American Profile, 1900-1909 by Edward Wagenknecht; University of Massachusetts Press, 1982

The most important September openings of the new season in the fall were those of Augustus Thomas's Arizona and James A. Herne's Sag Harbor . The vogue for dramatized novels continued unabated. Henrietta Crosman became a star in Mistress Nell , and Maude Adams assumed the Sarah Bernhardt role in L'Aiglon . The November sensation was the musical Floradora . Nobody cared much for the show itself, but the girls in the double sextette, "Tell Me, Pretty Maiden," became the toast of the town.

On the distaff side, Sarah Bernhardt was, by common consent, "the greatest actress in the world," but Bernhardt was an exotic, the only foreign visitor who attracted Americans in droves to plays of which they could understand no word, and her reputed eccentricities, of whose publicity value she was shrewdly aware, were quite as valuable a part of her endowments as her undoubted genius. Among the Americans, Mrs. Fiske was the most admired among the realists and Julia Marlowe among the romantics, while Maude Adams was the most dearly loved.

Maude Adams was never seen in public except upon the stage, and the theatergoing public felt about her very much as the larger movie public would later feel about Mary Pickford. If her emotional range was comparatively narrow, nobody cared; Barrie must have been thinking of her when he wrote in What Every Woman Knows that if a woman has charm she needs nothing else and that if she lacks it nothing else makes any difference. One wonders a little why she so far outstripped two other Frohman stars also well endowed with this quality -- Billie Burke and Marie Doro, and if one disqualifies Billie Burke on the score that her charm, which awakened a wide response of its own, was that of piquancy rather than the fey quality that distinguished Maude Adams, one can hardly dispose thus of the almost unearthly delicacy of Marie Doro.

Ethel Barrymore, David Warfield, and William Faversham became stars in 1901-in Fitch's Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, The Auctioneer , and A Royal Rival , respectively -- and many famous players appeared in dramatizations of popular romantic novels. Mrs. Leslie Carter had a great success in Du Barry , Maude Adams was beautifully accommodated in Quality Street , and Sothern made the popular hit of his career in If I Were King , which he later revived and which would become a musical, The Vagabond King , in 1925. There were brilliant new productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin by William A. Brady and of Sardou's Diplomacy by Charles Frohman, and George Henry Boker's Francesca da Rimini , one of the best American plays of the nineteenth century, was seen again, this time with Otis Skinner as Lanciotto.

The happiest event of the year was Frohman's production of Barrie's Peter Pan on November 6, carrying the Maude Adams vogue to its height and giving the modern theater one of its few really enduring and enchanting plays. Nearly fifty years later, Mary Martin enjoyed great success in a musical version, as did Sandy Duncan at the beginning of the 1980s. In 1924, too, Herbert Brenon would triumphantly transfer the play to celluloid, with Barrie's hand-picked, seventeen-year-old Betty Bronson as an ideal Peter. On Christmas night, Ethel Barrymore opened in another Barrie play, Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire ; other holiday offerings included Victor Herbert's Mlle. Modiste , with Fritzi Scheff singing "Kiss Me Again."

Sothern and Marlowe were not appearing together this season. Sothern was in a repertoire comprising The Fool Hath Said in His Heart There Is No God , which was Laurence Irving's idea of Crime and Punishment ; Paul Kester's Don Quixote ; and a revival of his father E. A. Sothern's signature play, Our American Cousin , which had been the bill at Ford's Theater the night Lincoln was killed, as well as his more familiar Hamlet and If I Were King . Miss Marlowe was appearing less ambitiously in James Fagan's Gloria , which the public did not care for but in which she intensely believed. Maude Adams had another perfect Barrie vehicle, What Every Woman Knows , and Otis Skinner found scope for flamboyant romanticism in The Honor of the Family . Musicals continued popular; in one, Three Twins , Bessie McCoy won the heart of Richard Harding Davis as the Yama Yama Girl ( Grace Duffie Boylan's Yama Yama Land , a successful juvenile of the period, has been strangely forgotten). All in all, though 1908 did not blaze new trails, it did have its share of successes.

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