The Oracle of Broadway
By AND
JUST off Manhattan’s Great White Way, on Forty-fifth street west of Broadway, crowds nightly assemble to cheer Margaret Sullavan in John Van Druten’s three-character success, The Voice of the Turtle. They pack a theater which has known many stars and many successes in the quarter of a century since that forgotten bit of musical lavender and old lace, Canary Cottage, opened its doors.
That first-night audience came to sit in judgment on “a young man from Frisco” who was opening his own theater with a musical play wrhieh he had written and directed. They went away marveling at the audacity and persistence which had brought this evening to a triumphant conclusion, and the young man wTho was responsible for it all became one of Broadway’s great ones, a theatrical mogul, a god who could make dreams come true, who could make or break stars, and wrhose word was law to the thousands of artistes and technicians who worked in his ever growing theatrical enterprises.
Ironically, few’ of the people applauding The Voice of the Turtle today realize that behind the bright lights which spell out “Moroseo” on the theater’s facade is a million-dollar legend. In The Oracle of Broadway: The Life of Oliver Moroseo, Helen INI. Moroseo, Oliver’s third wife, and Leonard Paul Dugger tell this typically American success story and the fascinating fragment of American theatrical history which evolved from it.
Oliver Moroseo started his career penniless. As a child he sold matches in San Francisco’s streets and he performed acrobatics for pennies. This wras in the 1880’s. By the turn of the century he owned and managed theaters, wrote and directed plays, and was a person of national theatrical consequence. In a constant effort to free the American theater of the usual “flutter your wings, m’proud beauty” melodrama which was then theatrical fare, he gave his patrons Ibsen — Hedda Gabler in 1899 in Los Angeles and later Cyril Maude in Peer Gynt. He plied them w’ith Strindberg, Shakespeare, Sheridan. He launched Laurette Taylor in Peg o’ My Heart, Charlotte Greenwood in So Long Petty, and Emily Stevens in Galsworthy’s The Fugitive. He made fortunes, and through two unsuccessful marriages lost them. His personal life wras a series of depressions until he met his third wife. His theatrical life wTas meteoric, brilliant.
Theatrical memoirs have a fascination peculiar to themselves. Even the most poorly organized and written raise the curtain on backstage life and make some revelation of the eternal mystery of what really goes on beyond the footlights in the world of make-believe. Usually there is more heartache than glitter, but even the gloomiest of the theater’s aspects make interesting reading and rarely seem real to an audience which has never experienced them.
The Oracle of Broadway show’s both sides of the picture, Mrs. Moroseo and Mr. Dugger tell Oliver Morosco’s story autobiographically, from notes he wrote. They tell it tenderly, intimately, in great detail, and with a complete lack of literary pretension. If it lags at times, it is only because of the infinite love with which this record has been written. Carton Printers, &{..25.
LEO LERMAN