I’m writing an article for an upcoming issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film on the topic of the New York Hippodrome’s first season. I am way more comfortable in the twentieth century than the nineteenth, but the NY Hippodrome definitely put on shows that drew from Victorian era performance. For my piece, I look at the nineteenth-century traditions of scene painting drawn on by Arthur Voegtlin, along with the ways he reflects on those experiences and how the size and scale of the Hippodrome pushes him in new directions.
Final of The Black Crook via Library of Congress Prints and Photos Division. http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/var.1527/
Arthur Voegtlin’s father William was a scene painter, best known for painting the backgrounds for the 1870 revival of The Black Crook. Arthur worked with his father for a bit, then struck out on his own, painting backdrops for the comedies of Charles H. Hoyt. The biggest comission Arthur Voegtlin received before he was hired at the Hip came from bandmaster John Duss, then the leader of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.
John Duss in his bandleader’s uniform via https://sites.google.com/site/pittsburghmusichistory/pittsburgh-music-story/classic/john-duss
Duss was apparently a bit of a huckster, more interested in showmanship and making money than he was in music. Harper’s Weekly calls him the “P.T. Barnum of the Musical World.” Duss took over the main space in Madison Square Garden (the Stanford White-designed one) for a series of summer concerts in 1903. He wanted to create a beautiful, classy, immersive space for these events. Inspired by an island setting at another show in the same space, Duss decided he wanted to approximate the experience of Venice for his audience. He writes of the plan in his autobiography The Harmonists:
With an island “stage” for the orchestra, and a huge Venetian backdrop, I proposed to encircle the island with a canal, span it with bridges and float a number of gondolas manned by real Venetian boatmen.
So he called on Arthur Voegtlin.
Postcard of the exterior of Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden
Voegtlin designed a model of the interior decorations, which was presented at his studio to publicize the upcoming event. Along with the canals and island imagined by Duss, Voegtlin added rose-lined entranceways, a drop curtain painted with St. Mark’s Campanile and the Doge’s Palace framed by the Adriatic, several replicas of buildings both real and imagined — the house of Desdemona, Othello’s wife in the Shakespeare play being among the latter.
The design for Venice as it appeared in Harper’s Weekly April 11, 1903 via hathitrust.org
Tiffany Studios reportedly loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Venetian marble objects to complete the scene, including statues and fountains. The audience paid up to three dollars apiece (the equivalent of around $100 today) to sit at cafe tables next to the fake river. Guests didn’t know what to make of the event, which mixed the informality of roof garden shows where you could eat and drink at your table with the formality of listening to diva Lillian Nordica and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra playing selections from Wagner. The performance mixed signifiers of high class performance with low-key summer entertainment.
Canals of Venice, Dreamland, Coney Island, public domain via https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/file_sets/zg64tp22d
That same summer, visitors to Coney Island could take a tour through the new exhibit called The Canals of Venice, a ride that offered similarly “authentic” views of the city without the added attraction of classical music and Tiffany marble surroundings. Regardless of the price range for their ticket, everyone wanted to take a virtual trip to Venice that summer.
In a few years, once he’d befriended Frederic Thompson and Skip Dundy, Arthur Voegtlin would start making these kind of immersive environments at Thompson and Dundy’s Coney Island venue Luna Park. In addition to his work building and painting sets for the Hippodrome, Voegtlin designed and wrote scenarios for the historical pageants put on at Luna Park throughout the summer. Voegtlin designed an Old West environment for his “Great Train Robbery,” along with a mining camp for the later “Days of ‘49.” Much much later, after the Hippodrome had gone through many owners and renovations and formats, long after he was unceremoniously fired by the Shubert Brothers in 1915, Voegtlin returned for one last production in 1925 called “Verdun,” recreating a battle from the Great War. Even after that, in 1929, Voegtlin served as a consultant for Morris Gest’s Passion Play, where the Hippodrome’s opulent lobbies were redone to suggest the periods depicted in the production, including the Roman Empire and Middle Ages.Voegtlin wanted the audience immersed in the reality of a production’s time and place, no matter when or where it was.