"Claudia" at the Court Square Theater

“Claudia” came to the Court Square Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts for three performances in March 1943. The play had just closed on Broadway the month before after a successful run of almost two years. The lead in that Broadway production, Dorothy McGuire, was whisked off to Hollywood to make her first motion picture. Phyllis Thaxter played the irrepressible young bride, Claudia in this road production.

This show also featured Donald Cook and Frances Starr reprising their Broadway roles. Both stage veterans with long careers, Mr. Cook also appeared in films, including the 1936 “Show Boat.”

Rose Franken, author of the play, directed both the Broadway and road shows.

Jane Cowl at the Court Square Theater

Jane Cowl, actress, playwright, and “Juliet” of a generation, toured with “The First Mrs. Fraser” at The Court Square Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts, April 1948. You might recall the darling diva from our earlier post about her blowing up at an incompetent young Jimmy Stewart and getting him fired. Here, she’s all composed and playing the grand lady of stage at the end of her career.

Born in 1884, this Boston native was one of the great stage actresses of her day, who performed in a few silent films, originated the role of Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder’s “The Merchant of Yonkers”, and during World War II headed New York’s Stage Door Canteen.

She was in her mid-60s when she appeared as Janet Fraser in this comedy by St. John Ervine, which was revived on Broadway in November 1947. Unfortunately, it played only 38 performances through December before producer Gant Gaither sent it on the road.

The play was actually made into a film in 1932 with Dorothy Dix in Jane Cowl’s role. Also in the cast of this play was Reginald Mason who came with Miss Cowl from the original New York cast, and had Broadway credits as long as your arm.

This play capped the 1947-48 season at the Court Square, and was also a kind of cap to Jane Cowl’s stage career. She died two years later.

Baseball Fan Ethel Barrymore at the Court Square Theater

April 28th fell on a Wednesday in 1943, as it does this year. For one day only, Ethel Barrymore and the New York cast of “The Corn is Green” played at the Court Square Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The play had been the triumph of the 1940-41 Broadway season. John Mason Brown of the New York Post described opening night, when “The bravos which filled the theater at the final curtain were deafening and prolonged. There was every reason for them because Ethel Barrymore gives the finest, most thoughtful and concentrated performance she has given in many years.”

Miss Barrymore played 461 performances in the role on Broadway before starting her nationwide tour, and by this time travel was subject to wartime restrictions.

After the war Ethel Barrymore returned to Hollywood and a busy second career as a character actress. Since baseball is a recurring theme on my other blogs this week, Another Old Movie Blog, and New England Travels, we might mention here that Ethel Barrymore was an avid baseball fan. Author Hollis Alpert in “The Barrymores” (The Dial Press, New York, 1964) notes that while on movie sets, in between takes she would “hurry to her dressing room, where she would listen to ball games on her radio. She rooted less for single teams than for individual players, and when there was not a major league game to listen to would settle for the Coast League games.”

At this stage of her life, she preferred freelancing rather than signing on with a single studio. Her reasoning was, “The first thing I know they would be lending me out for a lot of money and a couple of outfielders.”

"The Red Mill" at the Court Square Theatre, Springfield, Mass.

Back on this day in 1948 you could have caught the matinee of “The Red Mill”, which ran from April 5th through the 7th at the Court Square Theatre in Springfield, Mass. Victor Herbert’s operetta first wowed ‘em on Broadway back in 1906 at the Knickerbocker Theatre, and was revived in 1945 at the Ziegfeld Theater.

Buster West adorns the program as you see, a comic dancer who got his start in vaudeville while still a child, and appeared in several Hollywood B-movies showcasing his novelty dancing in the 1930s.

Pat Rooney, Jr., who was actually Pat Rooney, III, son of the famous Pat Rooney, Jr. (who became Sr. after the death of his own father, Pat), joined Buster as a couple of American vaudevillians on the spree in Holland.

Frank Jaquet played the Buromaster. Mr. Jaquet was a veteran of Broadway and Hollywood, where he played a slew of bit character roles, most of them uncredited, including one of the senators in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), and a police desk sergeant in “Meet John Doe” (1941).

“The Red Mill” had “whiskers on it” as they used to say, even in the late ‘40s, so I would imagine a revival today, unless it were a parody of a parody, is unlikely. Typical, though, of the rather wistful post-War nostalgia for a gentler world that brought us the smash “Oklahoma!”

Thomas Mitchell Tours in "Death of a Salesman"

“Death of Salesman” by Arthur Miller was a Broadway hit of 1949. Two years later in November 1950 its Broadway run ended. A few months later in January of 1951, Thomas Mitchell starred as Willy Loman at the Court Square Theater in Springfield, Mass. as the road show toured New England.

