April, 11,
have into the English, theatre, its ,,ros, intake is nevertheless still es-at $75,000 weekly. Of part is guaranteed income from "benefit" performances� the.nrc parties really�arranged for hi-fore the season begins. One , bigger houses this-year took in �96,000 in this form. Seventy-five* thousand dollars, the managers s,v, <s ample to support the number (,f houses needed; but there is an ..ver production of theatres, Whereas there used to be four, the last ten years thirteen ,<> have been established. Wartime prosperity added a number of them; nctors from the East European >tnge, which an economically demornlized Jewry could no longer >iipport, added a few others. Some of tlu'sr- were neceswy to meet the demands of the tremendous Jewish communities of Brooklyn and the Bronx, which in the last dozen-years have drawn more than a hundred .thousand people out of the cast side. But thirteen theatres, most of them of no standing but still diverting their share of trade, .ire too many for an audience which has hardly increased in numbers since the time it had but four theatres to patronize.
There is another factor of weight in the present crisis�the high overhead. Not only are the rentals heavy, running as high as $l2'fi,i)l.)0, but the personal costs arc proportionally higher than those of Broadway. For, while the latter must meet the .demands of two unions, the Yiddish theatre must Mtisfv M-ven-^the unions of actors, "tiigf hands, musicians, ushers, chorus, dressers and doormen�all of whom, as members of the Hebrew Trades, affiliated with the AnuTYan Federation of Labor, u'ork in concert. Every theatre must tike its quota of musicians wheih. r it wants them or not, and H "Hot take as many ushers and distribute them as the ushers* union Jict.it'.N. If the latter places three ��nts.in the orchestra and
CANADIAN   JEWISH   REVIEW
81
three in the balcony, when the management would prefer a four-two division, it has no alternative but to take on an extra man in the orchestra and retain the three in the balcony. The ushers receive, too, a salary of about $18. The actors' union has its regulations�a minimum of $75 weekly and a thirty-six week season�and it assigns ;i certain number of actors to each theatre. Should the manager not find any one in his roster to pl;iy a certain role and have to take an outsider to cast it, he must still pay the actors idle for the period of the play. While the managers do not complain so much of the actors �their union has indeed acknowledged the seriousness of the situation and financially aided some of the theatres�they do find the rest of the personnel a burden. At one of the large theatres, for example, the ushers and doormen draw $500 a week. Such items add up in the $10,000, which is the weekly expense account of that house. Still, it must remembered that the stabilization of personnel has its advantages for the theatres, and the managers wpuld no doubt be willing to pay for it if they were not so hard pressed.
Far more important than the overproduction in theatres and the high overhead is the stoppage of Jewish immigration into the United States. The Yiddish theatre feels this keenly in an immediate way because the tens o/ thousands who used to arrive annually flocked to it as a novelty. Most of these people came from villages where the theatre and all its appurtenances were anathema, except when it was invested with religious sanction, as in the annual Purimspiel, which celebrates the saving of the Jews of persian from massacre when Queen Esther interceded for them against the wicked Minister Ham-an. For the first time, perhaps, the immigrants were seeing a kind of real life acted out on a stagc-the formula of two minutes of
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