Babies on Our Block, The

DESCRIPTION: "If you long for information or in need of merriment, Come over with me socially to Murphy's tenement." The singer catalogs all the myriad Irish babies living in the area, who join in singing "Little Sally Waters"
AUTHOR: Words: Edward Harrigan / Music: David Braham
EARLIEST DATE: 1879 (sheet music published by Wm. A. Pond & Co, New York)
KEYWORDS: baby family
FOUND IN: US(MW)
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Finson-Edward-Harrigan-David-Braham, vol. I, #21, pp. 72-75, "The Babies on Our Block" (1 text, 1 tune)
Dean-FlyingCloud, pp. 91-92, "Babies on Our Block" (1 text)
Spaeth-ReadEmAndWeep, pp. 115-116, "The Babies on Our Block" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Richard Moody, editor, _Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762-1909_, World Publishing Company, 1966; the play "The Mulligan Guard Ball" is on pp. 549-565 (this is the first printed edition, taken from the manuscript filed with the Library of Congress in 1879, and may not have matched the actual performances perfectly); this song is very near the beginning of scene 5, on pp. 560, apparently sung by Dan Mulligan
Richard Moody, _Ned Harrigan: From Corlear's Hook to Herald Square_, Nelson Hall, 1980, "The Babies on Our Block" (copy of the sheet music on the inside front and back covers)
B. A. Botkin, _Sidewalks of America_, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1954, pp. 564-565, "The Babies on Our Block" (1 text, 1 tune)
Stanley Appelbaum, editor, _Show Songs: from The Black Crook to The Red Mill_, Dover Publications, 1974, pp. 17-20, "The Babies on Our Block" (1 text, 1 tune, a copy of the original sheet music; pp. 13-16 give the sheet music for "The Mulligan Guard")
William H. A. Williams, _'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream_, University of Illinois Press, 1996,p. 164, "(The Babies On Our Block" (2 substantial excerpts)
Edward Harrigan, _The Mulligans_, G. W. Dilingham, 1901, p. 143, "(no title)" (1 fragment)
ST Dean091 (Partial)
Roud #9572
RECORDINGS:
Mick Moloney, "The Babies on Our Block" (on HarriganBrahamMaloney)
Mixed Vocal Quartet, ("HarriganHartBraham melodies, no. 2," Songs of the past, no. 1") (Medley including bits of "Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door," "Babies on Our Block," and others) (Victor 35578)
SAME TUNE:
Soreheads on Our Block (James A. Garfield campaign song from 1880; Kenneth D. Ackerman, _Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield_, Carroll & Graf, 2003 (I use the 2004 paperback edition), p. 194 n. 3). Interestingly, this song is not in the official Garfield and Arthur Songster
Sheenies in the Sand (by Frank Bush) ("if you want some recreation during the heated spell, Come down to Coney Island, to Corbin's big hotel") (Gilbert, p. 180)
NOTES [9283 words]: The description of many babies residing in a block in New York, especially in Irish areas, is no exaggerations. Williams, p. 93, discusses the population of the Tenth Ward (not the ward in which Ned Harrigan set his plays, but not too different in character): "After the [Civil] war, the ward grew in density from 432 per acre in 1880 to 747 in 1898, making it perhaps the most crowded district in the world by the turn of the century." If we assume 600 population per acre, and assume a block to be 3 acres, that's 1800 people per block (!), so probably 40-50 babies per block.
According to Spaeth, pp. 186-187, the late 1870s saw a series of musical skits called the Mulligan series. "January 13, 1879, was the historic date of the opening of the full-sized Mulligan Guard Ball, which ran right on to the end of that season.... [T]he Mulligan Guard Ball may be considered the real revelation of what was thereafter known as the Harrigan and Hart style...."
"Harrigan himself represented the brains and energy of the troup, writing dialogue and the song lyrics, casting and directing every production, acting and singing the leading roles and often also serving as manager. Braham composed all the music and conducted the orchestra in the pit. Tony Hart continued to be the foil to Harrigan's characterizations and was particularly good as a female impersonator...."
"The Mulligan Guard Ball [first performed January 13, 1879; Moody, p. 85] contained, in addition to its parent song, such musical hits as The Skidmore Fancy Ball (a satirical treatment of a colored company), We're all Young Fellows Bran New, Singing at the Hallway Door, and The Babies on Our Block. The latter was the definitive forerunner of The Sidewalks of New York, giving a detailed picture of life in the humbler sections of the metropolis,with actual quotations from old Irish song scattered throughout the music."
According to Moody, p. 88, "Harrigan said [this song] had come to him when he threaded his way home through the mobs of Irish children -- Phalens, Whalens, Clearys, Learys, Brannons, and Cannons." "The Mulligan Guard Ball" was initially a short piece of six scenes, but it gradually grew until it filled an entire evening's entertainment (Moody, p. 91).
According to FinsonVoices, p. 293, Braham (whose birth date is variously given as 1837 or 1838) was the father-in-law of Harrigan (1844-1911). Harrigan was born on October 26, 1844 in New York's Lower East Side (Corlear's Hook, in the then-mostly-Irish neighborhood of Corlear's Hook (Kahn, p. 103; DAB, vol. IV, p. 295 gives his birth date as October 26, 1845), but despite his Irish family, he originally performed in blackface. He hooked up with Hart in 1871 during a performance in Chicago.
BanhamEtAl, p. 433, says that "Harrigan and Hart became the most popular comedy team on the American stage (1871-85). They sang, danced, and played the principal roles (usually Harrigan as the amiable fun-loving Irish adventurer Dan Mulligan and Hart, in blackface, as the Negro wench Rebecca Allup) in Harrigan's high-spirited 'melees': The Mulligan Guard Picnic (1878), MG Ball (1879), MG Chowder (1879), MG Christmas (1879), MG Nominee (1880), MG Surprise (1880), MG Silver Wedding (1881), Old Lavender (1877), The Major (1881), Squatter Sovereignty (1882), Cordelia's Aspirations (1883), Dan's Tribulations (1884), and Investigation (1884).
"Harrigan's farces were not all 'knockdown and slambang'. His documentary explorations of New York's Lower Eastside and his striking portraits of the Germans, Italians, Negroes, and particularly the Irish in his 40 plays promoted W. D. Howells to write, "Here is the spring of true American comedy, the joyous art of the dramatist who loves the life he observes.' Another critic called his plays the 'Pickwick Papers of a Bowery Dickens.'
"Harrigan was born on the Lower Eastside, appeared first as an Irish comic singer in San Francisco (1867), in 1871 met Tony Hart.... Their antics drew boisterous crowds to the Théâtre Comique (514 Broadway) and then to Harrigan's Théâtre Comique (728 Broadway).
