William Gill (dramatist)

William Gill, also known as William Bain Gill, William B. Gill, and W. B. Gill, (10 May 1842, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland – 1 April 1919, Schenectady, New York) was a British North American born Australian playwright, actor, theatre critic, journalist, and theatre manager. He is most famous for authoring Broadway's first hit musical, Adonis.^[1][2]

William Gill was born in what is present day Canada and raised primarily in Australia, he began his acting career in 1862 at the age of twenty; working alongside his mother, the stage actress Mrs. Gill, at the Theatre Royal, Ballarat under the management of William Hoskins. The pair continued to work together during Gill's early career with theatre troupes managed by George Fawcett Rowe and G. B. W. Lewis; the latter managing a touring company in Asia. Initially an actor in minor parts, he gained a reputation as a gifted leading comedic actor in Melbourne between 1865 and 1868. He also worked briefly as the manager of the Princess Theatre, Melbourne.

After the theaters in Melbourne were closed during an economic downturn, Gill traveled to India in June 1869 with Lewis's financially profitable Calcutta based company where he remained for more than three years; ultimately replacing Lewis as the company's manager. There he married his wife and frequent stage partner, the Australian actress "Waddy" Deering (later known by the stage name Elinor Deering), in December 1869; just prior to which he had starred in the title role of his first known play, That Dear John Timothy. After returning to Australia in 1871, he became manager of first the Royal Victoria Theatre, Sydney in 1872 and then the Royal Lyceum, Sydney in 1873; presenting three more of his original plays at the Royal Lyceum. He relocated to the United States in 1874 where he became manager of Piper's Opera House in Nevada for a short time. After this he briefly managed a repertory theatre in Salt Lake City where a scandal involving copyright infringement brought Gill to the attention of the American press in February 1875. Mark Twain successfully sued to prevent an unauthorized performances of a play adaptation Gill had crafted of Twain's novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.

Gill worked periodically as a journalist, theater critic, and a contributor of humorous short stories for American periodicals; particularly The Clipper. As an eyewitness news reporter, he covered the events of the gold rush in Wyoming in 1876–1877. Gill ultimately arrived in New York City as a member of Colville's Folly Company; making his Broadway debut as an actor at the Eagle Theater as the lead male comic in Oxygen, or Gas in a burlesque metre in December 1877. On Christmas Eve of that year his first stage work of sorts debuted on Broadway, the pastiche Babes In The Wood, or Who Killed Cock Robin? which Gill and Willie Edouin had co-created by splicing together excerpts of pre-existing materials by other writers, mainly pantomimes and burlesque material, into a new original format.

William Gill's first entirely original work to reach Broadway was Horrors, or the Rajah of Zogobad in 1879 which received positive if not enthusiastic reviews, and ran for a respectable 48 performances at the Union Square Theater. This began a series of several popular but critically mixed successes on Broadway, including The Magic Slipper (1879) and Our Goblins (one act version, 1879; two act version, 1881). From 1882 through 1886 he had a prolific partnership with the Irish playwright George H. Jessop with whom he co-authored many plays of which In Paradise (1882), Facts, or His Little Hatchet (1883), A Bottle of Ink (1884), and Mam'zelle, or the Little Milliner (1885) all had successful Broadway runs and tours. The pair also penned a series of flops, including Muddles (1885), Bluff (1885), and Aphrodite Still in the Ring (1886) which ultimately led to the end of their partnership in 1887.

As a playwright, Gill's plays were typically written for the talents of specific performers and for this reason the majority of his works were never re-created after the original artists ceased performing them. He had a tremendous success with the 1884 musical burlesque Adonis which was written as a starring vehicle for the actor Henry E. Dixey. The original production broke records at that time for both financial profits for a play and longest-running Broadway shows, and Dixey repeatedly returned to the role for revivals and national tours through 1899. Gill's burlesque, My Sweetheart, which was written for the actress Minnie Palmer and premiered in 1881, became an international hit with lengthy runs on the West End, the Royal Strand Theatre, the Princess's Theatre, Glasgow, and frequent touring productions in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States into the first decades of the twentieth century. He later penned the Broadway plays The Alderman (1897, for the actor Odell Williams), The Honest Blacksmith (1901, for the boxer-turned-actor Bob Fitzsimmons), and Mrs. 'Mac,' The Mayor (1905, for the drag artist George W. Munroe). In addition to writing several plays starring himself and his wife, Gill also created stage works for the husband and wife performing duo William J. and Malvina Pray Florence; actors Jefferson De Angelis, Richard Golden, John T. Raymond, Harry St. Maur, and Francis Wilson; actresses Hattie Starr, Eliza Weathersby, and mother and daughter Jennie and Corinne Kimball; and sopranos Marie Aimée, Ida Mülle and Dora Wiley.