page_title: Garden Theatre
section_title: Broadway theatre
hierarchical_section_title: Garden Theatre / Broadway theatre
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: Merely Mary Ann Garden Theatre, New York, every evening &amp; Saturday matinee. Abstract: 1 print&#160;: color lithograph&#160;; sheet 46 x 33 cm. (poster format)
context_page_description: The Garden Theatre was a major theatre on Madison Avenue and 27th Street in New York City, New York. The theatre opened on September 27, 1890, and closed in 1925. Part of the second Madison Square Garden complex, the theatre presented Broadway plays for two decades and then, as high-end theatres moved uptown to the Times Square area, became a facility for German and Yiddish theatre, motion pictures, lectures, and meetings of trade and political groups.
  The Garden Theatre has been erroneously referred to as the Madison Square Garden Theatre. It was not related to a theatre on New York's Madison Ave. and 24th St. that was called the Madison Square Theatre from 1879 to 1891 and later called Hoyt's Theatre.
context_section_description: The Garden Theatre presented a wide variety of dramas, musical comedies, and operas, both new plays and revivals, from 1890 to the approximately 1910, by which time it was increasingly used for extended, often lower-cost runs of plays first presented at other theatres.
  The theatre was managed by T. Henry French from its opening until October 1893 when A.M. Palmer took over. Three years later Charles Frohman became manager.
  In addition to productions ranging from one to over 100 performances, examples of which are below, in its heyday the theatre presented many repertory companies, with consistent casts offering rotating menus of plays, frequently for four-week engagements.  Notable "rep companies" that appeared at the Garden:
  Richard Mansfield (1891 and 1896): George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, Clyde Fitch's Beau Brummel, H. Greenough Smith's Castle Sombras, Mansfield's own Don Juan, or the Sad Adventures of Youth, T.R. Sullivan's Nero, Octave Feuillet's A Parisian Romance, A.C. Gunter's Prince Karl, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Richard III, and Mansfield's signature role(s) in T.R. Sullivan's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
  Mrs. Fiske (1896 ): her husband's Marie Deloche, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Dumas's Cesarine, and her own A Light from St. Agnes.
  Sarah Bernhardt and Coquelin (1900): Dumas's L Dame aux Camelias, Sardou's La Tosca, and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and L'Aiglon. The five-week engagement featured Bernhardt's famous portrayal of the title role in Shakespeare's Hamlet, which was wildly popular, with speculators getting five times face value for tickets.
  E.S. Willard Repertory (1900-01 and 1902-03, four weeks each): T.W. Robertson's David Garrick, J.M. Barrie's The Professor's Love Story, J.J. Dilley and L. Clifton's Tom Pinch (adapted from Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Henry Arthur Jones's The Middleman, Louis N. Parker's The Cardinal, and Herman Merivale and Palgrave Simpson's All For Her.
  Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1902): E.F. Benson's Aunt Jeannie, A. W. Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and Hermann Sudermann's The Joy of Living (translated by Edith Wharton).  (1908): The Flower of Yamato translated by Vicomte Robert D'Humiere, and Elektra by Hugo von Hofmannsthal after Sophocles, translated by Arthur Symons.
  Robert B. Mantell (1905): Shakespeare's King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet; Brownlow Hill's The Dagger and the Cross, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu.
  Ben Greet Players (1907 and 1910): Shakespeare's As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night; Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Peter Dorland's Everyman, Charles Reade and Tom Taylor's Masks and Faces, Richard Sheridan's The Rivals, Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, and others. The 1907 tour included future stars Russell and Sybil Thorndike, and Sydney Greenstreet.
  Examples of prominent actors and plays from this period are listed below.
caption: Poster for Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann starring  Eleanor Robson (1903)
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