Wallack's Theatre - 254 West 42nd Street

254 West 42nd Street

In 1903 producer Fred R. Hamlin and producer/director Julian P. Mitchell had a big Broadway hit with The Wizard of Oz, a musical staging of the L. Frank Baum story, and they had another with Babes in Toyland, a Victor Herbert operetta, later in the year. In 1904, Oscar Hammerstein I announced plans to build his eighth theatre (after the Harlem and Manhattan opera houses, the Olympia and Victoria music halls, and the Columbus, Olympia and Republic theatres), on vacant land he recently bought at 254-8 West 42nd Street, calling it the National. It would be designed by Albert E. Westover (Albert Edward Westover, 1860-1933), a Philadelphia architect who designed several theatres in that city for vaudeville operator B. F. Keith and is credited with Hammerstein's Republic. The same year, comedians Joe Weber and Lew Fields ended their decades-long partnership, giving their final show May 28, at the New Amsterdam Theatre. On May 31, the new partnership of Hamlin, Mitchell & Fields contracted to lease Hammerstein's (not-yet-built) new house. They announced they would name it for Fields and produce musicals and burlesques.

Their first offering was a new Victor Herbert operetta, It Happened in Nordland, with libretto and lyrics by Glen MacDonough, starring Fields and Marie Cahill, together with a burlesque of The Music Master, a current hit play. The Lew Fields Theatre opened on December 5, 1904, eight days after Hamlin's unexpected death. The show was a hit; the production ran through April 29, 1905, went on a road tour, resumed on August 31 with Blanche Ring instead of Marie Cahill, and closed on November 18, for another tour.

On May 23, 1906, Fields formed a New York State corporation with Lee Shubert of the Shubert Brothers, taking joint possession of the Herald Square Theatre. Fields and Mitchell moved there in August, and the former Lew Fields Theatre was leased by the well-known actor-manager James K. Hackett, who renamed it for himself. The Hackett Theater opened August 27 with a farce imported from London, The Little Stranger, starring Edward Garratt. Its first big success was the seven-month run of The Chorus Lady, starring Rose Stahl, from October 15, 1906 through June 1, 1907. (The play had opened at the Savoy Theatre on September 1.) In the first week of February, 1907 Hammerstein sold the theatre to Henry B. Harris, the theatrical producer who bought the Hudson Theatre the next year and built the Folies-Bergere in 1911. Hackett retained his lease and the playhouse its name.

Another big success at the Hackett was the Shubert production,The Witching Hour, a dramatic play by Augustus Thomas, which played from November 20, 1907 to June 27, 1908, and from August 17, 1908 to September 19, 1908 (when it moved to the West End Theatre on 125th Street). From September 21 through October 10, 1908 Hackett reprised his starring role in The Prisoner of Zenda, which he had first played on February 10, 1896. (In 1913, he starred in the novel's first film adaption, which was produced by Adolph Zukor and was the first production of the Famous Players Film Company.)

In 1911 Hackett's lease expired and Henry B. Harris took over, making major interior and exterior alterations. (The adjacent 1909 picture shows, in addition to the canopy, that the lobby projects beyond the building line. When the city narrowed the sidewalks on 42nd Street and Times Square in 1911 such encroachments were ordered removed.) He named the playhouse The Harris Theatre in honor of his father, William Harris, Sr, also a theatre owner and producer, and an associate of the Theatrical Trust, or Syndicate and opened on August 31 with a new play, Maggie Pepper, again starring Rose Stahl.

Henry B. Harris died on the RMS Titanic in April 1912. His estate operated the theatre for the next two and a half years, and September 21, 1914 leased it to Selwyn and Company; i.e., Crosby Gaige and the Selwyn bothers. (Four years later the three opened their own theatre across the street, which is today called the American Airlines Theatre.) They mounted several productions at the Harris, the first on October 23: The Salamander, by Owen Johnson (adapted from his book), starring Carroll McComas. When the Selwyn & Co. lease expired on July 1, 1920 Harris's widow sold the theatre to H. H. Frazee, a producer and theatre owner and owner of the Red Sox baseball team, who again made renovations and opened with a new play September 7: The Woman of Bronze, starring Margaret Anglin, which ran for 252 performances. Dulcy, a comedy by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, opened on August 13, 1921, made Lynn Fontanne a star, and ran through March 11, 1922.

In late 1924, John Cort leased the theatre, naming it Wallack's (his Cort Theatre on 48th Street preëmpted his own name); in two years he had no hits. Frazee sold it in October 1926 and it was leased out again, housing nothing but flops. The last was called Find the Fox, and its third performance, on Saturday evening, June 21, 1930, brought the legitimate career of this theatre to an end.

That year the theatre was leased to Max A. Cohen's company, Excello Estates, which showed movies in it. According to Henderson, "Cohen bought the land underneath Wallack's in 1940…tore out the second balcony, put stadium seating in the orchestra" and replaced the facade "with a windowless sheet of bland stucco." He named it Anco Cinema, after his wife, Anne. In 1988 the Anco was gutted and turned into retail space. In 1997 the building was demolished, as part of the 42nd Street Development Project. Its site is now occupied by the facade and other remaining parts of the Empire Theatre (originally called the Eltinge, opened in 1912), which was moved in 1998 170 feet to the west, and whose remnants serve as the entryway of a multi-screen cinema.