Stage Magazine – Old Magazine Articles

The W.W. I Plays of the Post-War Years (Stage Magazine, 1933)

A look at What Price Glory? and Journey’s End and the new spirit that created these dramas.

When R.C. Sheriff, nearly ten years after the Armistice, sat down to write an easy play for the amateurs of his boat club, he seems to have had no fixed notion as to what a play ought to be. The script of Journey’s End shows a complete absence of strain…

Click here to read an additional article concerning Journeys End.

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Lillian Gish Recalls Making The Birth of a Nation (Stage Magazine, 1937)

Twenty-two years after wrap was called on the set of The Birth of a Nation, leading lady Lillian Gish (1893 – 1993), put pen to paper and wrote this reminiscence about her days on the set with D.W. Griffith.

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Henry Travers as ‘Clarence the Guardian Angel’ (Stage Magazine, 1937)

Ten years prior to being cast in the roll as George Baily’s guardian angel, Clarence, the actor Henry Travers (1874 – 1965) appeared in the Broadway play You Can’t Take it With You. Playing the part of Grandpa Sycamore, he was singled out for praise by the editors of Stage Magazine; the review is attached herein.

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The Oscars: Hollywoods Self-Adoration Fest (Stage Magazine, 1938)

A tongue-in-cheek magazine article from 1938 about The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and their annual gala devoted to over-confidence, The Oscars. Written eleven years after the very first Academy Award ceremony, and published in a magazine that catered to New York theater lovers, the article was penned by an unidentified correspondent who was not very impressed by the whole affair but managed to present a thorough history of the award nonetheless.

Director Frank Capra was awarded his third trophy at the 1938 Oscars…

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Newsreels at the Movies (Stage Magazine, 1936)

The journalist who wrote this 1938 piece saw much good in theater newsreels, believing that the newsreel encourages a keener sense of the present and imprisons it for history. He doesn’t refer to any of the prominent newsreel production houses of the day, such as Fox Movietone, Hearst Metrotone, Warner-Pathe or News of the Day but rather prefers instead to wax poetic about the general good that newsreels perform and the services rendered. This newsreel advocate presented the reader with a long, amusing list of kings, dictators and presidents and what they thought of having their images recorded.

Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.

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Chicago Vaudeville Remembered (Stage Magazine, 1935)

American journalist and radio personality Franklin P. Adams (1881 – 1960) recalled the high-water mark of Chicago’s Vaudeville (with some detail) for the editors of STAGE MAGAZINE, a witty and highly glossy magazine that concerned all the goings-on in the American theater of the day:

They were Continuous Variety Shows. They ran – at any rate at the Olympic Theatre, known in Chicago as the Big O – from 12:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m….While those days are often referred to as the Golden Days of Vaudeville, candor compels the admission that they were brimming with dross; that Vaudeville’s standard in 1896 was no more aureate than musical comedy in 1935 is.

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A Profile of Cary Grant (Stage Magazine, 1939)

A fabulous three page article from STAGE MAGAZINE on the early career of Cary Grant:

Cary Grant appeared in six Broadway productions and twenty-seven Hollywood pictures before anybody took notice. Then he played a dead man.

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MODERN TIMES (Stage Magazine, 1936)

The world, with the exception of those bright eyed youngsters under the age of five, has waited pretty breathlessly for the reappearance of a forlorn little figure in a derby, baggy trousers, and disreputable shoes. The fact that his reappearance was to be under the sinister title, Modern Times alarmed not a few of us. This hapless creature, whose name by the way, is Charlie Chaplin, had come to mean an unchangeable element to us…Disguised in current mechanistic ingenuity, veiled in lukewarm disapproval of the plight of the working man, and tinted a slight shade of Red, it remain, delightfully and irrevocably, Chaplin.

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‘Porgy & Bess” (Stage Magazine, 1935)

Music critic and scholar Isaac Goldberg (1887 – 1938) reviewed the opening performance of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the editors of STAGE MAGAZINE:

Why the Jew of the North should, in time, take up the song of the Southern Negro and fuse into a typically American product is an involved question. Perhaps, underneath the jazz rhythms and the general unconventionality of musical process lies the common history of an oppressed minority, and an ultimately Oriental origin. In any case, the human focus of this particular type of musical Americanism has been, from the very first notes, George Gershwin.

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Shooting Scenes Between Air Raids (Stage Magazine, 1940)

An article about director Gabriel Pascal (1894 – 1954) and all the assorted difficulties set before him, his cast and his crew while filming George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara during the bombing of England in 1940.

Much of the article is composed of diary entries by an anonymous member of the cast:

After dinner we had a script conference off the lot and kept on working through the air raid sirens, relieved to be away from the studio discipline. Tonight the sky was one vast blaze of searchlights, and no sleep for anyone. It’s tough staying up all night and trying to work between raids all day…

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