Forgotten Designers Costume Designers of American Broadway Revues and Musicals From 1900-1930

Delbert Unruh

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781640827585
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Forgotten Designers Costume Designers of American Broadway Revues and Musicals From 1900-1930 by Delbert Unruh and Ione C. Unruh

CHAPTER ONE

RESEARCH

As we undertook this historical research project, two problems confronted us immediately. Problem number 1: What was the historical record? How much primary source material was there, where was it located, and how would we gain access to it? As we were to find out, there were five major collections of original costume design sketches, four in New York and one in Vienna. In New York, there are the New York Library for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Shubert Archives, the Museum of the City of New York, and the fifth is housed in the Theatermuseum, Vienna, Austria. These five major sites became the focus of our research into Broadway costume design of the period.

The existence of these collections of costume designs was not planned, except perhaps for the Shubert Archives. Rather, they happened through individual bequests from individuals and organizations over a long period. The existence of the collection in Vienna is somewhat unique, however, and a brief description of how it came to be provides a preliminary introduction to the world of Broadway costume design from 1900 to 1930.

THE VIENNA COLLECTION

Oskar Pausch, the director of the Theatermuseum, Vienna from 1979 to 1997, in the footnotes to his foreword to Wake Up and Dream, a 1986 exhibition monograph by Stefanie Winkelbauer, there is a brief tantalizing hint as to how the designs might have found their way to Vienna.

“Not to be discounted is the possibility of a provenance from the well-known Viennese costume house Lambert-Hofer, which in 1961 sold the Theatersammlung a large number of drawings grouped under the heading: “Costume designs from Viennese theatres, incl. ‘Venedig in Wien’ [Venice in Vienna]. However, as far as can be traced, these drawings, including some American drawings, were listed and catalogued as a unit.”

Another hint is found in Winkelbauer’s essay Broadway Shows and their Costumes on page 18 of her monograph. In America during this time:

“The ultimate in fashionable glamor was considered to come from Europe, no doubt assisted by the fact that costumes produced in the United States were up to one and a half times more expensive than those manufactured in Europe.”

Europe, after WWI, was in shambles. Jobs were needed and the costume houses cut their prices to attract work from America.

One of the prime motivations for any theatrical producer of this time, or any other time for that matter, is to produce a show for the least amount of money. Accordingly, many producers had their costumes fabricated by firms in Europe due to the lower cost. Winkelbauer notes that the large Berlin firm of Hugo Baruch & Son with branches in Vienna, London, and by 1912 in New York, had a great many artists on contract, and could supply costumes and set designs, as well as construction at very competitive prices. Producers found the lower prices irresistible and looked for ingenious ways to make their import into the US even cheaper.

“Costumes were sent from Europe in three rough sizes, small, medium, and large, and then altered to fit the individual dancers in New York. To avoid paying the steep 60 percent import duty imposed by the US customs, the costumes were often only roughly basted together and shipped to New York labeled ‘fabric’ as opposed to garments. The Shuberts sometimes had costume shipments sent on to Canada, where they were re-valued [for less] rebonded, and then returned to New York” (Winkelbauer 1986).

The truth of this is borne out by a memo from Sam Shubert to Melville Ellis, production manager on May 13, 1910. Shubert writes,

“In reference to the costumes for The Persian Princess which we imported here under bond, same runs out at the end of this month and must be either taken to Canada and rebounded, or the duty paid on same here. It would be much cheaper to send these costumes to Canada and have the valuation reduced and then bring them back here again and keep them for another year. I wish you would take this up with J. J. and let me know just exactly what to do in reference to same” (Shubert Archives).

As an aside relating to the business of design on Broadway at the time, Melville Ellis is listed as costume designer in the IBDb for 47 Shubert productions from 1908 through 1915. According to Maryann Chach, Curator of the Shubert Archives, Ellis worked as a de-facto Production Manager for the Shuberts. He supervised most of the details of the productions. For costumes, Ellis hired the costume designers and oversaw their designs through the run of the show. He designed contemporary costumes by picking out clothing at a local department store or, for period shows, hired New York designers to give them ideas to work with. The costume designers who were hired by Ellis often did not receive program credit.

Out of these few facts a scenario for the European fabrication of costumes seems to suggest itself. The producers, and often the directors, worked with the designers in New York until they were satisfied with the designs. Because costumes cannot be built without a color rendering as a guide, the finished illustrations were then sent to a costume house in Europe. When the ‘fabric’ was sent back to the US, all the colored renderings may or may not have been included. Six observations seem to bear this out.

1: The collection in Vienna does not seem to include a full set of costumes for any Revue.

