The Ghostly Impresario
The Stuyvesant Theater opened in 1907 on West 44th Street in New York, with David Warfield appearing in A Grand Army Man. Today it is known simply as the Belasco Theater in honor of David Belasco, actor, manager, director, dramatist, producer, who built it.
David Belasco was a theatrical visionary who founded the Little Theater movement, which emphasized intimacy of surroundings and actor-audience contact. He is credited with bringing a new realism to American theater. He introduced many technical advances in staging and design, earning him the sobriquet, “Wizard of the American Theater.”
The architect of the Stuyvesant was George Keister, but he was so closely supervised by Belasco, the project was more of an architectural partnership. The Belasco reflects its founder’s ideal of a theater building. Its exterior is in the Georgian Revival style, unusual for theaters at the time, with an office pavilion on the second story.
Belasco insisted on opulence. The lobby and doors were designed by John Rapp. The lobby boasted eighteen Everett Shinn mural panels and Tiffany glass lighting. The interior ceiling was made of back-lit colored glass. When the theater opened it was considered technically state-of-the-art and Belasco’s experiments there with staging and lighting design greatly influenced the future development of theatrical stagecraft.
In 1909, a 10-room penthouse was added to the rooftop and David Belasco moved in. A year later the name of the theater was changed to the Belasco. He lived in the penthouse until he died in 1931 and was buried in Linden Hills Cemetery in Queens, New York. But the spirit of David Belasco never moved out of the Belasco Theater.
Belasco was born in San Francisco on July 25, 1853 to immigrant parents who were Portuguese Jews from London. From the time he went on stage as a child, Belasco never worked outside the American theater. He toured mining camps and frontier towns as a young man. As a member of small traveling theater companies, he did everything from act to paint scenery.
In 1882, he arrived in New York to take a job as stage manager at Madison Square Garden. He moved to the Lyceum as stage manager and house playwright, where he also taught in the dramatic school, later the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
His first hit show was a Civil War melodrama called The Heart of Maryland, written for the notorious divorced socialite, Mrs. Leslie Carter. Mrs. Carter and Belasco became a pair in the public eye and he was known for dragging her across the stage by her hair to bring out emotion in her acting. Mrs. Carter was the first in a string of “Belasco Stars.”
His most popular productions included: The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893), Zaza (1899), Madame Butterfly (1900), The Music Master (1904), Adrea (1905), and The Girl of the Golden West (1905). His best work is considered to be The Return of Peter Grimm, staged at the Belasco in 1911.
Belasco was already married when he moved to New York from California, and his wife lived until 1925, but this never stopped his cavorting with showgirls and actresses. After he moved into the penthouse apartment in 1909, his parties there were famously raucous.
It is said that theaters are prime ground for hauntings, because of the widest possible range of emotion being expressed by very large numbers of people, over a long period of time, and enclosed in a confined space.
Perhaps it is true.
David Belasco continues to hold loud parties in his long-vacant penthouse, according to many who claim to have heard them over the 70 years since his death.
Stagehands swear they hear footsteps coming from the deserted apartment. They hear the creaking of the private elevator; the elevator has long been dismantled.
Reports of sightings of David Belasco’s ghost began almost immediately after his death in 1931. As in life, he faithfully monitored performances from his private box seat. He was seen sitting there in his box for every single opening night performance until 1970; Oh, Calcutta!, it would seem, too much, even for David Belasco.
