The Shubert Organization
The Shubert Organization is the oldest American theater production company still in existence . It has been run by the Shubert family (Shubert Bros.) since 1900. It still owns most of the theater buildings on New York's Broadway (17 in total) and a few other theaters in the United States. Since 1945, the Shubert Foundation has been the sole owner as a non-profit organization .
history
The Shubert Organization goes back to joint theater productions by the brothers Sam, Lee and Jacob J. Shubert at the end of the 19th century, which came from Syracuse (New York) . Her father Duvvid Schubart immigrated there in 1882 with the whole family from the Lithuanian Neustadt-Schirwindt (today Kudirkos Naumiestis ), which at that time belonged to Russia and had a large Jewish community. - The mostly unmentioned sisters Fannie, Sarah and Dora also played their part in building the company.
Since the last decade of the 19th century they worked in New York City with increasing success. They broke the monopoly of the Theatrical Syndicate founded by Charles Frohman in 1896 and became the world's largest theater producers. They hired stars like Richard Mansfield , Sarah Bernhardt , Alla Nazimova and Eleonora Duse . In 1911 they produced Max Reinhardt's Sumurun spectacle . On Broadway, they built the Winter Garden Theater , the Shubert Theater, and the Imperial Theater, and bought other theaters such as the Belasco Theater and the Majestic Theater .
In the mid-1920s , the Shubert Brothers operated over a thousand theater buildings in the United States. Eddie Cantor , Fred Astaire and Cary Grant appeared in their stage shows. Many of the theaters were later closed or converted into cinemas, some of which still bear the name Shubert Theater today . In the global economic crisis since 1929, the Shubert Brothers made do with restructuring. They brought out the later Ziegfeld Follies and other revues such as the dance musical Hellzapoppin ' (1938).
Jacob J. Shubert died in 1963. In the 1970s, the Shubert Organization became active again as a theater producer after a change in leadership. She directed and financed successful music and spoken theater productions on Broadway and Off-Broadway such as Ain't Misbehavin ' (1978), Amadeus (1979), Children of a Lesser God (1979), The Little Shop, which are mostly known in Europe in their film adaptations of Horrors (1982), revivals of classic Broadway hits and acquisitions from London such as Cats (1982).
The Shubert Organization is helping to preserve the historic theater building on Broadway. Telephone and later electronic ticket sales (telecharge.com) have been their commercial mainstay since the 1980s.
literature
- Jerry Stagg: The Brothers Shubert , New York: Random House 1968
- Foster Hirsch: The Boys from Syracuse : The Shubert's Theatrical Empire, Cooper, New York 1998. ISBN 0-8154-1103-0
- Brooks McNamara: The Shuberts of Broadway: A History Drawn from the Collections of the Shubert Archive , New York: Oxford University Press 1990. ISBN 0-19-506542-5