Mr. Mitchell, one Hollywood’s greatest character actors who had performed in some of Hollywood’s greatest films, was making the transition in 1951 from films to television roles. The better part of the 1950s he played on TV, but before this transition he had made an earlier one from stage to movies.

Thomas Mitchell had first appeared on Broadway in 1916, and through the 20s had been a stage actor until Hollywood gave him a new career. He was actually the first actor ever to win the three awards: the Tony, the Emmy, and the Oscar.

But from January 8th through the 10th, 1951, he was Willy Loman in Springfield.

Road Show - "Mister Roberts" at the Court Square Theater

Another opening, another road show. Here we have the program for “Mister Roberts”, which came to the Court Square Theater, Springfield, Massachusetts from December 11th through 16th, 1950, when the Court Square entered the period its last golden years.

Directed by Joshua Logan, the play starred Curtis Cooksey as The Captain, Robert Burton as Doc, and Don Fellows as Ensign Pulver. Cooksey and Burton were veterans, who first trod the boards on Broadway in 1915 and 1916, and Cooksey had appeared in several silent films. Both had worked in early television as well.

Don Fellows came to the road show from the original Broadway hit, where he was part of the ensemble. He had also originated the role of Lt. Buzz Adams in “South Pacific” and appeared in a number of Broadway musicals, films, and television in his long career.

The cast also included a couple of newbies who would one day become famous names, Jack Klugman and Lee Van Cleef.

Arsenic and Old Lace at the Court Square Theater, Springfield, Mass.

“Aresnic and Old Lace” toured New England in 1941, and played two nights and a Wednesday matinee on November 25th and 26th. Featured in the cast was Laura Hope Crews (center, above), who returned to the stage after several film roles, among them the fretful and childlike Aunt Pittypat Hamilton in “Gone With the Wind” (1939). “Arsenic was one of Laura Hope Crews’ last roles before her death the following November in 1942.

Miss Crews and Effie Shannon, who was originally from Cambridge, Mass., played the sweetly sinister sisters Brewster. Forrest Orr, last seen here on tour with “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” played the bombastic and childlike “Teddy” Brewster who thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt.

The unique, if, much parodied Hollywood legend Erich von Stroheim played the evil Jonathan Brewster. Mr. Stroheim, actor, writer, and director, must have made an entertaining evil brother Jonathan (the role was originated on Broadway that January by Boris Karloff).

Directed by Joseph Kesslring, the show would become a film vehicle for James Stewart in 1944 (last seen here getting bawled out by Jane Cowl in Boston), and would become for decades to come the favorite chestnut of community theater groups around the country. One wonders if this show is always playing sometime, somewhere, though surely Halloween must be its high season.

This local newspaper ad tells us the tickets went from $1.10 up to $2.75 for orchestra seats, though you could get cheap seats at the matinee for 55 cents.

Corse Payton at the Court Square Theatre

Corse Payton arrived in Springfield, Mass. with his stock company in 1915 to play at the Court Square Theatre. He billed himself as “America’s Best Bad Actor.” Rather than keep the crowds away, this unlikely label seemed to attract them, if only out of curiosity.

Born in the 1860s, Payton was a Midwesterner who joined a traveling circus as a young man, and by 1900 had had enough touring through the country to settle down in Brooklyn and bought himself a theater and founded a stock company. Some future film stars got their start with Payton, including Mary Pickford, Ed Wynn, Fay Bainter, and Dorothy and Lillian Gish.








In August, 1915 at the Court Square Theatre, Corse Payton and his stock company, which included some of his relatives, like his brother, Claude, presented what the playbill labeled “the absorbing drama” called “Madame X.”

The teenaged girl who went to this performance at the Court Square Theatre wrote in pencil on top of the program “went with Agnes - cried a lot.”

Hopefully, the girls cried because it was such an absorbing drama, and not because Payton really was such a bad actor.


This photo of the Court Square Theatre here is from the Library of Congress, from the Detroit Publishing Company, taken sometime between 1900 and 1910.

The Court Square Theatre opened in 1892. Most of the theatre greats played here, the Barrymores, Helen Hayes, each in their season and generation. It was closed in 1955, demolished two years later.


Here is a shot of what remains of the Court Square block. For more on the Court Square Theatre, have a look at this blog post by Mark T. Alamed in his terrific “Exploring Western Mass” blog, and also here at Cinema Treasures for more history on the Court Square.