page_title: Klaw and Erlanger
section_title: The Syndicate
hierarchical_section_title: Klaw and Erlanger / The Syndicate
caption_attribution_description: Looking west at New Amsterdam Theater, 42nd St., New York, 1905
context_page_description: Klaw and Erlanger was an entertainment management and production partnership of Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger based in New York City from 1888 through 1919. While running their own considerable and multi-faceted theatrical businesses on Broadway, they were key figures in the Theatrical Syndicate, the lucrative booking monopoly for first-class legitimate theaters nationwide.
  Klaw and Erlanger joined in partnership in 1888. Starting from the purchase of an existing booking agency, the partners gradually gained control of the southern territory, anchored in New Orleans. They ran allied businesses, produced Broadway shows, and owned a number of theaters. They were part owners of the new Iroquois Theater in Chicago, which suffered a catastrophic fire in 1903 that resulted in more than 600 deaths and brought Klaw & Erlanger bitter criticism. In the same year they opened their flagship New Amsterdam Theater in New York, where the Aerial Gardens became the longtime stage for the Ziegfeld Follies.
context_section_description: The partners became founding parties to the Theatrical Syndicate in 1896.  The other members were Charles Frohman, J. Fred Zimmerman Sr., Samuel F. Nixon and Al Hayman.  Another loosely associated figure was William Harris of Rich & Harris in Boston.  Taking advantage of their physical chain of theaters, the syndicate developed a standardized booking process, and brought efficiency to an otherwise fragmented and wasteful scheduling system.  
  The system was opposed -- by their main competitors, the Shubert brothers.  Sam Shubert began to compete through the billing of "independent theater," an appeal that soon broke the Syndicates' playhouse monopoly and began the diversification of Broadway theater.  But the Klaw & Erlanger booking system was also decried and challenged by performers such as the prominent actor Richard Mansfield, the husband-and-wife team of Harrison Grey Fiske and Minnie Maddern Fiske, among many others.  
  Its monopoly was broken in 1910, but the Theatrical Syndicate continued in operation with considerable holdings.  As late as October 1924 -- after the partners' brief foray into the film business circa 1915, after Marc Klaw ended his partnership with Erlanger in 1919 and opened his own Klaw Theatre on Broadway in 1921 -- A.L. Erlanger was still reported as the most powerful member of the Theatrical Syndicate.  In fact, poised to take over the complete operation and its multifaceted benefits:
  Mr. Erlanger, who was the most powerful member of the anti-unionists, has wearied of conducting the famous Theatrical Syndicate without assistance while dividing the profits with the heirs and assigns of the other original members; so, he has arranged the matter in such fashion that hereafter he, himself, will be all there is of the Syndicate... The combination took life in 1896...with a view of avoiding conflict and confusion, fixing responsibility for broken engagements and disregarded contracts, and incidentally of determining the drawing-power and consequent sharing-terms of plays and starts.  The scheme, Mr. Erlanger long ago told me, originated not with him, but with the late Al Hayman...
  A.L. Erlanger died in 1930.
caption: Amsterdam Theater - 42nd St. - New York Vity 1905 crop
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