Quality Street: Broadway

Act 1 scene: Sydney Brough as Valentine Brown calls on Miss Susan and Miss Phoebe in Quality Street.

Quality Street. Comedy in four acts by J.M. Barrie. Presented by Charles Frohman. Produced under the stage direction of Joseph Humphreys. Stage manager Joseph Francoeur. Scenery by Unitt. Costumes by Dazian and Helen Windsor. Incidental music by William Furst.

Maude Adams did her best to avoid being interviewed throughout her acting career, but in a rare exception she was quoted in an item published in The Boston Globe (3 February 1902, p.2):

“It is rather a curious circumstance,” [said] Miss Adams, “but although I have acted Lady Babbie so many times, Mr Barrie never has seen me in the role, nor has he seen me act, except on the occasion referred to by Mr Frohman [in Rosemary]. Nor have I had the pleasure of meeting him more than once when I called upon Mrs Barrie and himself in their charming suburban London home.

“A very pleasant chat, too, I had with Mr and Mrs Barrie, for we talked over ‘Quality Street,’ and what my new role was to be, although at the time Mr Barrie had not written a line. In fact, I did not see the manuscript of the play at all until last summer. After Mr Barrie had finished it Mr Frohman sent it to me in Tours, France, where I was resting. Did I study the role then and there? Oh, no, I simply glanced over the play, and beyond being delighted with it, I did nothing more at the time than to let Mr Frohman know that fact. I came back here late in August and went to the Catskills, where I took up the real serious study of the role and the development of the character prior to beginning rehearsals in this city.”

“Do you know,” said Mr Frohman, “What Mr Barrie told me he did when Miss Adams called on him? He let her and Mrs Barrie do most of the talking, but he watched Miss Adams all the time.”

Maude Adams as Phoebe Throssel

New York Public Library, New York

Maude Adams as Phoebe Throssel shows off her ringlets

New York Public Library, New York

Quality Street received its first performance at an out-of-town tryout at the Valentine Theatre, Toledo, Ohio, on 11 October 1901. Thereafter it toured, playing Detroit and Baltimore, and several smaller towns, before opening at the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York on 11 November.

According to Armond Fields, one of Maude Adams’ biographers, “It was an odd initial tour for an Adams play, but Frohman wanted to collect as many good reviews in these cities as he could and use them to promote the play in New York City.”

Fields also speculates that Frohman may have had some reservations about the play, using the tryout period as an opportunity to fine-tune the production prior to Broadway. An anecdote in Charles Frohman: Manager and Man records:

“Quality Street” was tried out in Toledo, Ohio, early in the season of 1901. On the opening night an incident occurred which showed Frohman’s attitude toward new plays. The third act dragged somewhat toward the end, evidently on account of an anti-climax. On the following day Frohman asked his business manager to sit with him during the third act, saying:

“Last night Miss Adams played this act as Barrie wrote it. This afternoon she will play it as I want it.” (p.167)

The Toledo opening was a huge success, as noted by the New York Times (12 October 1901):

TOLEDO, Ohio, Oct. 11.—Maude Adams scored a great success here tonight, when “Quality Street” was received by a critical audience most enthusiastically. Miss Adams was called again and again before the curtain. The entire house was sold out long before the performance began.

Sydney Brough as Valentine Brown in Act 1

Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University

Sydney Brough as Valentine Brown, after his return from Waterloo

Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University

Of the principals, actor Sydney Brough (1868-1911) had been specially engaged for the role of Valentine Brown; his first appearance in America. A member of a well-known theatrical family (his father was Lionel Brough, uncle to Australia’s Robert Brough), Brough was a thoroughly reliable and capable actor, but like many in the Brough family, his career would be cut short through ill health and early death. Though Sydney Brough never visited Australia, Helen Lowell (1866–1937), who played Susan Throssel did—when in 1908 she toured as Miss Hazey in Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.

The Cast

Following the first performance, Frohman seems to have sent Barrie the opening night reviews and also informed him of his dissatisfaction with the end of Act 3. In his 29 October reply to Charles Frohman, Barrie wrote:

First of all to thank you most heartily for all the thought and care you have given to Quality Street. I see it has been immense—and Miss Adams for the wonderful things she seems to be doing with Phoebe. She is a marvel, and someday I think she must present me with that little brown frock, which I begin to think is a subtle part for her.