2: Given the tremendous number of musicals and musical revues that were done in New York during 1910–1930, it is quite possible that the European costume shops were working at full speed and some renderings were just left behind. When a show is in final construction, the pressure to finish can be intense. No one in the costume house is interested in the designer’s sketch after the fabric is cut and sewing begins. Reality is staring everyone in the face, and that reality has to be fixed. John Kenrick in his book, History of Stage Musicals notes that the 1920s were Broadway’s busiest decade, with as many as 50 new musicals opening in a single season.

3: The designs were not carefully handled by the costume shops in Europe. For example, Alfredo Edel in a letter to R. H. Burnside (the Director of the Hippodrome Extravaganzas) on August 4, 1908 complained about the state of his drawings, they were certainly very roughly handled by the people who copied them off for Landolff (a costume house in Paris). “The gold and the paillettes are completely rubbed off and they do not look like the designs I gave them” (Winkelbauer, p. 38).

The Internet Broadway Database identifies Edel as one of the costume designers for a Ballet The Four Seasons in a Hippodrome spectacular entitled The Auto Race, which opened on November 25, 1907. Perhaps his ruined design was a part of the ballet, and he was rightly disturbed about the lack of care taken with his sketches.

4: During this time, the designers did not own their sketches, the producer did and sometimes these sketches may have been returned with the costumes to the producers. Designers, also, can sometimes be careless about maintaining their archives, especially when they are working on more than one show at a time as they were then and were too busy to keep track of their designs whereabouts. Also, because their sketches were in Europe, the designers had to trust the European costume shop to return them. Cora MacGeachy wrote on one of her sketches “Please return this.” It is still in the Theatermuseum, Vienna archive.

5: If the show is a disaster or is a truly humiliating experience, designers have been known to just leave the designs in the shop or destroy them so there is no record of their work on that show. Gilbert Adrian, a renowned theatre and motion picture designer during 1900–1930, was so afraid of being copied that he is reported to have deliberately burned his sketches after the production was over, thus today there are very few of Adrian’s original designs available.

6. There was no agreement between designers and producers as to who owned the sketches. American Producers believed that when they paid for the design of a costume they owned the sketch. The designer Kiviette complained late in her career, that because there was no agreement with producers; actors, directors, producers, or shop craftsmen could just help themselves. Costume construction companies in New York as well as Europe seemed to also operate under that assumption as well. Many of the sketches in the Vienna collection have the stamps of American or European companies—Adler Costume or Orange Mfg. Co. from the USA and Hugo Baruch and Landolff from Europe being frequently seen. The stamp of an American company on a sketch in Vienna seems to suggest an interesting possibility. Perhaps an American producer assembling the costumes for a proposed future production remembered a costume he had had made by the Adler Co. some years back. He had Adler send the sketch back to him, or found it in his own files, and included it in the group of costume renderings he was sending to the European company. Thus, it became three times removed from the original designer.

These facts and suppositions concerning the handling and care of design sketches seems to account for the fact that some examples of these designers work cannot be found at all, or by happenstance are scattered among the collections of the Theatermuseum, Vienna, The McNay Museum in San Antonio, Texas, The Hoblitzell Theatre Collection, and the Harry Ransome Center at the University of Texas, The Museum of the City of New York, The Shubert Archives, The New York Library for the Performing Arts, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In London, there is a massive collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and at the Royal Opera House. There are also private collections that we did not know of or were unable to gain access to, and there are a few representative examples of some designers scattered in other large museums, or on various websites. We made the best use of this material, as we were able; but our central focus remained on the four major collections listed above.

Problem number 2 was: How much of the primary source material, sketches and photographs, existed and what condition was it in. Further, what measure would we use to select the material? As our search continued, some general parameters became obvious.

The first under this category was; if there were only an insignificant amount of material, or none at all, and an absence of biographical and production information, designers were frequently not listed in official programs, we would not consider that designer as a part of the discussion. After all, if we didn’t know who they were and what they had done, we had nothing on which to frame a narrative.

As we were also to discover, most of the time we were working with incomplete collections of designs or gaps in biographical data, and we became quite adept at pursuing information into totally obscure sources. As we also found out, biographical information about most of the designers we were researching was scant or nonexistent. During this time, designers were on the lower rungs of the publicity ladder. Only the designers who had become famous in another area: Fashion—Sally Milgrim or Lady Duff-Gordon, or in Motion Pictures—Adrian, Lemaire or Orry-Kelly—would have a substantial record. We were at the mercy of the currents and eddies of time, and whatever images, programs and theatrical memor...

Table of contents

• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN