This Day in Theater History (Alexander Woolcott vs. the Shuberts)

April 7, 1915 —Setting a pattern for successors at the “paper of record” for the next century, The New York Times’ theater reviewer and resident enfant terrible Alexander Woolcott struck a blow for critical independence by taking Broadway’s powerful Shubert Brothers to court, after they banned him from all of their productions for panning a show. 

For every Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr, who inspired respect even when producers disagreed strongly with their judgments, The Times has also produced a Clive Barnes (whose every lifted eyebrow induced trembling until he made the mistake of taking more money and an enhanced title at a paper nobody respected, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post) or a Frank Rich, who reveled in his role as the “Butcher of Broadway.” 

But Barnes and Rich were pikers compared with Alexander Woolcott. I don’t know anyone who reads Woolcott today, though this is not unusual for theater critics – outside of William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan and George Bernard Shaw in his pre-playwrighting period, how many reviewers are read much years after their deaths?

In fact, Woolcott shares the fate of a contemporary, George Jean Nathan. Both men are less recalled nowadays for the quality of their opinions or even the vigor of their prose than for their associations and the characters they inspired. 

People remember Nathan, when they do at all, as co-editor with H. L. Mencken of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, and as the inspiration of both cynic “Maury Noble” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Beautiful and Damned and the viperish Broadway critic “Addison DeWitt” (played by George Sanders, in a performance that won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) in the 1950 film classic All About Eve. 

On the other hand, Woolcott was one of the members of the Algonquin Round Table of witty literati who met daily for drinks and barbs. His waspish tongue and all-around-impossible manners also led friends George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart to depict him as “Sheridan Whiteside” in their smash hit, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and movie director Otto Preminger to mold him into Clifton Webb’s downright dislikable “Waldo Lydecker” in the film noir triumph Laura. 

But in his own time, it was nearly impossible to escape Woolcott, much like it has been more recently with Roger Ebert before he began to suffer ill health. 

After his stint at the Times, he moved on to three other New York dailies: the Herald, the Sun, and the World. But theater criticism was performance art for him, and in the last decade or so before he died Woolcott began to give himself over to the real thing. 

He wrote two plays with Kaufman (both bombed) and appeared in several others, including, appropriately enough, the road company of The Man Who Came to Dinner. He became an even stronger presence on radio, where listeners became as familiar with that high-pitched voice as—well, like the play that caricatured him, the guest who wouldn’t leave. 

A former police reporter for the Times, Woolcott could treat actors and their shows as perpetrators of criminal offenses against paying theatergoers. 

He submitted what may still hold the record as the shortest theater review, summing up one production with a four-letter word: “Ouch.” More likely, he’d describe a play as leaving "a taste of lukewarm parsnip juice," or an actor as "scrupulously artificial and ever glacial." 

Compared with those notices, Woolcott’s negative review of the Shuberts’ comedy Taking Chances—a bedroom farce in which a bank robber escapes punishment by bedding the wives of police chiefs—sounds like a downright rave. 

After taking in the show on St. Patrick’s Day, he lauded the lead actor and some other aspects of the performance, but on the whole he felt it “not vastly amusing,” “vulgar” and “quite tedious.” 

That didn’t please Lee and J.J. Shubert, who suffered even rougher treatment from other critics about this show but decided to make an example of the Times critic. 

Having displaced the Theatrical Syndicate as the reigning power on Broadway, the Shuberts were used to throwing their weight around. Only the year before, they banned Acton Davies of the New York Sun (neither they nor he took the ban that seriously, since he soon began working for them). 

On April 1, Woolcott was told that he would not be permitted to watch any Shubert production. Even a paid ticket wouldn’t do the trick for him. 

Upon hearing the news, the Times told the Shuberts that they wouldn’t accept any advertising from them. More to the point, the paper decided to take the brothers to court for not allowing their critic to follow his calling. 

An initial judgment by Justice Peter Hendrick in May affirmed that the Shuberts had to allow the biting Woolcott admittance to their theaters. Upon appeal, however, the First Judicial Department of the court’s appellate division ruled in favor of the brothers a year later. 

By this time, however, the battle was turning out to be worth more than it was worth for them. Readers were so eager to pick up the Times to see what outrageous thing their theater critic would write next that the 28-year-old Woolcott was given a raise. 

So after the favorable court decision, the Shuberts gave up the struggle, told the Times that its critic could come back to their shows, and even sent along a box of cigars as a no-hard-feelings-right?-gesture to Woolcott. The whole affair, the pleased young critic chuckled, with his reputation made, “went up in a puff of smoke.” 

Alexander Woolcott is no longer the talk of the talk, but nearly 100 years after his stand, the gift he left theater critics—fearless independence (even if in the service of writing that could be not merely critical but downright nasty and mean)—endures.