Harrigan, interestingly, was only part-Irish; he also had English ancestry, and was not Catholic -- he may have been agnostic (Kahn, p. 68). His father William Harrigan was of Irish ancestry (so most accounts, although Warren Burns claimed he was Welsh; Williams, p. 270), but had been born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, in 1799 and turned Protestant while serving at sea with a Protestant captain (Moody, pp. 7-8; Kahn, p. 103, says that Ned Harrigan had few connections with Newfoundland but acknowledged his family history by keeping Newfoundland dogs as pets). His mother, Ellen Ann Rogers, was from New England (her father supposedly died in 1813 in the Chesapeake/Shannon sea fight when she was just a year old; Kahn, p. 104), and had married William Harrigan in 1830 (Kahn, pp. 104-105); they had thirteen children, although only four reached adulthood (Moody, p. 9). Ned Harrigan only once even visited Ireland (Moody, p. 7). But "he played so many Irishmen onstage that he sometimes absentmindedly talked with a brogue off-stage; in the eyes of his fans he was as Irish as Dan Mulligan himself" (Kahn, p. 68). "Harrigan's own voice, a kind of mongrel tenor, was not exemplary in either tone or volume, but the musical interludes in his shows were so popular that a lot of people thought of him primarily as a song-and-dance man" (Kahn, p. 78).
His education was limited, and he wasn't very attentive even when in school, but he read voraciously, particularly drama (Kahn, pp. 110-111). And his mother had been deeply attached to southern songs and often played and sang them at the piano with her children. Harrigan said that "It was from her that I learned most of my Negro business and old songs. She had a capital dialect and could dance and sing 'Jim Crow' as well as I ever saw it done" (Moody, p. 11).
Harrigan was old enough that he might have served in the Union army in the Civil War, but managed to avoid being drafted (according to Kahn, p. 115, we don't even know what Harrigan was doing during these years), although his brother William was in the Army of the Potomac and ended up being captured and sent to Andersonville Prison, which almost killed him (Moody, p. 15). How this influenced Ned Harrigan's military comedies is not clear.
During the Civil War, his parents divorced, and Ned became increasingly unhappy with his father and stepmother (Moody, p. 14; Kahn, pp. 114-115); after a fight with his father, one account says Ned bought a new banjo and signed up on a boat for New Orleans (Moody, p. 15, although Kahn, p. 115, believes the quarrel took place during the Civil War, so there were no boats from New York to New Orleans!). There is no question, though, that he eventually made it to San Francisco, working on the docks while hanging around theaters when he could (Moody, p. 17). Williams, p. 158, suggests that working in San Francisco's theaters helped him to develop his relatively sympathetic attitude toward the Irish; the Irish did not suffer the discrimination on the West Coast that they did in New York.
Harrigan remembered San Francisco fondly enough that he frequently took his company there during the New York off season, despite the long distance, and the city by the 1890s regarded him as a native son (Kahn, p. 116)
By 1868, he was listing himself as a performer in city directories, although he wasn't a lead actor yet (Moody, p. 22) -- he was shy enough that his friends had to force him to be pushy about getting jobs (Kahn, p. 118). He learned a lot from the famous Lotta Crabtree (Moody, p. 23; DAB, vol. IV, p. 295, says they sang duets). From California, he gradually wandered back east, often in small performing groups, though he kept on having problems with companions who drank themselves into poverty and even outright crime (Moody, p. 27, and Kahn, pp. 124-127, both tell tales of a compatriot who actually sold his own pants to earn money for booze).
Even before meeting Braham, Harrigan was writing his own song texts, but he used old tunes -- e.g. his first important song sung with Hart was "The Little Fraud," set to the tune of "Little Maud" (Moody, p. 33). His method of writing was interesting: He set out a certain number of cigars on his desk, then wrote until they were all smoked, covering reams of paper which someone would copy so that Harrigan could edit them (Kahn, p. 212).
Hart (1855-1891) was born Anthony J. Cannon, the son of Irish immigrants Antony Cannon (Sr.) and Mary Sweeney, one of five children. He was "a Roman Catholic of pure Irish ancestry" (Kahn, p. 68). He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on July 25, 1855 (Kahn, p. 132).. He was hard to control from an early age. He always wanted to act, and at a children's drama, he staged a hanging so real that the victim nearly died (Kahn, p. 134). With little other choice after that, his parents sent the eleven-year-old to a reform school, so he ran away to try his career as a performer (Moody, pp. 30-31), originally calling himself "Master Antonio" (Kahn, p. 132).
Ordinarily you'd expect a boy with conduct problems to refuse to play female parts, but Hart apparently was playing girls from the beginning of his stage career (Moody, p. 32). He joined a touring company which eventually brought him to Chicago in 1871, where he got in trouble with a fellow cast member over the use of their one towel, and ended up leaving the company (Kahn, pp. 136-137). He apparently met Harrigan while both were getting their shoes shined (Kahn, p. 137). It was only after this that Mr. Cannon adopted the name "Hart," giving the duo a simple and easily-pronounced name (Kahn, p. 138; they had called themselves "The Nonpariels," but "Harrigan and Hart," for obvious reasons, proved a more successful name). Hart's "shortness and almost femininely beautiful face made him a natural for drag roles, while his masculine approach meant his 'women' tended to be raucous and combative" (Bordman, p. 44).
The team did well enough in Chicago that they decided to try Boston in April 1871. Originally given a short slot in a program featuring many acts, they quickly became the hit of the show (Moody, pp. 34-35). A jealous competitor, in fact, turned in the 16-year-old Hart to the reform school he had fled, and Harrigan had to convince a court to leave Hart free and in Harrigan's care (Kahn, pp. 140-141).
One of those the two met in Boston was John Braham, the conductor of the hall's orchestra; when Harrigan and Hart headed for New York, John Braham wrote a letter to introduce Harrigan to his uncle David Braham (Moody, p. 37). The two hit it off -- and so did Harrigan and Braham's twelve-year-old daughter Annie, the composer's oldest child (born November 30, 1860; Franceschina, p. 18. Her photograph shows a pretty young woman, although Kahn, p. 156, calls her "slightly heavy-set, but with striking white skin and large black eyes, which gave her a Spanish appearance. She had a paradoxical nature. As a girl she called herself 'Sober Annie' and as a woman was called by her family 'the Duchess,' but despite these intimations of extraordinary gravity, but there was a lighthearted streak in her. She liked to play the banjo" and went to horseraces with Lillian Russell.
