Before the 19th century, theatre performances were usually marked with a playbill that listed salient facts about the program and the production. This all changed when an Ohio businessman named Frank Vance Strauss began his work transforming the traditional playbill into a collectible souvenir, featuring advertisements, theatre information, joke columns and recurring fashion features, like those seen above.
Frank Vance Strauss was an Ohio business man who was the first to specialize in printing the theatre programme in New York City. He began by collecting ads for the Madison Square Theatre[1] and transformed the programme from a four page leaflet into a magazine playbill that included advertisements along with the credits.[2] Strauss began his work in 1884, and a year later recruited companies like Caswell Massey, Runkel Brothers Cocoa, and Schirmer Pianos to be advertised in his programs.[3] In 1891, Strauss merged with his main competitor and, by 1905, standardized the “design and layout of the programs so that the makeup would be easier and the sizes of advertising space uniform.”[4] Because the programs were made of such a higher quality, audiences were collecting them as souvenirs. Strauss, along with other publishers, started to create albums and leather-bound volumes specifically for collecting programs.[5] In 1918, Strauss sold the company to his nephew, Richard M. Huber. Under Huber the company’s name changed to The Magazine Theater Program and, by 1924, was printing 16,000,000 playbills for over 60 theatres. This was the beginning of Huber’s monopoly over program printing for Broadway theatres.[6]
(credit: American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America)
