Word: shuberts
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Secrets In the City. The sons of a Syracuse peddler, 73-year-old Lee and 68-year-old Jacob J. (for nothing) Shubert were already stage-struck in 1885 when an older brother, Sam, got a job as an extra with a visiting road company at $1 a week. When they found that program boys got $1.50 a week, the three brothers switched to the commercial side, and in a few years were leasing theaters-and putting on shows-in Rochester, Albany, Troy, Utica and Buffalo as well as Syracuse...
With their profits, plus $30,000 from a haberdasher friend, they went to New York-and ran up against potent Klaw & Erlanger, whose syndicate then controlled all New York bookings, plus everything of importance on the road. Though the Shuberts did their best to make friends with the press, some New York papers, dependent on K. & E. ads, panned the brothers and their shows. Libeling a Shubert, scoffed one paper, "would be as cruel as unnecessary...
...train he was riding ran into a carload of dynamite; Lee and Jake have never traveled together since. But Jake and Lee went on to fight with drama critics, bar them from theaters, and are said to have issued a manifesto that they wanted to be called "the Messrs. Shubert," not "Jake...
Money in the Sticks. The Messrs. Shubert also went on building or buying control of theaters across the U.S. To fill them, they shrewdly concentrated on operettas, suitable for road shows. They did not depend on the high-priced Broadway casts, but on low-salaried, second-rate singers. The Shuberts often had as many as 20 operettas (The Student Prince, Blossom Time, Maytime, etc.) touring the U.S. In one season they cleared $850,000 on The Student Prince alone...
...which bought the old firm's assets for $400,000, and began building their present smaller but much less vulnerable empire. Completely self-sufficient, it includes a script company (which owns more than 1,000 shows), a music publishing company, a scenery-and-costume company, and the Trebuhs (Shubert spelled backwards) Realty Co., which, with the Shubert Theater Corp., owns 16 of the 32 legitimate theaters in New York, owns or controls 21 outside...