She would also prove a strict money manager; Kahn, p. 151. She was so good with money, in fact, that when Harrigan opened his own theater, he made her the owner! -- Kahn, p. 273. Her judgment was apparently quite good; late in life, when Harrigan tried to put on a play against her advice, and it flopped, he said, "When I have listened to my wife, I have always done the right thing. This time I didn't listen"; Moody, p. 203).
Perhaps it was to keep himself close to Annie that Harrigan talked to Braham about writing music for some of Harrigan's lyrics. If so, it was an incredibly fortunate decision. Looking at the record, even though he is forgotten today, Braham was probably the most significant composer in America between the time of Henry Clay Work and the end of the nineteenth century. He was "a bespectacled, professorial-looking man with a floppy mustache and... red hair" (Ewen, p. 63).
Harrigan and Braham seem to have been incredibly comfortable together: when on a tour, "the team continued to perfect the symbiotic collaboration that was their trademark: the pair worked, ate, and drank together, and wrote letters home at opposite ends of the same table" (Franceschina, p. 108). FinsonCollected, p. xvii says that they "may have been the closest and most enduring" songwriting team before George and Ira Gershwin.
Hart was a fine actor and singer, but his problems with emotional regulation and self-control were not over. After Harrigan and Hart became a success, Hart started spending money much too freely; "Tony lived for the moment, confident that the next hour, the next day would take care of itself" (Moody, p. 61). It was quite the contrast to Harrigan, who always watched his cash and set aside some of his income to care for his extended family (Moody, p. 60).
There was a story that the original name of David Braham's family was "Abraham"; supposedly they were German Jews who had migrated to Britain in the mid-1700s and shortened their name to fit in (Franceschina, p. 3). Born in February 1834, David's musical training seems to have been limited, but from a very early age, he was composing his own tunes. His original instrument was harp, but supposedly he was unable to play a gig because a public coach would not carry him and his instrument. So he switched to violin in his late teens (Franceschina, p. 4). Personally, I think it will tell you something about his musical ability that he managed to become a successful fiddler despite starting that difficult instrument so late in life! He did not at first try to make a living as a musician, though; in the 1851 census, he was listed as a brass turner, i.e. maker of brass instruments (Franceschina, p. 5).
Braham's mother died in 1854, which perhaps made him more willing to leave home, following his brother to America in 1856 and then getting a job with a mistrel group (Franceschina, pp. 5-7. Braham apparently always preferred to compose tunes on violin rather than piano; Kahn, p. 151. The house orchestra he assembled didn't bother with piano, either; it featured three violins, viola, 'cello, bass, flute, clarinet, two cornets, trombone, and tympani; Moody, p. 122.) FInsonCollected, vol. 1, p. xxxiii, suggests that Braham didn't even put together the piano parts for his published sheet music, but used an in-house composer at the publisher William A. Pond and Co. This is obviously possibe, but I wouldn't consider it certain.
Braham's background may be responsible for his success as a composer; Franceschina, p. 9, says "his integration of European musical idioms with a folklike popular style... created the characteristic musical style of Harrigan and Hart and developed the template for the musical comedy 'sound' of the twentieth century."
There isn't much information about Braham's wife Annie Hanley; different records indicate birth dates as early as 1840 and as late as 1846 (the police census of 1890 listed David Braham as 56 and Annie as 44, according to Franceschina, p. 194, which would imply a birth date in 1845 or 1846, but such records aren't overly reliable). Certainly she was a teenager when she fell in love with Braham. The best guess is that they married in 1859 (Franceschina, pp. 10-11); the best guess is that she was seventeen or eighteen at the time -- which of course does not fit with a birth date of 1845. Her brother, Martin W. Hanley ("Genial Matt"), eventually became the Harrigan company's business manager (Moody, p. 55) and often ran their out-of-state tours. Among other things, he would invent uniforms for theater ushers (Kahn, p. 267).
In 1860, Braham obtained his first job as conductor of a theatre orchestra (Franceschina, pp. 14-15) -- an impressive position for such a young man, though the New York theatre scene was so unstable that Braham had to change jobs many times in the 1860s (Francescina, pp. 17-26). He finally found a safe job when "he was made musical director at Tony Pastor's music hall, the birthplace of American vaudeville" (HischakCompanion, p. 90).
Braham's tunes did so well that a contemporary newspaper labeled him the "the American Offenbach" and said that his tunes "can make the whole town keep time" (Kahn, p. 214). His influence on the American musical was immense; not only did he work with Harrigan to produce the first real sequence of American musicals, but he had also directed the orchestra for "The Black Crook" (Franceschina, p. 83), which some consider the first musical of all. And Braham conducted the orchestra for the first American performance of Trial by Jury (Franceschina, p 95), the first performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan piece in the United States. Root, p. 70, also says that "Braham was the perhaps the first" to produce "an entire, musically unified score composed to a libretto and conceived by a single composer" in American musical theater. Surely no single other person played such a role in developing the Broadway musical!
In 1876, Braham was musical director of the Theatre Comique when Josh Hart (no relation to Tony) gave up management of the venue and Harrigan and Hart took over. So Braham came with the theater that Harrigan and Hart were suddenly in charge of -- which proved a convenient arrangement for all. "The Braham family responded by moving from 86 Carmine Street round the corner to larger quarters at 222 Varick Street, likely in anticipation of Harrigan's habit of living under their roof" (Franceschina, p. 102)
Kahn, p. 158, claims that Braham eventually started trying to find a wife for Harrigan, and tried to play matchmaker -- and even as they were trying to get Harrigan to meet the girl he had picked out (a pretty chorus girl, according to Franceschina, p. 101), Harrigan was found sitting with black-haired Annie Theresa Braham, who was by then fifteen. (Franceschina, p. 106, claims that Annie Braham suffered from a "youthful infatuation" with Harrigan, but it sounds as if he was the one hanging around her!) Harrigan and Annie married the next year, when he was 32 and she was 16. They married in a small Roman Catholic ceremony (attended mostly by the Harrigan, Braham, and Hanley families, plus some co-workers) on November 18, 1876 (FinsonCollected, p. xvii), just two days before Harrigan debuted one of his first relatively long and serious plays, "Iascare" (Moody, p. 69; Franceschina, p. 106). This even as Harrigan and Hanley were still organizing their theater!
(Not that they had any problems, financially; in their second year, they cleared $40,000 despite a payroll that was rapidly approaching a hundred people, and by their fifth, they were pulling in 10,000 audience members per week; Kahn, pp. 190-191; Moody, p. 83. This at a time when Root, p. 10, reports that leading actors made $75 per week, or $3750 if they worked fifty weeks per year; supporting actors might make $25 per week, and ballet girls just $10. Thus Harrigan and Hart were making on the order of five times the going rate.)
