[John] Augustin Daly
Daly, [John] Augustin (1838–99), producer, director, and playwright. The multi‐talented man of the theatre came from very nontheatrical origins. His father was a sea captain and his mother was a soldier's daughter. Daly's first exposure to the theatre was in Norfolk, Virginia, where his widowed mother had moved from their North Carolina home. After seeing James E. Murdoch play in Rookwood, he began to organize amateur theatricals. When the family's move to New York placed him closer to the theatrical mainstream, he took work at the Sunday Courier, soon becoming its drama critic. In 1862 he turned to playwriting, dramatizing S. H. von Mosenthal's Deborah as Leah, the Forsaken. First produced at the Boston Museum and brought to New York in January 1863, the play was an immediate hit. Several subsequent efforts were less successful, but in 1867 he wrote a largely original work, Under the Gaslight, which enjoyed widespread acclaim. Its sensational effects of an approaching railroad train and a man tied to the tracks in its path were widely copied. Two years later he leased the Fifth Avenue Theatre. His intention was to assemble the finest company and offer seasons mixing the best new works with revivals of the classics, although one of Daly's few faults was his insistence on rewriting even the most famous plays. “The old playwrights must have turned in their graves at his ruthlessness,” Otis Skinner observed. In a remarkable departure from accepted practice, he broke with the tradition of having each performer play only those roles in his or her “line.” Daly expected his artists to be able to switch from comic roles to serious ones and from heroes to villains. He annoyed some players by assigning them minor roles after they had played major ones. However, his plans succeeded famously, and within a short time his company was the only serious rival to Wallack's. Daly's tiny playhouse became known as the “parlor home of comedy.” One of his few disappointments was the reaction to most of the new American plays he offered. “American press writers,” he noted, “are proud of everything American except other American writers.”
When the Fifth Avenue Theatre burned in 1873, he quickly restored another old theatre, continuing until he temporarily retired in 1877. Among the plays he offered during this first period were London Assurance, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Frou‐Frou, Fernande, Saratoga, Divorce, Article 47, The Fast Family, The School for Scandal, The Big Bonanza, Our Boys, and Pique. His company included Mrs. Gilbert, James Lewis, William Davidge, Charles Fisher, and several young ladies whose careers he promoted: Agnes Ethel, Fanny Morant, Fanny Davenport, and Clara Morris. During this time Daly attempted to operate other New York theatres, including the Grand Opera House, where he presented opéra bouffe and some musical spectacles. These proved burdensome and unpopular and were soon dropped. In 1879 he restored yet another old playhouse, renaming it after himself, and initiated what George Odell called “one of the most distinguished theatres in the history of the American stage.” Many of his former actors returned to his fold, including Mrs. Gilbert, Lewis, Davidge, Fisher, and the rising John Drew. For his leading lady, Daly enlisted Ada Rehan, who would become his finest and most beloved performer. Operettas and musical comedies were included in the repertory and, later, several London musical imports. The list of major hits this second company offered included Needles and Pins, Boys and Girls, 7‐20‐8, The Country Girl, Red Letter Nights, She Would and She Would Not, A Night Off, The Magistrate, The Taming of the Shrew, Dandy Dick, The Railroad of Love, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Lottery of Love, The Last Word, and Tennyson's The Foresters. Daly had sent out road companies of his earlier hit plays, but this second company he took as an ensemble not only across country, but on one visit to Germany, three visits to France, and numerous visits to England.
As playwright, Daly claimed credit for approximately one hundred plays, although virtually all his works were adapted from foreign pieces. Most of his sources were German or French, though he was not above rewriting Shakespeare and the 18th‐century English playwrights. Indeed, his modern editor, Catherine Sturtevant, suggests that so few of his plays are without known sources that it is not unreasonable to suppose we are merely ignorant of the models for his so‐called original plays. No source has been found for what many consider his finest work, Horizon (1871), a story set in the Wild West that recounted the adventures of a girl adopted by a villainous type after her father's murder. The hit plays Divorce (1871) and Pique (1875) were exceedingly free adaptations of novels. Modern research has revealed that many of the plays he took credit for were written largely by his brother Joseph. William Winter summed up Daly by noting, “He made the Theatre important, and he kept it worthy of the sympathy and support of the most refined taste and the best intellect of his time.” Biography: The Life of Augustin Daly, Joseph Francis Daly, 1917.
