latter had the exclusive right to book dramatic and musical shows, as long as they were “high class” and filled at least twenty-five weeks in a season. The local theater managers could book the remaining weeks themselves. ⁵⁶ The Princess Theatre now stood in direct competition to His Majesty’s that belonged to the Sparrow Amusement Company and was booked by the Theatrical Syndicate. Both houses offered a very similar variety of first-class theatrical shows, many of them from Broadway or imports and adaptations from Europe.

As part of the Shubert theatrical empire, the Princess Theatre underwent not only refurbishments but also a fundamental reorganization of its management practices. It was now operated through a steady flow of telegrams, letters, and visits between Montreal, Toronto, and New York. ⁵⁷ The Shuberts were involved in almost all the details of management and usually had the last say. They closely monitored how the house was run, as they did with all theaters across their circuit. They frequently insisted on cutting costs or streamlining the organization of the theater according to the standard procedures of all Shubert houses. The successive managers of the Princess had to send daily receipts and weekly statements and negotiated almost every decision from staff selection to the size of the orchestra, the bill posting arrangement, or the ticket prices, with the New York headquarters. As employees, they had a subordinate position in the hierarchy of the different shareholders and decision-makers involved. The Toronto management played an important mediating role in all this, as the Shuberts relied on Solman’s expertise in Canadian matters, not only regarding the management of the theaters in Montreal and Toronto but also in strategic matters more generally.

The Shuberts thus remained dependent not only on local investors that provided the houses but also on Canadian middlemen to manage and book them. They, however, wielded considerable power in this constellation. While they were not the majority shareholders, they decided what shows were going to Montreal, which means they controlled the prestige and the drawing power of the house. Solman repeatedly asked for musical shows as these were the most successful in Montreal. The Shuberts did book their biggest Broadway musicals and stars for the city, but put pressure on the local managers to make the shows profitable. As business went down after the outbreak of the First World War, J. J. Shubert still sent the annual revue “The Passing Show 1914” to Montreal. He, however, warned the local manager of the Princess, Abbie Wright: “It is one of the most expensive attractions we have ever sent out, and it depends on the business this show does whether we will send any more shows to Montreal this year.” ⁵⁸

Since 1909, the Princess and His Majesty’s Theatre had coexisted in fierce competition in Montreal. Both houses could hold their own despite the business war between the Syndicate and the Shuberts that raged across the continent during those years. With the entry of Canada into the First World War, however, the situation in Montreal deteriorated, putting both houses at risk. Soon, the Shuberts were ready again to address the problem of how to match the number of houses and shows in a city and on the circuits. While the vaudeville solution—shifting operations to another theatrical genre—had not worked out before in the advanced vaudeville venture and was also still banned due to the ten-year contract with the UBO, another strategy was needed this time around.

The Theatrical Syndicate and the Shuberts eventually found a way to restore the peace in the theatrical industries and keep a balance of power. Starting in 1913, they entered into booking agreements with each other to end opposition in some cities by reducing the number of houses or changing their profile. The aim was to have only one first-class house in each city for which the two conglomerates could share the booking. ⁵⁹ In 1917, Entertainments Limited and the Shuberts let go of the Princess Theatre in Montreal and signed a five-year agreement to share the booking of their former opposition house, His Majesty’s Theatre, with Klaw and Erlanger. ⁶⁰ After Sparrow’s death in 1914, the theater was still in the possession of the Sparrow Company and managed by its co-owner William A. Edwards. Solman had pushed for such a cooperation with the Syndicate for years, arguing that since business had declined, audiences in Montreal could only support one first-class house. ⁶¹

The end of the First World War did not profoundly transform the theatrical situation across North America, but conditions for the trans-regional integration of Montreal’s theater venues had gradually changed for some time. Some of the principal players that had fueled the business conflicts since the 1890s disappeared from the scene. After Sparrow’s death and the closing of both the Academy of Music and the Theatre Royal, the Sparrow Company had lost its dominant role in the theatrical scene of Montreal. The Theatrical Syndicate had started to disintegrate, leaving only Klaw and Erlanger, who separated in 1919. Business conflicts across and between the different genres of the North American theater industries did not stop in the 1920s, but institutional balances shifted considerably. Moving pictures (often in combination with popular prized vaudeville) had been on the rise for more than a decade, and the overall number of traveling shows in the higher prized and dramatic segment decreased. ⁶² The theatrical scene in Montreal adapted to these shifts in the trans-regional supply networks. The number of resident stock companies grew, especially in the francophone sphere; more theaters were turned into cinemas; and popular musical shows continued to make good business.

