HISTORY & RESTORATION (con't)

The Lyric c.1905. Left: 42nd Street entrance. Right: 43rd Street facade. Photos from building proposal submitted to Livent by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, LLP, and Kofman Engineering, Ltd. Project Managers & Architect.

The Lyric opened on October 12, 1903 with Old Heidelberg starring Richard Mansfield. Most of its successes were musical. Two major composers of operetta had hits there: Oscar Straus whose most famous show The Chocolate Soldier (based on Shaw's Arms and the Man) opened at the Lyric in 1909 to run for 296 performances, and Rudolf Friml whose first show The Firefly opened at the Lyric in 1912. His last hit, The Three Musketeers, produced by the fabled Florenz Ziegfield, played there for seven months in 1928--an impressive run in those days.

The glory years of the Lyric, the 1920's, belonged to musical comedy in an era when the music and the comedy were dqually dazzling. During that decade Fred and Adele Astaire appeared in For Goodness' Sake, scored partly by the Gershwins, and the Marx Brothers had their second Broadway hit (and the source of their first film) in The Cocoanuts, book by George S. Kaufman, songs by Irving Berlin. And in 1929 the young Cole Porter wrote his first successful full-length score (and one of the best of his entire career) for Fifty Million Frenchmen. It turned out to be the Lyric's last successful show. The theatre switched to movies in 1934.

The Apollo opened in 1910 as a combined film and vaudeville house under the name of the Bryant. In 1920 the Selwyn brothers took over and rebuilt it, making it the twelfth and last theatre to be built on 42nd Street's Times Square block. It began operations on November 11, 1920, with Jimmie, a show memorable only for having the fledgling Oscar Hammerstein as one of its writers, and didn't have a hit until 1923 when W.C. Fields starred in Poppy.

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