Gus Hill (22 February 1858 – 20 April 1937) was an American vaudeville performer who juggled
Indian club
Indian clubs, which originated in the Indian subcontinent, are a type of exercise equipment used to present resistance in movement to develop strength and mobility. They consist of juggling club shaped wooden clubs of varying sizes and weights, ...
s. He later became a burlesque and vaudeville entrepreneur. Hill was one of the founders of the
Columbia Amusement Company
The Columbia Amusement Company, also called the Columbia Wheel or the Eastern Burlesque Wheel, was a show business organization that produced burlesque shows in the United States between 1902 and 1927. Each year, about four dozen Columbia burlesque ...
, an association of burlesque shows and theaters, and became president of the American Burlesque Association. He also staged drama and musical comedies. He launched a highly popular series of "cartoon theatricals", musical comedies based on comic strips or cartoons. At one time he was running fourteen different shows.
Early years
Gus Hill was born Gustave Metz in New York City on 22 February 1858.
His parents, Gustave Metz and Martha E. Baecht Metz, were German immigrants. Gus was the oldest of three surviving boys.
His father was the owner of a sawmill and furniture factory.
Gus Hill was an amateur athlete. He became a wrestler and then a juggler with Indian clubs.
He took the name "Hill" from a sporting resort at
Broadway
Broadway may refer to:
Theatre
* Broadway Theatre (disambiguation)
* Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
** Broadway (Manhattan), the street
**Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...
and Crosby Street in Manhattan called Harry Hill's.
On 16 June 1876, when Hill was eighteen, he was listed as a club swinger on a bill for a vaudeville show at
Tony Pastor
Antonio Pastor (May 28, 1837 – August 26, 1908) was an American impresario, variety performer and theatre owner who became one of the founding forces behind American vaudeville in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. He was sometimes referr ...
's theater in New York. The show featured the "great Leonzo Brothers and their celebrated dog, Tiger."
He would travel around the country challenging local jugglers to compete. On his first appearance he would let the local win. He would challenge them to a repeat match when he returned, ensuring a full house, and would then defeat the local. He gained the title of "Champion Clubman of the World". There was some sharp practice involved, but the title was useful in his variety act billings.
Vaudeville manager
![Gus Hill 1888](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Gus_Hill_1888.jpg)
Gus Hill soon moved into show business management, although he continued to perform for ten years or more.
Hill produced ''Gus Hill's Mammoth Novelty Company'' in the 1885–86 season, and performed in the show with his Indian clubs.
He produced ''Gus Hill's World of Novelties'' in the 1886–87 season, featuring the new performers
Joe Weber and
Lew Fields
Lew Fields (born Moses Schoenfeld, January 1867 – July 20, 1941) was an American actor, comedian, vaudeville star, theatre Management, manager, and Theatrical producer, producer. He was part of a comedy duo with Joe Weber (vaudevillian), Joe We ...
.
Hill produced musical comedies priced low for unsophisticated audiences far from
Broadway
Broadway may refer to:
Theatre
* Broadway Theatre (disambiguation)
* Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
** Broadway (Manhattan), the street
**Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...
.
The scenery was designed to fold up into specially designed trunks to save space.
Hill was known for cost-cutting, using old scenery and costumes, and employing performers who could not demand high wages since they were not yet known, or were past their peak.
In 1892 Hill added a second company, ''Gus Hill's New York Vaudeville Stars''.
Hill would put on shows from Monday to Saturday each week, including Wednesday and Saturday matinees.
Hill made all the travel arrangements.
Typically the show moved to a new city by train on a Monday morning, and were put up at a boarding house for performers at their destination.
Hill owned several of these boarding houses, as did other variety company owners.
The cast would share rooms, and would be given their meals at the boarding house.
This kept expenses down, but conditions were acceptable for the performers.
