I’ve always assumed that my family had a distant relation to Abraham Erlanger, the fearsome uber-producer who was at his zenith at the turn of the 20th century. He went into partnership with Marc Klaw; together they joined forces with a number of other big men to form the Syndicate that monopolized theater ownership and thus bookings across the country. If you didn’t play ball with the Syndicate, you played in a tent, the way Sarah Bernhardt was forced to.
Recently a cousin of mine returned the geological file that my father had loaned her, dating back fifty years ago when he began researching the family tree. He’s done so fitfully since then. Reading through the file, I was surprised that we are actually quite closely related. My great-grand grandfather Henry Lobenthal was the brother of Erlanger’s mother Regina.
My grandfather Joseph, that would be Henry’s grandson, was in vaudeville as a dancer and then a booking agent during the early 1920s. I wonder now, did he get his start in show business by calling upon Erlanger?
It was Klaw & Erlanger who in 1903 built the New Amsterdam theater on West 42nd Street, the Art Nouveau masterpiece designed by architects Herts and Tallent.
That theater has been a place of importance in my life. I was in high school 1975
when I began a campaign to win landmark status for the theater, which was granted in 1979. My first professionally-published writing was a monograph in a special issue of Marquee Magazine, journal of the Theatre Historical Society that was dedicated to the New Amsterdam.
Did I know the closeness of the Erlanger connection back then? I couldn’t have asked my grandfather directly, because while he was alive, he was not totally with-it.
But I wasn’t championing the theater out of familial loyalty! But my interest in the New Amsterdam, in the theaters and theatricality of that era, can’t be separated from my grandparents (my grandmother was dancing in vaudeville when she met my grandfather) participation in that culture.