At the turn of the 20th century in the days before radio, talking pictures and television, and with a population of 250,000 Toronto had close to 100 theatres large and small with most neighbourhoods having their own local Vaudeville theatres or music halls.

 

Some were just small rooms above a store, or in a back room of a tavern, but others were magnificent 1,000-seat gold-leafed palaces-to-the-arts where the performances on stage often equaled the drama off stage.

 

One of these great theatres, the Academy of Music (now demolished, stood on the south side of King Street at University Ave.) had the extra-added attraction of being the first public building in Toronto to be completely electric when it opened in 1890.

 

In 1895 the Academy of Music was renamed the Princess Theatre and remodeled into Toronto’s then only first class “legitimate theatre” presenting mostly plays and operas on its newly built and larger stage.

 

However competition arose in 1907 when a block away the bigger and still standing Royal Alexandra Theatre also billed as a first-class legitimate theatre opened its doors.

 

Even though the Royal Alex was described as the most beautiful theatre on the continent, its 21-year-old millionaire owner Cawthra Mulock had trouble booking plays from Broadway because the Royal Alex’s producers and agents were battling an influential New Yorkbased theatrical booking conglomerate known as the Theatrical Syndicate headed by Charles Frohman & Abe Erlanger.

 

The powerful Syndicate had a near monopoly on touring productions in the U.S. and Canada at the turn of the 20th century.

 

Plus, it also had a financial interest in Toronto’s Princess Theatre, the Royal Alex’s main competitor just down the street.

 

In order to save the newly built Royal Alexandra from financial ruin, its managing director Lawrence “Lol” Solman partnered the Royal Alex with the Syndicate’s main rival, the Shubert brothers, who would bring legit plays from New York into the Alex rather than accepting the Syndicate’s offer of Vaudeville acts, since a fortune was spent on building the Royal Alex with a large deep stage that wasn’t a necessity for Vaudeville.

 

After hearing this news an outraged Syndicate boss Abe Erlanger threatened to bring the Royal Alexandra to its knees, wiping it off the map and turning the site into a common stable for horses.

 

The rivalry between the Shuberts and the Syndicate began in 1905 when Sam Shubert died at the age of 26 as a result of injuries suffered when the passenger train he was on collided with several parked freight cars outside Harrisburg, Pa.

 

His two remaining brothers, Lee and Jacob, fueled by Abe Erlanger’s disrespect of their dead brother name by his refusal to abide by any past and present legal agreements “with a dead man,” drove the Shuberts to destroy the Syndicate grip on the North American market and ultimately building the largest theatre empire in the 20th century.

 

Eventually, for a short time at least, the Syndicate and the Shubert Bros. buried the hatchet and formed a mega agency at which time the Royal Alex partnered with another celebrated Broadway impresario, David Belasco.

 

The almost decade-long competition between the Princess and Royal Alex ended on the night of May 7, 1915, when fire gutted the Princess Theatre, thus making the Royal Alex the only firstclass, legitimate theatre then in Toronto.

 

Call it Karma, fate or coincidence, but on that very same evening of the fire, the British ocean liner Lusitania, after being struck by a German torpedo, sank in the Irish Sea, killing 1,198 people including Syndicate partner Charles Frohman.

 

The Royal Alexandra’s owner and founder Cawthra Mulock died a few years later in 1918 of the devastating Spanish influenza epidemic while on a business trip to New York.

 

The Princess Theatre was eventually rebuilt after the 1915 fire but never had much of a chance to regain its prominence as the final blow came when this once great theatre had the unfortunate destiny to lie in the path of the newly expanded University Avenue and was ultimately torn down in 1930.

 

In another theatrical twist of fate the Syndicate’s Abe Erlanger, Broadway impresario David Belasco and the Royal Alex’s manager Lawrence Solman all died (of natural causes) within a few months of each other after the demise of the Princess Theatre.

 

Some 60 years later in 1993, Ed Mirvish and his son David (present owner of the Royal Alexandra) opened the Princess of Wales Theatre on King Street West and it was named, in part, for the old Princess Theatre, once the Royal Alex’s great rival.

 

The previous Princess was just one of Toronto’s many theatres that was demolished to make way for progress and parked cars.

 

Today as you cross University Aveue at King Street you can still walk across the very spot where this great theatre once stood and where in 1898 a 5-yearold Toronto-born Mary Pickford—who would later become famous as America’s Sweetheart in films—made her stage debut in the “legitimate” play, The Silver King.