1900s

Although more Americans could now hear their favorite tunes in the comfort of their own homes with Columbia and Victor gramophones, the turn of the twentieth century was still the heyday of theater-building to cater to travelling operas, operettas, minstrel troupes, ragtime, and the newest form of variety entertainment, vaudeville. A fusion of centuries-old cultural traditions including the English music hall, the minstrel shows of antebellum America, and Yiddish theater, vaudeville featured comedians, actors, musicians, singers, dancers, plate-spinners, ventriloquists, acrobats, animal trainers, and anyone who could keep an audience’s interest for more than three minutes.

During this period, New Brunswick would witness the erection of four new theaters: the Shortridge, the Strand, the Bijou, and the new Opera House. After the Masonic Opera House tragically burned down in December 1896, New Brunswick was without a theater until November 21, 1900, when Richard S. Shortridge’s Theatre opened on Liberty Street with Charles H. Hoyt’s New Jersey farce A Day and a Night. The property was quickly bought out in a joint venture by the Belasco-Fiske-Shubert Opera House Company; a decade after the original was destroyed, the new Opera House opened in August 1906 on the Liberty Street site. Decorated with minimalistic green Art Nouveau designs on a white background to give a “spacious and rich effect,” the new performance hall could comfortably seat over 1,200 for entertaining vaudeville sketches, photo-play pictures, kinemacolor motion pictures, and parody operettas like In a Japanese Tea House (1915). Contemporaneously, the S & K Amusement Company transformed the ruins of the Masonic Opera House into the Strand Theatre. A little further down George Street, Benjamin W. Suydam raised the small Bijou Theatre to show twice daily vaudeville sketches accompanied on pianos made by its neighbor Mathushek & Son.