The Broadway Anthology — Text and Context

Accidents and Publicity: The Press Agent's Calculus

Bernays opens with "Accidents Will Happen," a poem whose narrator shadows a "burly Dutch tenor" hoping for a story. The singer's life is "commonplace and unimaginative" until a taxicab accident nearly kills him—yet the press agent is away, and the event goes unreported. The irony is sharp: the disaster that should have made news is wasted. In "The Baritone," a Metropolitan star's crisis is not artistic but financial—he balks at a six-dollar surcharge on the Twentieth Century Limited. These pieces treat celebrity as a manufactured commodity, where the real drama is the struggle to get—or avoid—publicity.

The Vaudeville Confessional: From Showboat to Headliner

Kingsley's "Lo, the Headliner" adopts the voice of a monologist born on a showboat, raised in "legit" theatre, and schooled by carnival pitchmen. The poem catalogues his ascent: stealing Billy Sunday's business, imitating William Jennings Bryan, being discovered by Poli. Yet the tone is weary, not triumphant. He admits, "I was not raised for vaudeville," and describes his act as "gravy, and hokum," and "the old jasbo." Pemberton's "The Old Chorus Man" echoes this rueful note, portraying a veteran who has seen the business from the chorus line—a perspective that undercuts the glamour of the headliner's boast.

David Belasco: Wizard, Materialist, and Unfinished Portrait

Kingsley's "David Belasco" is the anthology's longest single portrait, a poem that oscillates between awe and critique. Belasco is called "wizard, magician, necromancer of switchboards," a man who "hath woven spells from the actual." But the poem also notes his limits: "He can stage Tiffany's jewels but not Maeterlinck's bees." The final stanza proposes that Belasco's one remaining work is to stage "a cross section in drama of his own self-surprising." The portrait is admiring yet pointed, treating the impresario as a figure of immense skill constrained by commercial necessity—"an artistic materialist."

Shifting Genres, Shifting Perspectives: Structure as Commentary

The anthology's organization—four authors, alternating verse and prose—creates a mosaic rather than a single narrative. Bernays's poems are tight, anecdotal, often ironic. Hoffenstein's contributions, like "The Theatre Scrubwoman Dreams a Dream," introduce a lower-class vantage point. Kingsley's pieces are more expansive, blending biography and editorial comment. Pemberton's sketches, including "The Screen" and "Matinee," turn toward the audience and the new medium of film. This structural variety enacts Broadway's own multiplicity: no single voice dominates, just as no single show defines the street. The reader moves from press agent to scrubwoman to star, each section reframing the others.

Readers will find the anthology richest when read as a sequence of counterpoints: Bernays's cynical press agent against Hoffenstein's dreamer, Kingsley's celebratory portraits undercut by Pemberton's backstage realism. The book does not offer a unified argument about Broadway; instead, it lets its four authors speak in turn, leaving the reader to weigh the distance between the marquee and the dressing room. Pay attention to who is speaking—and who is silent.

There’s something touching about how those 1917 Broadway sketches capture people throwing themselves into brightness, the way accidents and artifice blur into legend. It reminds me of an old favorite, Gudrun: A Mediaeval Epic — Background and Themes, where heroism also lives in the pause between what’s staged and what’s felt. I keep returning to both, quietly, for that same honest ache.