IN NEW YORK CITY, AND all around the country, 1921 was a full, rich year. (For one thing, people could go to Broadway shows and sit close to one another — but that’s another subject.) Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb had great seasons on the baseball field. Movie theaters were showing Rudolph Valentino in “The Sheik” and Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in “The Kid.”
The winner at the Boston Marathon was a guy from New Jersey. A horse named Behave Yourself won the Kentucky Derby. A 42-year-old German man named Albert Einstein came to the city to lecture about his new “theory of relativity.” And at 219 West 48th Street, an elegant new theater opened.
So, happy 100th birthday to the Walter Kerr! (This marquee, for “The Heiress,” is from 2012.) It was called the Ritz Theater for a long time, and a new digital interactive timeline (the link is below) reviews a lot of what it’s been through. Here are a few intriguing points.
https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/1603544/Walter-Kerr-100th-Anniversary/#vars!date=2023-08-25_23:33:03!
Herbert J. Krapp, architect
The Walter Kerr began its life as the Ritz Theater, designed by Herbert J. Krapp (in photo), a New York City native who at 25 had already become the Shubert organization’s “house architect.” Krapp also designed more than a dozen other Broadway theaters as well as the Edison Hotel.
2. The first production at the Ritz was the theatrical equivalent of a double feature. “Mary Stuart,” a one-act set in 16th-century Scotland, starred Clare Eames (whose grandson is the actor Tony Goldwyn). The “opening act” was a pantomime, “A Man About Town.”
3. A total of seven productions at the theater won the Tony Award for best play: “Angels in American: Millennium Approaches,” “Angels in America: Perestroika,” “Clybourne Park,” “Take Me Out,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” “Proof” and “Doubt.”
3. Two other productions at the theater won the Tony for best musical. “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” and “Hadestown” (which opened in 2019 and was playing when all of Broadway was shut down in March 2020).
SOME THINGS DON’T CHANGE “Power," part of the Federal Theater Project’s “living newspaper” series, played at the Ritz in the late 1930s. The project was part of the WPA.
4. Other well-known shows that graced its stage included “My Sister Eileen,’ “Tobacco Road,” and several of August Wilson’s plays, including “Two Trains Running.” Katharine Cornell starred in “The Enchanted Cottage” there in 1923.
5. The theater underwent a $2 million renovation in 1990 and was renamed the Walter Kerr Theater.
6. Walter Kerr (1913-96) himself was a Pulitzer Prize-winning theater critic, for The New York Herald-Tribune beginning in 1951 and for The New York Times beginning in 1966. Kerr (the name rhymes with Burr, sir) was born in Indiana and attended Northwestern University. His wife was the playwright Jean Kerr.
7. The digital timeline of the theater’s history includes commentary from Broadway luminaries including Cherry Jones, Kenny Leon, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Stephanie J. Block and Tovah Feldshuh.
8. The theater didn’t spend the entire century as a stage-performance venue . It was a radio studio from 1939 to 1942, a radio and television studio from 1943 to 1965, and it was vacant until 1969..
9. The most notorious onstage incident at the Walter Kerr took place in 1991, when Nicol Williamson, playing the ghost of John Barrymore, turned one fencing scene in Paul Rudnick’s “I Hate Hamlet” a little too realistic by actually poking his co-star in the derrière with the flat side of his sword. Evan Handler, playing a 20th-century actor living in Barrymore’s old apartment, was the co-star. The New York Post’s Page 1 headline summed up the news: “Hamlet Actor Storms Off Stage After Co-Star Whacks Him in Butt.” The Broadway publicist Adrian Bryan-Brown goes into detail (and shows us the headline) on the timeline.
10. Jujamcyn Theaters has owned the Walter Kerr since 2005.
The interactive timeline can be viewed at www.jujamcyn.com/walterkerrtimeline
