Going Legitimate
Like John Considine, Cort left Seattle during the depression (and anti-vice reaction) that followed the Panic of 1893, but returned after the Klondike Gold Rush to build the Grand Opera House (opened 1900) on Cherry Street. Geographically he had crossed north of "the Deadline", Yesler Way, out of the vice-ridden "restricted zone". Artistically, he had crossed from variety entertainment into legitimate theater.
With Considine, he played a major role in one of the country's rising fraternal organizations: just before the turn of the century they founded what became the Fraternal Order of Eagles (F.O.E.). A third founder, H. L. Leavitt, soon bolted to found the Loyal Order of Moose.
By 1903, Cort's Northwestern Theatrical Association controlled 37 theaters in the American West, allowing him to compete with some success against the Eastern entertainment establishment. He signed an agreement with Marcus Klaw and Abraham Erlanger, then the country's leading booking agents of dramatic talent, and his theaters became part of the Klaw and Erlanger Circuit. At this point, he was Seattle's leading theatrical impresario. However, Klaw and Erlanger were more focused on box-office potential than artistic merit, and Cort's position in the market had given him an audience with some critical faculties. If people were being offered badly produced plays, they would skip legitimate theater entirely and go see a vaudeville.
In 1910, Cort helped organize the Independent National Theatre Owner's Association, a group of circuits that tried to break away from the New York-based syndicates. Allied with the independent Shubert Organization, these added up to 1200 theaters nationally. They eventually forced Klaw and Erlanger to allow theaters to book both Klaw/Erlanger productions and others. Still, while the fight was on, Klaw and Erlanger had backed construction of Seattle's new Metropolitan Theatre in the prestigious Metropolitan Tract. Cort, in turn, headed for New York, where he became a notable producer and manager, as well as the founder of New York's Cort Theatre.
In the summers of 1916-1918, Ruby Stevens (the future Barbara Stanwyck), travelled with the show, watching her elder sister Mildred perform.
Read more about this topic: John Cort (impresario)
Famous quotes containing the word legitimate:
“The media no longer ask those who know something ... to share that knowledge with the public. Instead they ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimate it.”
—Serge Daney (1944–1992)
“The wonderful scope and variety of female loveliness, if too long suffered to sway us without decision, shall finally confound all power of selection. The confirmed bachelor is, in America, at least, quite as often the victim of a too profound appreciation of the infinite charmingness of woman, as made solitary for life by the legitimate empire of a cold and tasteless temperament.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)