Harrigan had initially written short sketches, but gradually built them up, adding more performers, bigger sets, and more spectacle. There was no particular moment one can point to and say "this was when the shows became full-length musicals" (Spaeth, p. 183); it was only gradually that the main show too over. Even The Mulligan Guar Ball, which opened January 13, 1879, initially still shared the bill with other short performances (Spaeth, p. 186). But by the early 1880s, Harrigan's shows were the only items on the bill.
The Harrigans actually continued to live with the Brahams for several years, until the number of their children forced them out; Ned and Annie Harrigan had ten children, although three died young (Moody, pp. 70-71). The second son was named "Anthony Hart Harrigan" in honor of Harrigan's partner (Kahn, p. 206). Even after the Harrigans moved out, David Braham's wife often babysat her grandchilden (Moody, p. 127). Even when the Harrigans built a second home by a lake, the Brahams soon built a vacation home of their own nearby (Moody, p. 130).
When Harrigan and Hart took up their new home, Hart convinced Harrigan to hire a new performer, a very pretty woman named Gertie Granville, who ironically had performed in a minstrel troop that Hart had been part of before she came along (Kahn, p. 203). Born in 1851, she was four years older than Hart (Kahn, p. 205), and had divorced two husbands (Kahn, p. 203), but Hart didn't care. They married during a vacation in London on July 15, 1882, although they were to remain childless except for an adopted son (Kahn, p. 205).
By 1883, Harrigan and Martin Hanley created a touring company to perform Harrigan plays around the country; one Eugene Rourke usually took Harrigan's parts (FinsonCollected, p. xx).
Gertie was probably responsible for breaking up the partnership; when Harrigan decided to stage a play by George Stout, "The Blackbird," Hart wanted Gertie cast in the play. Neither David Braham nor Annie Harrigan wanted her in the piece, but Harrigan finally consented. He stomped on her encores, though (Kahn, p. 215; Franceschina, p. 148).
I can't help but mention that Harrigan, in this play, portrayed a musician who was pretending to be blind who rejoiced in the name of "Con O'Carolan"! (Franceschina, p. 148).
When the second Comique burned down (1884), the partners separated" (BanhamEtAl, p. 433), though Harrigan eventually started a new theater in 1890. (Theatres at this time were very prone to fires; Kahn, p. 224, says that a new theatre had an average life expectancy of twelve years before burning. The Comique was considered to be relatively safe, with many exits, fireproof doors, and indoor hydrants; Kahn, p. 228. And Franceschina, p. 141, says it used electric rather than gas light -- a significant innovation.) These precautions prevented any fires while patrons were present, but on December 23, 1884, the night watchman left a little early, shortly before 7:00 a.m. (Moody, p. 143). Before the first cleaning woman arrived around 7:30, the theater caught fire (Kahn, pp. 228-230). The building eventually collapsed and was a total loss. The building itself was uninsured, and while Harrigan and Hart had bought $30,000 insurance for the company, the premium had accidentally not been paid and the policy had lapsed (Kahn, pp. 231-232).
Perhaps the most tragic loss was David Braham's; supposedly he owned a Stradivarius, and was desperately running from fireman to fireman, crying "Save my fiddle!" (Kahn, p. 233; Franceschina, p. 166, says the instrument was worth between $500 and $1000), but the instrument was destroyed. Few others lost such a personal treasure, but all their investments in the building were gone. (There was a minor happy ending: friends of the troupe scraped together to buy a Guarneri violin for Braham, According to Kahn, p. 235, it was given to him as a surprise gift when the company started their season in the replacement theater, with the audience, when asked, "Who is Dave Braham," answering, "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen"!) Braham also lost almost all his unpublished arrangements and incidental music (Franceschina, p. 165). The company as a whole is estimated to have been out $50,000 for the theater, $20,000 for scenery, and $5000 for costumes (Franceschina, p. 166; Kahn, p. 232, ups that to $30,000 for scenery and $8,000 for costumes).
The partners managed to get another show on stage at a different theater just a few days later (Franceschina, pp. 166-167), which created even more demand for tickets than for a usual Harrigan premier (Franceschina, pp. 169-170), but the cracks in the partnership were showing. Harrigan and Hart each had reason to blame the other's relatives (Kahn, p. 232; Franceschina, p. 165; Hart's brother-in-law, the night watchman, had abandoned the building shortly before the fire started, but it was Harrigan's relative who hadn't paid the insurance). Both had families that disliked the other -- Annie Braham Harrigan and Gertie Granville Hart were overtly hostile, and Harrigan's father and Hart's brother were not on speaking terms (Kahn, pp. 236-237). When Harrigan and Hart disagreed about starting a tour, that was it (Kahn, pp. 237-238). On May 3, Hart wrote to Harrigan that he was leaving the company on May 9 (Kahn, p. 238).
The news was so shocking that people asked the Mayor of New York to intervene, but he couldn't help. And Harrigan was distracted by the death of his infant son (Kahn, pp. 238-239). That doubtless made reconciliation even harder. Harrigan and Hart did make one more appearance, because of a binding contract, but that was it, even though enthusiastic audiences begged them to stay together -- and then showed partisanship for one or the other when that didn't work (Kahn, pp. 240-241).
Harrigan could go on. He'd lost his venue, and a lot of property, and his best performer, but he could still write, and he still had Braham, and he also had controlled most of the machinery of the company -- he had been the all-controlling manager all along (Kahn, p. 202), with Hart merely sharing the take. It was different for Hart. All he had done was perform; he hadn't had to know how to make things work. (Responsibility really wasn't his thing; there is at least one report of him getting engaged to a woman he never married; Kahn, p. 205. He put a lot of his money into diamonds; Kahn, p. 207) As events would prove, he wasn't able to manage on his own. He and Gertie tried out some shows to highlight their particular talents -- and they flopped (Kahn, pp. 246-247).
And then he got sick. In 1887, the New York Herald published a story describing his problems: "Tony's once clear and bell-like voice, it seemed, was rough and raspy. Sometimes he lisped, sometimes he stuttered. His memory was faltering. His eyes looked odd, his gait was unsteady, and he had fearful tantrums, during which he couldn't articulate coherently. He had even struck his wife while temporarily deranged" (Kahn, p.244-245). The eventual diagnosis was syphilis.
In June 1888, Hart had to be committed to an asylum. He recovered enough to leave in early 1889, but after seven months, had to return, and spent the rest of his life there, except for attending two funerals -- one of them Gertie's; she died in March 1890. (No one mentions syphilis in her case, but although she does not seem to have suffered from derangement, she had had health problems for most of their marriage -- and, as noted, they had no children.) Hart died on November 4, 1891, at the age of 36, with an estate said to be worth just eighty cents (Kahn, pp. 256-257) despite a benefit not long before that had raised $14,000 (Kahn, p. 255). It was seven years since he and Harrigan had split.
