Alice Johnson (actress)
Alice Johnson was a Broadway actress and singer,[1] active at the beginning of the 20th century.[2] She began her career in the chorus in light opera.[3] She later became a member of the Murray Hill Theatre Stock Company. In a single season she was seen in "no less than thirty roles running the entire gamut of the modern stage."[1] The company was founded by Henry V. Donnelly (1862–1910).[4] The company gave two performances daily and changed the play each week. Alice played everything from Lady Macbeth to Peggy in A Tin Soldier by Temple Bailey.[3]
She was also the leading actress in the Frawley Company, a stock company founded by T. Daniel Frawley in San Francisco, when it was at the zenith of its popularity.[5] She was married to Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Butler, the son of Colonel George Butler and actress Rose Eytinge, until his untimely death in 1904 at the age of twenty-five.[1]
Selected plays
- The Pearl of Pekin (1888) an adaptation of the operetta Fleur-de-thé by Charles Lecocq
- The Poet and the Puppets (1893) a burlesque adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan[Note 1]
- The Sorrows of Satan (1897) adapted from the novel by Marie Corelli[6]
- The Swell Miss Fitzwell (1897) by Henry A. Du Souchet
- The Little Host (1898–99)
- A Divorce Colony (1900) a farce by Sydney Rosenfield, Grand Opera House, San Francisco[7]
- A Friend of the Family (1903) California Theatre, San Francisco
- Mistakes Will Happen (1906)
- The Dear Unfair Sex (1906)
- The Man from Home (1908–09)
- Widow by Proxy (1913)
- Thank You (1921–22) by Winchell Smith and Tom Cushing at the Longacre Theatre[8]
Notes
- ↑ The show included a Hamlet in hoop skirts, the song "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow" and a three-legged dance. The audience hissed and booed its disapproval. (Reference: Thomas Allston Brown (1903) A History of the New York Stage, Dodd, Mead and Company, New York)
References
- 1 2 3 Robert Grau (1909) Forty Years Observation of Music and the Drama, Broadway Publishing Company, New York
- ↑ Alice Johnson at the Internet Broadway Database
- 1 2 Robert Grau (1910) The Business Man in the Amusement World, Broadway Pub. Co.,, New York
- ↑ "Henry V. Donnelly Dead" (February 16, 1910) New York Times
- ↑ Sunset Magazine Vol.9 No.5 (September, 1903) Southern Pacific Company, San Francisco
- ↑ William Archer (1898) The Theatrical World: 1893-1897, Walter Scott Ltd., London
- ↑ The Argonaut Vol.47 No.1234 (November 5, 1900) San Francisco
- ↑ Winchell Smith, Tom Cushing (1922) Thank You: A Play in Three Acts, Samuel French