From the Bowery to Broadway

📖 The Scoop

Before Ziegfeld launched his Follies, before the Shubert brothers built their empire, Lew Fields' productions were the toast of Broadway. For the "smart set" in the luxury box seats and the shopkeepers and clerks in the gallery, an evening at Weber & Fields' Music Hall was the hottest ticket in town, a chance to see the biggest stars of the era - Lillian Russell, Fay Templeton, David Warfield, DeWolf Hopper, and the "Dutch" knockabout comedy team of Weber & Fields. From the Bowery to Broadway offers a panoramic view of the early history of the American popular theater through the career of a consummate showman. In the half-century between his stage debut - a bumbling youngster in a Bowery amateur show - and his farewell appearance on the opening night bill at Radio City Music Hall, Lew Fields was involved in almost every form of popular entertainment, from the dime museum, circus, the minstrel show and vaudeville, to revues, "book musicals", and operettas, as well as recordings, silent films, radio, and talkies. Here are the triumphs and disasters of a singular life in show biz. Born Moses Schoenfeld, Lew Fields crossed the Atlantic in steerage at age five and grew up in the mean streets of the Bowery in the 1870s and 1880s. At the age of ten, to escape his father's sweatshop, he began performing on stage with his school chum Joe Weber. As teenagers, they trouped through variety circuits all over the country; before they reached thirty, they had their own Broadway theater and all-star stock company. Going solo, Fields blossomed into an innovative producer who helped raise the Broadway musical to the pinnacle of show biz (his scores of credits include five of the early Rodgers and Hartshows). Fields' influence was extraordinary: his raucous "Mike and Meyer" knockabout comedy routines with Weber were the prototypes for generations of acts to follow, and the legacy of the satirical revues performed nightly at the Music Hall lives on in the irreverent topical humor of Saturday Night Live. "He was more than a gifted comedian", the late Helen Hayes wrote in the foreword. "For over a decade, he was Broadway's most inventive, extravagant, and prolific musical producer". The man who, in his own words, lived "to give the public what it wants" emerges as a surprisingly complex and contradictory figure: a beloved and much-copied comedian who yearned all his life for recognition as a great dramatic actor; an inveterate risk-taker and compulsive gambler who made and lost several fortunes; and a producer who did more than anyone to legitimize the popular stage, but nonetheless used all his influence to prevent his talented offspring from pursuing their own stage-struck ambitions. Armond and Marc Fields draw on a wealth of new research to bring to life the teeming streets of the Bowery, the grueling vaudeville tours, the backstage feuds, and the skirmishes with the Syndicate's theater monopoly and critics who openly resented the stunning successes of a Jewish "East Side ragamuffin". In addition, the authors vividly describe dozens of hilarious comedy routines, burlesque sketches, and big-budget production numbers. Brimming with intimate anecdotes and historical insight, this vastly entertaining biography will be savored by anyone who has ever felt the lure of the Great White Way.

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts (fancy, right?)