At least passions had died down enough that Annie Harrigan and David Braham attended the funeral. Harrigan, who was performing at the time, was not there, but he sent an elaborate floral arrangement which "spelled out, in bright red carnations, the single word 'Partner'" (Kahn, p. 258). And Harrigan and Braham at least once visited Hart's grave in Worcester on one of their tours (Franceschina, p. 208).
Harrigan and Braham were reasonably successful on their own into the 1890s (although Moody, p. 197, points out that the Panic of 1893 had made Harrigan's situation more precarious and forced him into more touring, and Williams, p. 171, says that the increase in non-Irish immigrants in New York meant that his Irish plays became less popular). Then, on February 17, 1895, Harrigan's teenage son, known as Ned Jr. or Eddie, died of appendicitis (Moody, p. 200; Franceschina, p. 211. Harrigan twice lost a child while actually on stage; his daughter Annie, aged ten months, had also died while he was performing, and everyone kept it from him until the show ended; Moody, p. 245).
After trying to carry on, Harrigan closed his current show and abandoned his theater, which, after a minor reconstruction to make it more appealing to a higher-class clientele, became the Garrick (Kahn, p. 288; Moody, p. 201). Harrigan, Braham, and Hanley eventually started performing again (apparently Braham needed some convincing; Franceschina, p. 211), but somehow it wasn't the same. Receipts suffered, forcing Harrigan to cut salary expenses -- and causing Annie Yeamans, who had played Cordelia Mulligan to Harrigan's Dan Mulligan, to leave the company (Franceschina, pp. 212-213). She had been as important to Harrigan as Hart had been; it was a real blow. And David Braham, who had reached the age of sixty, wanted to retire from his busy life; his son George could take over conducting, and his son David Junior was also part of the Harrigan company (Franceschina, p. 215), but David Sr. turned to a relatively quiet life of arranging and conducting orchestral music for Augustus Pitou (Franceschina, p. 217). Braham was still active, both as conductor and as arranger, and he and Harrigan remained close, but Braham's life was much quieter as he entered his sixties (Franceschina, pp. 225-226). Thus Harrigan had lost the single most important element in the success of his plays.
After taking a trip to Europe, Harrigan returned to America, but he wasn't having much luck writing (he and Braham resumed their collaboration with a piece called "My Son Dan" -- Franceschina, p. 218; Kahn, p. 290 -- but it went nowhere; another, "Marty Malone," was said to have a good Braham melody in it, but it was such a flop that Franceschina, pp. 220-221, says that no copy of the published music has survived) and crowds slowly gave up on his Harrigan's shows (Kahn, pp. 290-291). He continued to act, and was popular as a performer (Kahn, p. 295; Moody, p. 204, says that for a while he was earning $750 per week for his appearances -- but it was a temporary gig). A play called "Under Cover" was successful off-Broadway, but not successful enough to restart the Harrigan machine; Harrigan started offering reduced versions of his shows with casts of ten or so rather than the fifty or more he used to employ (Kahn, pp. 296-297).
In 1901, Harrigan published The Mulligans, a tale of the crew that made him so popular; other than his songs, it was the only part of his vast writings (estimated by Moody, p. 206, at more than two million words) to be published. The book was "Dedicated to the Memory of Tony Hart." It is mostly a rehash of "The Mulligan Guard Ball," "Cordelia's Aspirations," and "Dan's Tribulations," but with additional biographical detail (Moody, p. 207). I must say that I found it a hard read; Harrigan, especially in the first part, tried to use dialog to explain things that, in a book, can simply be described, and the book is too long for the plot, and the physical comedy doesn't work when merely described, and hero Dan Mulligan is just too combative for me to be comfortable with him. To me, the book is, sadly, neither funny not interesting in the Dickensian way that his plays were (to be sure, I generally don't like fiction). It perhaps tells you something about Harrigan's ability to sustain a narrative that he one said, "I wish a fellow could make a play without a plot" (Williams, p. 159; also Kahn, p. 265, although he points out that "Harrigan came up with some of the most cumbersome and complex plots ever devised." I would say the key word is not "complex" but "cumbersome").
Braham's last musical effort was as part of a comic opera called "The Yankee Counsul," which premiered in 1904 and was taken to the theater where Braham worked in 1905. In the middle of the run, he started suffering abdominal pains. The doctors concluded it was kidney disease. He was bedridden for the rest of his life, and died early on April 11, 1905, in the arms of his wife, with many of his children and grandchildren present (Franceschina, p. 230). In all that time, Braham had supposedly given only two public interviews, and was worried that even that made him seem egotistical (Franceschina, pp. 231-232), but few composers have left so many great tunes behind.
Annie Braham not only outlived Braham but also her daughter Annie Harrigan, who died March 24, 1918; Annie Braham herself died October 8, 1920. The last of the Braham children, Rose, lived until 1956 (Franceschina, p. 231).
Ned Harrigan was starting to have chest problems as the new century rolled around (Kahn, p. 298). "On May 9, 1909, when the [annual Lambs Club] Gambol opened... Harrigan received a ten-minute ovation at his first entrance. The finale was to be an old-fashioned minstrel walkabout, and Harrigan, his face blacked by burnt cork just as it had been in his youthful days of minstrelsy, was sitting in the wings, waiting to go on, when he suddenly clutched his side and said to Eddie Foy, 'I can't get up.' He was removed from the opera house in a wheelchair, and spend the rest of his life in one" (Kahn, p. 300; Moody, however, never mentions the chair and on p. 223 describes him standing and taking a bow in 1910). Certainly he stopped working and restricted his activities. Two doctors (one of them Harrigan's son) believed he had had a mild heart attack (Moody, p. 220); Williams, p. 171, thinks it was a stroke. His long-time associate Annie Yeamans, who had played Cordelia to Harrigan's Dan Mulligan (they had apparently met as performers in 1873, according to Franceschina, p. 64, so they had worked together for more than 35 years by then), visited regularly but spoke sadly of "the trembling old man with his head sunk on his breast and his thin hands playing idly with the bedclothes" (Moody, p. 224); when he died, she "was too stricken to attend" his funeral (Moody, p. 225). Harrigan and Yeamans were nearly the last of the players who had been part of the Harrigan and Hart company at the beginning; she died in 1912, the year after Harrigan, having lived long enough to not only bury her husband but her daughters as well; she wrote their obituaries (Kahn, p. 149).
