Academic literature on the topic 'Madison Square Theatre'

Always on the margin of the nineteenth-century theatre is the stagehand. Nameless to history, they follow orders of influential producers like Lester Wallack; they follow theatre dreams of artists like Steele MacKaye. Yet researching this last artist, one stagehand name repeatedly appears. Doing so he takes on a personality and a history. The man was Nelson Waldron (1839–1917). At times he was noted as stage machinist, later on a master machinist, then a recipient of a theatrical benefit night – something reserved for actors who had achieved peer recognition. This peer of the New York theatre community during the last quarter of the nineteenth century begins to take shape. He was savvy enough to hold the patent for the Madison Square Theatre’s double stage in the heady days of feuding between the Mallory Brothers and Steele MacKaye. In the days that first brought Buffalo Bill’s rodeo inside to become an actual horse drama, there was Nelson Waldron again, building visual sensations that filled the Madison Square Gardens, literally. Waldron’s life in the theatre was evidently full and rewarding. His was a life not chronicled, but certainly one deserving. The paper brings forward an initial accounting of Nelson Waldron’s theatre.

This chapter discusses the rise of the Friday Night Fighters. The new age of television meant grand opportunity for Friday Night Fighters. As broadcasts expanded in the postwar years, fighters discovered that a main event fight in Madison Square Garden equaled instant national celebrity and a big pile of cash. To make it on TV, a boxer first needed to be in New York. Some migrated internally, arriving from the red dirt roads of the Deep South or the rangy farmlands of the Midwest. For others, home was the cane fields and ghettos of the Caribbean or the desert metropolises of Mexamerica. Still others crossed the Atlantic, originating in Europe, Asia, even Africa. In a way, the Friday Night Fighters symbolized New York immigration. The remainder of the chapter explains the effect of television on the sport, how both science and theater played into the persona of the Friday Night Fighter, by letting two boxers stand in for the whole. The first— Kid Gavilan—is an exemplar of that group of rugged, quality fighters who made many appearances but whom the history books have let pass unnoticed into the mists of boxing lore. The second— Chuck Davey—was a man almost too perfect for television and wholly unprepared for it.

The move to Aotearoa New Zealand was transformative in ways I could not have imagined when I left New York City “temporarily” in 1994. From the cheap seats at Madison Square Garden to the VIP tent at Te Matatini National Māori Performing Arts Festival, I continue to embrace the excitement (and terror) of entering into theatre and performance arenas that are emphatically not mine, and to be touched, always, by the generosity of performers and audiences no matter where I find myself. It is tempting to picture Johnny, Larry, and the others frozen in time and space, still at Gleason’s right where I left them. And indeed, Johnny is still there, still teaching youngsters the game and maintaining his claim to fame. He has a website: the ...