Hill signed up
David C. Montgomery &
Fred Stone
Fred Andrew Stone (August 19, 1873 – March 6, 1959) was an American actor. Stone began his career as a performer in circuses and minstrel shows, went on to act in vaudeville, and became a star on Broadway and in feature films, which earned h ...
in May 1896.
By this time he was one of the richest of the variety show promoters.
A reviewer described Hill's show at the Haymarket Theater in Chicago in 1896:
For the 1896–97 season Hill added three burlesque companies and the cartoon theatrical ''McFadden's Row of Flats''.
''Gus Hill's Ideal Minstrels'' first appeared in 1898.
That year he produced a series of melodramas written by
Owen Davis
Owen Gould Davis (January 29, 1874 – October 14, 1956) was an American dramatist known for writing more than 200 plays and having most produced. In 1919, he became the first elected president of the Dramatists Guild of America. He received t ...
. The next year he introduced the ''Royal Lilliputians'', a freak show.
He managed to poach Billy Reeves from
Fred Karno
Frederick John Westcott (26 March 1866 – 17 September 1941), best known by his stage name Fred Karno, was an English theatre impresario of the British music hall. As a comedian of slapstick he is credited with popularising the custard-p ...
's show to appear in his own ''Around the Clock'' vaudeville company.
Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor (born Isidore Itzkowitz; January 31, 1892 – October 10, 1964) was an American comedian, actor, dancer, singer, songwriter, film producer, screenwriter and author. Familiar to Broadway, radio, movie, and early television audiences, ...
also played in his vaudeville shows.
![Alice in Wonderland 1915 poster](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Alice_in_Wonderland_1915_poster.jpg)
Burlesque and other enterprises
''Gus Hill's Aggregation'' and ''Gus Hill's Stars'' were burlesque shows, but included variety acts and were cleaner than others.
Gus Hill was one of sixteen producers who incorporated the
Columbia Amusement Company
The Columbia Amusement Company, also called the Columbia Wheel or the Eastern Burlesque Wheel, was a show business organization that produced burlesque shows in the United States between 1902 and 1927. Each year, about four dozen Columbia burlesque ...
on 12 July 1902.
With the "Columbia Wheel" a series of companies followed each other round a circuit of theaters, a concept for which he claimed the credit.
Hill produced three burlesque shows each season for Columbia until the early 1910s, when he leased his franchise to other producers so he could devote more time to ''Mutt and Jeff''.
The Columbia Wheel came to operate two large burlesque circuits after buying a rival. In May 1915 the company arranged to transfer its No. 2 circuit, which had forty theaters and thirty-four touring companies, to a new corporation called the American Burlesque Association.
Gus Hill was named president of the new entity.
Hill funded a number of African American reviews.
One of these was ''Gus Hill's
Smart Set Company'', which starred performers such as
Billy McClain,
Ernest Hogan
Ernest Hogan (born Ernest Reuben Crowdus; 1865 – May 20, 1909) was the first African-American entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show (''The Oyster Man'' in 1907) and helped to popularize the musical genre of ragtime.
A native of Bo ...
,
Tom McIntosh
Thomas S. "Tom" McIntosh (February 6, 1927 - July 26, 2017) was an American jazz trombonist, composer, arranger, and conductor.
McIntosh was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest of six siblings. He also had an elder half-sibling by his fath ...
and
Sherman H. Dudley
Sherman Houston Dudley (1872 – March 1, 1940) was an African-American vaudeville performer and theatre entrepreneur. He gained notability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as an individual performer, a composer of ragtime songs, ...
. The troupe staged vaudeville-style shows with comedy sketches, songs, dances and specialty acts.
Gus Hill's ''Smart Set'' put on the touring show ''The Black Politician'', a musical comedy, in 1904–08. Music and lyrics were by
James Reese Europe
James Reese Europe (February 22, 1881 – May 9, 1919) was an American ragtime and early jazz bandleader, arranger, and composer. He was the leading figure on the African Americans music scene of New York City in the 1910s. Eubie Blake called hi ...
and
Cecil Mack
Cecil Mack (November 6, 1873 – August 1, 1944) was an American composer, lyricist and music publisher.