He died on June 6, 1911, minutes after writing a last note, amounting to a thank-you, to his wife; he clearly knew he was dying (Moody, p. 224; Kahn, p. 301). He thought he was forgotten, but more than a thousand people attended his funeral (Kahn, p. 301; Moody, p. 225). His last note had said that he had left Annie Harrigan financially secure -- but, despite her financial skill, she lost the theater and other properties over the years as bills came due (Moody, p. 227). Spaeth, p. 195, says that "a tradition of American showmanship died with him."
FinsonVoices, p. 293, says that Harrigan's ethnic songs were often "based... on the neighborhood centered in the Sixth Ward (around Five Points at the junction of Baxter, Worth, and Park streets)." Supposedly this area was about half Irish, with substantial populations of Germans, Poles, and Italians but almost no "native-born white Americans" (the statistic is probably derived from p. 58 of Kahn).
Kahn, p. 14, says, "Between 1875 and 1895, first with and then without Hart, Harrigan presided over four theatres in New York, gradually moving uptown as the city did and eventually getting as far as 35th Street. And as he migrated northward, he was followed by one of the most loyal claques any theatrical figure ever commanded. Twenty-three of his plays achieved runs of more than one hundred performance each on Broadway, phenomenal displays of longevity in those days. The plays, in most cases, were lambasted by reviewers, but Harrigan's audiences didn't care."
In 1876, business manager Hanley rented the vacant Comique Theatre for Harrigan and Hart. It was to be their home for five years; their touring days were mostly over (Kahn, p. 189). With a permanent home, Harrigan started writing longer pieces; all had loose plots, plus music and dancing; "They were the neolithic ancestors of the musical comedy of today" (Kahn, p. 190).
Spaeth, p. 181: "The famous Harrigan and Hart shows did not spring into life full-grown as if by a magician's formula. They were a logical evolution, from the typical song-and-dance act of the period to an elaborate stage presentation, combining the best features of minstrelsy and vaudeville, with some of the techniques of musical comedy and the modern revue."
Ewen, p. 64, quoting Samuel G. Freedman: "Beyond the importance of his themes, Harrigan also laid the groundwork for what would become American musical comedy, particularly in his use of songs to advance the stage action."
Kahn, pp. 57-58, described the setting of the typical Harrigan performance "Mulligan Alley... had a cosmopolitan flavor. The Wee Drop Saloon, run by an Irishman named Walsingham McSweeny, faced a two-story tenement, the upper floor of which was occupied by Ah Wung, a Chinese, who ran a combination laundry and ten-cents-a-night lodging house. (Harrigan meant this to be a relatively decent lodging house. There were some places in the lower wards where the overnight charge was five cents to lie down....) Below Ah Wung's premises was an Italian junk shop. The tenement next door was given over to two Negro institutions. One was the headquarters of a social club called the Full Moon Union... the members of which, once they had mastered [its] violent handshake, were committed to the forthright end of throwing white folk -- preferably Irishmen -- off horse cars. The other was a policy shop run by Welcome Allup, whose wife, Rebecca, was one of Tony Hart's most popular roles. She was a smart, pretty, self-assured young colored woman who frequently got sent to Blackwell's Island for drunkenness. Harrigan created her and her married name in tribute to a Negro washwoman named Rebecca.... This real Rebecca was often arrested, too, while in her cups, and whenever the police threw her into the paddy wagon she would cry, 'Well, it's all up.'"
Moody, p. 92, says describes Rebecca Allup as "the boisterous Negro wench, who toyed with suitors and the English language with remarkable dexterity. Rebecca acquired her given name who appeared with her tin pail at the saloon at Prince and Crosby so frequently that the neighbors christened her 'Rebecca at the Well.' Her surname derived from her pathetic cry when she had journeyed to the well too often: 'Well, it's all up.'"
(It may tell you something about Harrigan's fondness for plot twists that HarriganMulligans, p. 38, gives her maiden name as "Melrose," and on that page starts a subplot that describes her as courting Welcome Allup not because she wanted to marry him but "to make dat Simpson Primrose jealous." She may have been sneaky, but in the end, her honesty saves the day when she returns money that had been stolen; HarriganMulligans,, pp. 448-450. On the latter page, we learn that "Rebecca Primrose and her husband, Simpson Primrose, are now known as swell colored people in the Tenderloin, the honesty of the black girl having been rewarded by the Hon. Thomas Mulligan with a large and munificent gift. This induced Simpson to marry her and open a barber shop among the Tenderloiners, which is now gaining him fame and fortune.")
The Mulligan Guard, Harrigan's most famous subject, was a parody of the "target companies" set up in New York in the 1870s -- groups which supposedly gathered as militia companies of sorts, but which often got together to get drunk and then shoot at targets. Kahn, p. 85, reports that "The Mulligan Guards was a three-man military organization": Harrigan, the "captain of an army of one," dressed in a fancy uniform, then Hart, with a musket and clothes that didn't fit, plus a black boy, Morgan Benson, who carried the "target" that target companies carried to identify them on their maneuvers; there is a photo of the three facing p. 80 of Kahn, although there is dispute about who played which part.
Moody, p. 154, describes how Harrigan and Braham produced their songs: "When a play was finished, Harrigan passed Braham the lyrics, one verse and the chorus for each song. Braham scanned them, usually getting a rough idea of time and style for each, and piled them on the piano, or more often stuffed them in his pocket with some blank pieces of music paper. Some of his speediest composing was done on the horsecars and the elevated trains. He worked one line at a time, covering the rest with his music paper and humming the words until a tune evolved. When it suited him, it was transcribed. If the notes didn't come quickly, he passed to the next line and then worked back. Sometimes it took a month to find the tunes for a new show; more often they came at the first attempt. One horsecar ride produced 'Babies on Our Block.' Five minutes on the elevated gave him 'Maggie Murphy's Home, the song that just missed being Al Smith's theme song."
Braham also composed with the abilities of the performers in mind, attending to their ranges, and made a rule never to put two songs with the same meter in the same play (Moody, p. 155). According to Franceschina, p. 126, there was only one instance of Braham writing a tune before Harrigan had written the words, and even in that case, Harrigan had the verse text; he just hadn't planned to have a chorus until Braham gave him the tune.
HischakCompanion, p. 326, says that Harrigan "was born in New York and began in show business in touring minstrel shows and variety. He made e few Broadway appearances in comic parts in 1870 and then the next year teamed up with Tony Hart... a fellow coming born in Worcester, Massachusetts. The short, round Hart ran away from an abusive home and sang in New York saloons, performed in circuses, and clowned in minstrel shows before doing a comedy act with Harrigan, playing the hyperactive buffoon to Harrigan's fatherly, more mature foil. Soon the two were headlining in vaudeville, with Harrigan writing the sketches and collaborating with various composers on songs in the act. These rough-and-tumble performances were extended and became the first American musical comedies on Broadway.... The Harrigan and Hart shows celebrated the cultural diversity of American (sic.) with one group of immigrants fighting and outwitting another group, all in wild and carefree pandemonium."