Of course I am hoping all will be well in New York. I gather that the final scene of Act 3 is not all we had hoped, and independently of that I have felt in my bones for some time that is artificial and therefore wrong. Miss Adams thinks so, too, though she doesn’t let on. I have therefore altered it and enclose the result. Any loss is I think slight—only some lines that may get a laugh, and the gain is that Phoebe’s character comes out more sincere. It is more what she really would have said and done. Also the whole runs more swiftly to an end. The introduction of Valentine at the end seems useful also.

I hope you will have this in time to try it before the play reaches New York, but even if not I think you should do it there the first night. I don’t press this, for of course you who have seen the performance know best. Still there can be no risk in using the alteration (if is not so vital as that) and I certainly hope you will agree with me.

I see the newspaper says I make Valentine or someone say “It is me”, instead of “It is I”. I don’t remember, but if so please alter it. (Robbins, pp.66-67)

In reviewing the opening night in New York, the New York Times (12 November 1901) observed of Maude Adams’ performance:

In “Quality Street” there is not a moment when Miss Adams is required to undertake anything that does not lie within the scope of her powers. The result is delightful to the audience, and last night it was welcomed with hearty applause. … Those who are familiar with her abilities and her style of acting will readily perceive wherein she found the role of Phoebe abundant scope for the exercise of her art. She acted with much abandon and with a fine simulation of sincerity.

Quality Street played to full houses for eight weeks of a limited season, with the play closing on 4 January 1902 at the height of its success. Another tour followed which saw the play staged in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and other cities, small and large. After five months of touring, the strain became too much for Maude Adams and in May she called a halt to the tour. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, she was ordered to rest by her doctor, and a week later she was on her way to Europe. This sudden departure meant that an anticipated return season of Quality Street in New York was not forthcoming and her resultant two-year absence from the stage no doubt contributed to the play’s comparative failure in the USA at this time.

Though the play was a financial success, playing to capacity houses in New York and on tour, many of the reviews were fairly lack-lustre. It seems Maude was the drawcard, not Barrie. Writing in 1902, John Bouvé Clapp and Edwin Francis Edgett in Plays of the Present, for example, observed:

Neither the play nor Miss Adams’s acting of the leading character attained the popularity anticipated from her success in “The Little Minister”. (p.224)

Ellen Terry witnessed Maude Adams’ performance and offered a generous appraisal of the play and its leading lady:

I feel very glad that I came over from Brooklyn to see Miss Maud Adams in Mr. Barrie’s play “Quality Street”. It is worth a much longer and more difficult journey than that to see so charming and matchless an actress and so pretty and delightful a play. As for Miss Adams, she is quite a darling, and I love her. She is tremendously fine, and perfectly remarkable in this play. I might say she is really a winning little demon as Phoebe of the ringlets, so wholesalely does she capture people’s hearts and merrily run away with them. I hope that when Miss Adams comes to London I shall be in a box with Barrie on her opening night to welcome her. I know Mr. Barrie very well, and I am positive that he would be enthusiastic with delight could he see the beautiful manner in which his Quality Street is played here. Miss Adams is so fresh, so new, so splendid! Her art is refreshingly fragrant, Everything about her is so individual, so enchanting, that I must repeat what I said at the beginning – that she is a darling, and I love her!

The Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), 22 March 1902, p.2.

American-Australian actress Maggie Moore also shared her observations of Quality Street with Australian theatregoers:

The next performance I attended was to see Maud Adams in “Quality Steet”. I liked her. She is clever, earnest in her acting; but I was a bit disappointed. Maybe, I expected too much—and I didn’t care for the play. She is a great favorite in America, and her big success was, I believe, as Babbie in the “Little Minister”.

Sunday Times (Sydney), 8 June 1902, p.2

In New York, Quality Street received only one revival, in January 1908, when it played for just a week at the Empire Theatre, prior to the introduction of a new Maude Adams’ play, The Jesters.

Yet despite the lukewarm response to the play in America, it attracted the attention of Hollywood and was filmed twice, in 1927 and 1937.