Biography
Born as Richard Cecil McPherson in Portsmouth, Virginia, he attended the Norfolk Mission College and Lincoln University in Pennsyl ...
.
It starred Jim Burris, Tom Logan and Irvin Allen.
At this time Hill was running fourteen different shows. He had a mule which had appeared in ''McFadden Flats'', and then was moved to other revues without success.
Hill gave the mule to Dudley, who brought it on stage and created a sensation.
Salem Tutt Whitney joined the ''Smart Set Company'' in 1905. In 1909 he and
J. Homer Tutt organized the Whitney Musical Comedy Company, which toured under Hill's management as the ''Southern Smart Set Company''.
Hill ventured into film production with the Nonpareil Feature Film Company in 1914.
The first film released was the pseudo-documentary ''The Line Up at Police Headquarters''.
Hill announced plans to make a series of single-reel ''Happy Hooligan'' episodes, but none appeared.
Nonpareil released a version of ''
Alice in Wonderland
''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (commonly ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English novel by Lewis Carroll. It details the story of a young girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatur ...
'', starring Viola Savoy.
The company appears to have then quietly folded.
Cartoon theatricals
A "cartoon theatrical" is a live theater performance based on a comic strip or cartoon.
More than two hundred cartoon theatricals were produced between 1896 and 1927, about fifty of them original and the others derivative.
Gus Hill was involved in over half of them.
In the 1890s Hill started producing a vaudeville act that was based on ''New York Sunday World's'' cartoon, ''
The Yellow Kid
The Yellow Kid (Mickey Dugan) is an American comic strip character that appeared from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer's ''New York World'', and later William Randolph Hearst's ''New York Journal''. Created and drawn by Richard F. Outcault in th ...
''.
He later added characters from other cartoons such as ''
Mutt and Jeff
''Mutt and Jeff'' was a long-running and widely popular American newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Bud Fisher in 1907 about "two mismatched tinhorns". It is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip. The concept of a newsp ...
'' and the ''
Happy Hooligan
''Happy Hooligan'' is an American comic strip, the first major strip by the already celebrated cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper. It debuted with a Sunday strip on March 11, 1900 in the William Randolph Hearst newspapers, and was one of the first p ...
''.
He was also responsible for ''
Alphonse and Gaston
''Alphonse and Gaston'' is an American comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper, featuring a bumbling pair of Frenchmen with a penchant for politeness. It first appeared in William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, the ''New York Journal'' on September ...
'' and ''
Bringing Up Father
''Bringing Up Father'' is an American comic strip created by cartoonist George McManus. Distributed by King Features Syndicate, it ran for 87 years, from January 2, 1913, to May 28, 2000.
The strip was later titled ''Jiggs and Maggie'' (or ''M ...
'' among others.
Most of the theatricals were musical comedies.
Hill produced these "cartoon theatricals", or musicals based on comic strips, into 1920s.
The theatricals would first play in legitimate road shows, then move to Hill's burlesque franchises.
''The Yellow Kid'' cartoon featured a series called ''McFadden's Row of Flats'' in the ''
New York Journal
:''Includes coverage of New York Journal-American and its predecessors New York Journal, The Journal, New York American and New York Evening Journal''
The ''New York Journal-American'' was a daily newspaper published in New York City from 1937 t ...
'' in 1896.
Gus Hill's ''McFadden's Row of Flats'' opened in London on 22 October 1896.
The play was a broad comedy revolving around interactions between Dan McFadden and Sandy McTavish, stereotypes of the witty Irishman and the tight-fisted Scot.
Another theme is McFadden's daughter, who is sent to finishing school and becomes too much of a lady to acknowledge her father in public.
In the end McFadden's daughter marries McTavish's son and all ends well.