FinsonCollected, vplume I, p. xv: "Twentieth-century musical theater can really offer nothing to compare with the extraordinary careers of Edward Harrigan and David Braham in nineteenth-century New York. From 1873 to 1893 their skits and full-length musical comedies ran continuously through every theatrical season (save two when they were on national tour) to enthusiastic, full houses. With relatively few changes, they retained the same troupe of actors throughout the two decades, and Harrigan served as director, manager, and actor, while Braham led the troupe's orchestra. It were as if Oscar Hammerstein had written, produced, directed, and starred in twenty-nine musical comedies, while Richard Rodgers had not only composed the songs, but also presided in the pit for each production. In an era when an extended New York run lasted a month, Harrigan's comedies typically played for three months or longer and returned in subsequent seasons."
HischakCompanion considers them forerunners to teams such as the Marx Brothers, Hope and Crosby, and Martin and Lewis. Moody, p. 79, says that W. C. Fields derived "much of... [his] loquacious arrogance" from Harrigan characters.
There was a 1985 Broadway musical about them, "Harrigan 'n' Hart," although it apparently went nowhere (Wikipedia says it lasted just four shows, despite featuring Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame).
Their company was so busy that it dominated the lives of those who worked for it: "[Harrigan] assembled a more or less permanent company of supporting actors who were so closely associated with him that some of them proved to be practically unemployable when he retired, for they had never had the experience of working for anybody else" (Kahn, p. 7). It's little surprise that they were loyal, given that Harrigan supplied good pay (he actually paid for rehearsal time, which no one else did) and more benefits than most (Kahn, p. 202). DAB, Vol. IV, p. 296, credits Harrigan with 39 plays, although this seems to include some short sketches.
According to Kahn, p. 74, this song helped inspire others: "Lawlor and Blake [who wrote 'Sidewalks of New York'] are thought to have been inspired, consciously or subconsciously, by an 1879 tune from The Mulligan Guards' Ball, entitled 'The Babies on Our Block.'"
George M. Cohan's popular 1907 song "Harrigan" ("H, A, double-R, I, G, A, N spells Harrigan") is in part a tribute to Harrigan (Kahn, p. 80; Moody, pp. 3-4; also the Wikipedia page for the song, which lists many popular recordings. Franceschhina, p. 119, records that Cohan's father Jerry Cohan had performed at times in the variety shows staged by Harrigan and Hart.) Cohan would write "Harrigan inspired me when I applauded him from a gallery seat. Harrigan encouraged me when I first met him in after years and told him of my ambitions. I live in hopes that some day my name may mean half as much to the coming generation of American playwrights as Harrigan's name has meant to me" (Williams, p. 209, who however adds that "Ironically, Cohan used [the song "Harrigan"] in a show about suburbia; Fifty Miles from Boston was a long way from Mulligan's Alley.")
There was a Harrigan Club founded in 1910 to celebrate him (Moody, p. 1), and John Philip Sousa always used Harrigan/Braham songs on Saint Patrick's Day (Moody, p. 4).
Those wishing to hear a substantial selection of Harrigan and Braham songs in a fairly "folkish" style might be interested in Mick Moloney's recording "McNally's Row of Flats: Irish American Songs of Old New York, by Harrigan and Braham" on Compass Records. It also has an extensive introduction, mostly based on the same books used here and most especially about Harrigan, and quite a few photos. It is one of the most extensive collections of Harrigan/Braham materials now available. Performances of the old material is very rare -- according to Moody, p. 230, "Except for a production of The Mulligan Guard Ball... on January 20, 1977, none of Harrigan's plays has been produced since his death,and only one, The Mulligan Guard Ball, has ever appeared in print and that not until 1966" (although it appears there has been another reissue of that play since, andKatherine K. Preston later published a different text of "The Mulligan Guard Ball," plus "Reilly and the 400," in Irish American Theatre: The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879) and Reilly and the 400, volume 10 of Nineteenth Century American Musical Theatre, 1994, according to FinsonCollected, p. xix n. 13). DAB, vol. IV, p. 296, claims that two shorter sketches, "The Porter's Troubles" (1873) and The Editor's Troubles (1875) also reached print, but I know of no songs from these pieces.
Nonetheless, Harrigan continued to have indirect influence on the theatre through his children; son William (who appeared in more than thirty movies) and daughter Nedda (born "Grace," but she took the name "Nedda" in honor of her father; Kahn, p. 206) were particularly noteworthy. Nedda -- born in 1899, long after her parents thought they could have more children (Moody, p. 221) -- was sometimes known as Nedda Harrigan Logan; according to her Wikipedia page, she appeared in fourteen movies, had many stage roles, and entertained troops during World War II; she was once the USO's Woman of the Year. And she "served as president of the Actors Fund, and was a founder of the Actors Fund Bloodbank and a trustee of the Museum of the City of New York." The Actors Fund of America created an award in her honor.
In another minor "folklological" twist, Harrigan's family, when they became rich enough to have a summer residence, built it at Schroon Lake, New York. Half a century later, Schoon Lake became "a left-wing folk resort in the Adirondacks" where Lee Hays of the Weavers spent time as a master of ceremonies (Jarnow, p. 125).
The contemporary power of Harrigan, Hart, and Braham can be found by looking at the list of songsters in Cohen. Based on the index entry on p. 208, no fewer than 48 Harrigan songsters were published in the period from 1860 to 1899 (and I didn't even count a handful that Cohen listed but which listed Harrigan and Hart among several contributors). Hart was a little behind him. Tony Pastor had his name on 37 songsters. Gus Williams was the source of 20. Pat Rooney was associated with 19. The Christy Minstrels were still popular enough to offer 17, and Johnny Roach had 15. I didn't see anyone else with more than 12. Thus no one matched Harrigan, and Pastor was the only other performer to have more than half as many!
Although today we would call them "vaudeviille" writers, or perhaps refer to the plays of Harrigan and Braham as "musicals," they were certainly much closer to the folk than, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe; this song, for instance, has a reference to "Little Sally Waters" and "Greenie Gravel" and "The Mulligan Guard" refers to "Garryowen." HarriganMulligans, p. 281, quotes "The Greenland Whale Fishery"; p. 428 quotes "Shenandoah"; and p. 301 has a character call for "Brennan on the Moor." He also quotes Black folk songs; HarriganMulligans, p. 368, gives the chorus of "Oh, Lord, How Long" (in fact, he seems to be the first ever to cite the words) and p. 368 gives a large chunk of "One More River to Cross."