Conclusion

The theatrical scene in Montreal developed in close interaction with the continental integration of the theater industries. In the process, musical and theatrical venues became points of intersection between the local and the trans-regional sphere. Although central booking agencies acquired the power to organize—and at times dominate—the business, they were not the only actors necessary in the “middleman’s process” of bringing shows to towns. A series of intermediary actors and organizations at different levels of the theater industries were actively involved in matching particular theaters with the outside supply of shows while targeting diverse audiences in the city. This article argued that a detailed focus on such mediating roles reveals the agency of local actors and the influence of particular urban spheres in the process of trans-regional integration. Such an approach has the potential to steer global urban history away from global-local divides toward the investigation of the particular scope, mechanisms, and effects of connectivity.

The North American theater industries evolved through regional organization, continental integration, and the centralization of the business in production and booking centers such as New York City. Touring circuits and booking conglomerates were neither global nor strictly running along state lines. They were trans-regional in the sense that their operators took part in constructing particular transnational business regions. ⁶³ Moreover, business organization and the geographies of supply networks varied from one theatrical genre to another. As a result, there were various options of how to provide theaters in Montreal with shows: some houses were included into regional theatrical circuits that spanned the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada, such as the Jacobs-Proctor circuit or Sparrow’s burlesque and music hall circuit. Others were integrated in the eastern or western wing of U.S.-Canadian burlesque circuits; some got their shows directly from producers or independent agents in North America or Europe; and some were booked exclusively by the Theatrical Syndicate, the Shubert corporations, or the UBO. That way, the music and theater venues in Montreal became part of concrete, historically shifting urban networks that formed the basis of the theatrical industries.

This integration of theater venues into trans-regional touring circuits was only possible with the active support of investors, owners, and managers in the city that provided the urban infrastructure and organizational support for the mostly U.S.-based booking agencies and theatrical circuits such as the Shubert corporations. At the same time, theatrical managers in Montreal relied on U.S.-American business partners with whom they entered into booking agreements or even co-founded trade associations and circuits to gain access to a steady supply of up-to-date theatrical shows. This enabled the Sparrow Company to become the dominant player in the theatrical scene of the city and also exposed it to continuous risks as both participant and casualty of trans-regional business rivalries. The Americanization of Montreal’s theaters was not so much a foreign takeover but the result of a cooperation, often initiated by actors from the city.

Against this background, it is possible to distinguish different types of mediating roles with varying grades of agency and influence in the operation of musical and theatrical venues. The booking and management process was spread out along different positions across the supply network, often involving continuous negotiations between various stakeholders. Actors in Montreal decided about the profiling of houses, influenced how the expansion of theatrical industries played out, or even escalated industry wars that led to general reorganizations of the business at large. The production and booking centers were not self-sufficient, as most of the profit was made on the road, so holding a group of profitable houses was one way of regaining some bargaining power. Another, much more risky strategy was to circumvent the dominant New York suppliers and to use the few independent agencies on the American continent or import attractions directly from Europe. This option, dependent as it was on transatlantic mobility, became harder to sustain and mostly collapsed during the First World War. More localized forms of production, especially in a growing number of French-Canadian theater institutions, did prove sustainable and profoundly reshaped the urban theatrical landscape in Montreal.

Investigating the challenges that middlemen faced when connecting theaters in Montreal to trans-regional circuits and to the urban publics explains why the theatrical scene in the city was so highly dynamic. The profiles of theaters underwent sudden changes, switching from touring combination companies to resident stock companies and back, targeting a different linguistic or social segment of the urban population, and offering another type of theatrical genre. These transformations were often pushed forward by the managers and booking agents. They had to constantly reorient the houses to position them in ever-changing continental circuits and in relation to socially and culturally fragmented audiences. They did this by offering a variety of musical genres and repertoires, and by constantly adapting the architecture and location of theaters. An especially dynamic phase of social and cultural specialization of the houses in the 1890s and 1900s overlapped with growing trans-regional rivalries between competing corporations that escalated into a string of “theatrical wars” in the decade before the First World War. Against this background, the theatrical venues offering touring shows could only be successful as long as the middlemen were able to keep a working balance between urban and trans-regional integration. Their constant efforts to establish and institutionalize connectivity as the basis of their business made it possible to sustain an increasingly differentiated number of musical theater venues in the city of Montreal.