The play was the basis for the silent film ''
McFadden's Flats McFadden's Flats may refer to:
* McFadden's Flats (1927 film), an American silent film
* McFadden's Flats (1935 film)
''McFadden's Flats'' is a 1935 American comedy film directed by Ralph Murphy and written by Arthur Caesar, Edward Kaufman, A ...
'' made in 1927 and another silent film with the same name made in 1935.
The 1927 film featured
Charlie Murray,
Chester Conklin
Chester Cooper Conklin (January 11, 1886 – October 11, 1971) was an early American film comedian who started at Keystone Studios as one of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops, often paired with Mack Swain. He appeared in a series of films with ...
and
Edna Murphy
Edna Murphy (November 17, 1899 – August 3, 1974) was an American actress of the silent era. She appeared in 80 films between 1918 and 1933. Murphy was voted "Most Photographed Movie Star of 1925" by '' ScreenLand Magazine''.
For part of ...
.
The 1935 film, adapted by
Casey Robinson
Kenneth Casey Robinson (October 17, 1903 – December 6, 1979) was an American producer and director of mostly B movies and a screenwriter responsible for some of Bette Davis' most revered films. Film critic Richard Corliss once described him ...
, featured
Walter C. Kelly,
Andy Clyde and
Richard Cromwell
Richard Cromwell (4 October 162612 July 1712) was an English statesman who was the second and last Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland and son of the first Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.
On his father's death ...
.
It remained true to the play's vaudeville origins and received friendly reviews.
Hill's ''Mutt and Jeff'', and sequels such as ''Mutt and Jeff in Panama'' (1913–14) and ''Mutt and Jeff in College'' (1915–16), ran from the 1910–11 season through to the 1927–28 season, and at one time had six companies playing the show in different places.
In 1922 Hill staged a version of ''Mutt and Jeff'' performed by Conoly's Colored Comedians at the
Lafayette Theatre, New York. A reviewer in ''
Billboard
A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...
'' said :There is no reason why this show should not furnish a very complete evening's entertainment for either colored or white audiences. In the twenty-three song numbers and specialties one is certain to find several that will tickle any fancy. The chorus is fast and the wardrobe gorgeous."
Hill first staged ''Happy Hooligan'' in the early 1900s, and was still staging a version of that show in the 1923–24 season.
''Bringing up Father'' ran from 1913–14 to 1932–33, with up to three companies at one time.
In April 1921 Hill spoke as president of the 110-member Touring Managers' Association, which employed about 6,000 actors.
He said his group would strongly oppose the
Actors' Equity Association
The Actors' Equity Association (AEA), commonly referred to as Actors' Equity or simply Equity, is an American labor union representing those who work in live theatrical performance. Performers appearing in live stage productions without a boo ...
. He said the increasing exactions of the actors, the musicians and the stage hands had made producing more and more unprofitable.
By the 1927–28 season the Columbia Burlesque Circuit was struggling financially.
This was the last season where cartoon theatricals were a significant part of the burlesque shows.
Hill produced ''Gus Hill's Midgets'' in 1929, marking the end of his career as a producer.
He continued to perform as a club swinger in charitable events and nostalgia shows.
Gus Hill died of a heart attack in New York City on 20 April 1937. He was aged 79.
Broadway productions
Broadway shows produced by Hill included:
* ''Southern Enchantment'' (Musical, Comedy, Extravaganza, Original) February 23, 1903 – March 7, 1903
* ''In Posterland'' (Musical, Comedy, Original) March 23–28, 1903
* ''Spotless Town'' (Musical, Comedy, Original) April 2–7, 1903
* ''Happy Hooligan'' (Musical, Comedy, Farce, Original) May 4–12, 1903
* ''Around the Clock'' (Musical, Comedy, Farce, Revival) January 6–11, 1908
* ''Bringing Up Father'' (Musical, Comedy, Original) March 30 – April 18, 1925
Publications
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References
Sources
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Hill, Gus
1858 births
1937 deaths
American theatre managers and producers
Businesspeople from New York City
Vaudeville performers
Jugglers