Williams, p. 159, says that "Harrigan's string of Mulligan Guard comedies was, however, unique, and several historians have cited them as forerunners of contemporary situation comedies." I'd also compare soap operas -- long-running sagas featuring the same characters in endless variations on similar themes.
Quite a few Harrigan/Hart/Braham songs eventually established at least a faint hold in the tradition. Songs which have been found in tradition at least once include "Are You There, Moriarity?," "Babies on Our Block" (i.e. this song), "Get Up, Jack! John, Sit Down!," "Hold the Woodpile Down," "John Reilly (II)" and its by-blow "I'll Lay Ye Doon, Love," "Little Old Dudeen," "Longshoreman's Strike (The Poor Man's Family)," "Maggie Murphy's Home," "McNally's Row of Flats," "Mister Dooley's Geese," "Muldoon, the Solid Man," "My Beauty of Limerick," "My Dad's Dinner Pail," "Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door," "The Regular Army-O," "Slavery Days," "Whist! The Bogie Man," and "The Widow Nolan's Goat." Also, Braham composed the music to "Over the Hills to the Poor-House" (words by George L. Catlin). The "No Irish Need Apply" song filed under "No Irish Need Apply" may have originated with Harrigan's company. Also, Spaeth-WeepSomeMoreMyLady, pp. 175-176, prints "The Gallant 69th" (Roud #V41521), although there is no evidence of traditional currency. Nonetheless we've indexed that song because it's found in most Harrigan-related collections. See also the index entry for "Dolly, My Crumple-Horn Cow," David Braham's personal favorite.
Braham was not properly a Tin Pan Alley composer, but according to Maxwell Marcuse, he heavily influenced its evolution (Williams, p. 271).
Ironically, the list of songs which went into tradition does not include "The Mulligan Guard" (Roud V7922), which according to HischakEncyclopedia, p. 234, established the Braham/Harrigan production team in 1873, and as a result was included in all their later productions; it seems to have left no memory at all in tradition -- though it was used as a march by the Coldstream Guards and is actually quoted in modified form in Kipling's Kim! (Kahn, pp. 3-4). (Those who wish to see it can find the text on p. 49 of Moody, and the tune of the chorus on pp. 113-114 of Spaeth-ReadEmAndWeep; Moody, in the photo inset after p. 54, has a copy of the sheet music, which mentions Braham but not Harrigan).
FinsonCollected is a two volume comprehensive set of Harrigan/Braham songs, but it is hard to find and hideously expensive. The same can be said of the Harrigan and Hart songsters. Applebaum's "Show Songs" is perhaps the next best choice; it has "The Mulligan Guard" and "Babies On Our Block" listed as from "The Mulligan Guard Ball"; "The Widow Nolan's Goat" and "Paddy Duffy's Cart" from "Squatter Sovereignty," and "Maggie Murphy's Home" from "Reilly and the 400." - RBW
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APPENDIX I:
Harrigan's book The Mulligans never gave a proper biography of Dan Mulligan, but someone assembled one from the plays; Root, p. 57, tells us that "he had emigrated to America from Ireland in 848; fought with the 69th infantry [i.e. the 69th New York; see "The Gallant Sixty-Ninth"] in the Civil War; returned to the Irish ghetto of New York and bought a grocery store which he operated well enough to support his family; became the leader of his extended family group and a sucessful local poitician." Root adds that "As a politician he was honest, and although graft was an accepted way of life he worked not for self-power or wealth but for the good of his constituents. He was naturally slightly irascible [more than slightly, I would say], but always forgiving and generous even to his enemies. In contrast to previous representations of ethnic characters on stage, Harrigan 'presented a full panorama of Irish life.'"
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APPENDIX II:
Since I managed to find a program for a presentation of "Cordelia's Aspirations" from 1895, I'm going to reproduce the text here, so that you can see a list of the players who were performing. The performance was at the "Columbia Theatre, Washington St. The Handsomest Theatre in New England," so this was Harrigan's troupe on tour. (I've simplified the formatting a little to make it work as text.)
Monday Evening, April 22, 1895
Mr. EDWARD HARRIGAN
AND HIS NEW YORK COMPANY
Under the management of M. W. Hanley
In Harrigan's Popular Play,
Cordelia's Aspirations
In Three Acts and Three Scenes
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dan Mulligan...Mr. EDWARD HARRIGAN
Simpson Primrose...Mr. JOHN WILD
Rebecca Clinton...Mr. JOSEPH SPARKS
Planxty McFudd...Mr. HARRY FISHER
Gus Lochmuller...Mr. HARRY WRIGHT
Walsingham McSweeney...Mr. CHARLES COFFEY
Palestine Puter...Mr. WILLIAM WEST
Honora Dublin...Mr. CHARLES F. McCARTHY
Robert Ridgeway...Mr. GEORGE MERRITT
Theodore Chamboudet...Mr. WM. H. GUNNING
Hoke Buckheister...Mr. DAN BURKE
Junkman...DAVE BRAHAM, Jr.
Bridget Lockmuller...Miss HATTIE MOORE
Diana McFudd...Miss EMMA POLLOCK
Ellen McFudd...Miss MAJORIE (sic.) TEAL
Rosa McFudd...Miss LILLIAN STUART
---AND ---
Cordelia Mulligan...Mrs. ANNIE YEAMANS
UNCLE TOM COMBINATION [i.e. the Band]
Dan Burke, Wm. H. Gunning, Dave Braham, Jr., John Flynn, John Mayon,
William West, Michael Kearney, Jas. Burke.
Mr. George Braham, Musical Director for Mr. Harrigan
EXECUTIVE STAFF
D. Frank Dodge...Scenic Artist
Stephen Simmons...Master Mechanic
Louis Filber...Master of Properties
Dancing under the supervision of Dan Burke.
--
Since this is a late production, some of Harrigan's regulars had died or departed. FinsonCollected, pp. xix-xx, says that the actors who originated the key parts were
Dan Mulligan: Edward Harrigan
Cornelia Mulligan: Annie Yeamans
Gustavus Lochmuller: Harry Fisher
Bridgit Lochmuller: Annie Mack
Rebecca Allup (later Primrose): Tony Hart (in both blackface and drag)
Simpson Primrose: Johnny Wild (in blackface)
Palestine Puter: Billy Gray (in blackface)
Tony Hart was also the original of Tommy Mulligan, the son of Dan and Cordelia, who eventually married the Lochmullers' daughter.
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