The Reviews

THE AMERICAN STAGE

(From our own correspondent)

New York, Jan. 10.

The actress whom Mr. Frohman desires the American public to accept as the best of all is Miss Maude Adams, who has lately been playing at the Empire Theatre in Mr. Barrie’s Quality Street. Miss Adams had succeeded so well in The Little Minister that Mr. Barrie thought it worth while to write a new play for her, and for her only. The new play is written round her. He has taken her measure, and Phoebe Trossell in Quality Street is simply Miss Maude Adams. The part is meant to give her, and does give her, an opportunity to display all her qualities, all her idiosyncrasies, all her mannerisms, all her individual and personal traits. The result is that, instead of Miss Adams as Phoebe Trossell, we have Miss Adams as Miss Adams. It is interesting, but it is not an example of dramatic art. If, which I am far from doubting, Miss Adams be capable of composing and rendering a character unlike her own, no occasion for doing that is now offered her. Her one important success thus far has been as the heroine of The Little Minister. She tried Juliet, but to that part she proved inadequate. She tried L’Aiglon, and there were critics who thought her impersonation of the Duc de Reichstadt superior to Mme. Sarah Bernhardt’s—a judgment by which the critics in question were judged. She lacks the feeling for Juliet and the power for L’Aiglon, and the limits other dramatic resources are visible even in a pure Maude Adams part. Within those limits she is effective; beyond them her work on the stage is valueless. A vivacity which soon becomes restless, a habit of overemphasis both in voice and in gesture, a voice which is harsh and metallic, a countenance which lends itself readily to grimace, an elocution which seldom suggests careful training—such are some of the gifts by which Miss Maude Adams has won her way to the front with American audiences here and in the West and South. She has individuality, and has the power of impressing herself on the public by, I imagine, her force of character and a strange piquancy of demeanour which often comes very near to good acting. Miss Adams is the newest of those actresses who have been long enough on the stage to win, by her natural gifts and by help of the syndicate, what seems an assured position.

The Times (London), 25 January 1902, p.16

Maude Adams as Miss Livvy (aka Phoebe Throssel) in Act 2

New York Public Library, New York

Maude Adams as Miss Livvy (aka Phoebe Throssel)

New York Public Library, New York

Knickerbocker Theatre (Al. Hayman & Co., managers).—In J.M. Barrie’s four act comedy, “Quality Steet”, with which Maude Adams opened on Nov. 11 an eight weeks’ engagement at this house, there was shown to be sufficient opportunity for Miss Adams to again charm with her grace of manner and expression in a role similar to those in which her greatest successes have been achieved. This play received its premier at the Valentine Theatre, Toledo, O., on Oct. 11, by the same company which now renders it. Mr. Barrie, although he has built a dainty and thoroughly wholesome piece, which is particularly acceptable in that it offers a role along the lines which a favorite player has shown to be her forte, has, nevertheless, laid himself open to criticism by choosing rather an inane groundwork on which to construct his play. There is in the plot a recourse to the simple expedient of folstering upon a man, as her own niece, the woman whom he loves, and the metamorphosis is accomplished simply by having the lady in question don a ball gown and curl her hair, and yet he does not recognize her. But the quaint charm of the treatment and the beauty of the simple dialogue are so potent that their force is irresistible, and the play is unquestionably a success, although in the plaudits of the opening night audience there was shown more of a desire to reward Miss Adams for her excellent work than to commend the medium through which it was accomplished. In the role of the unsophisticated maiden who loves for long years a man who apparently cares nothing for her during the greater part of that time, Miss Adams was superlatively excellent, and she invested the role with an archness, a coquetry and a spontaneity which held her audience in a spell, from which they awoke to applaud wildly this delightful player.

The New York Clipper, 16 November 1901

Bibliography

John Bouvé Clapp & Edwin Francis Edgett in Plays of the Present, The Dunlap Society, New York, 1902

Armond Fields, Maude Adams: Idol of American Theatre, 1872-1953, McFarland & Company Inc., North Carolina, 2004

Isaac F. Marcosson & Daniel Frohman, Charles Frohman: Manager and Man, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1916

Phyllis Robbins, Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait, Putnam, New York, 1956