Klaw and Erlanger

Klaw and Erlanger was an entertainment management and production partnership of Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger based in New York City from 1888 through 1919. While running their own considerable and multi-faceted theatrical businesses on Broadway, they were key figures in the Theatrical Syndicate, the lucrative booking monopoly for first-class legitimate theaters nationwide.

Klaw and Erlanger joined in partnership in 1888. Starting from the purchase of an existing booking agency, the partners gradually gained control of the southern territory, anchored in New Orleans. They ran allied businesses, produced Broadway shows, and owned a number of theaters. They were part owners of the new Iroquois Theater in Chicago, which suffered a catastrophic fire in 1903 that resulted in more than 600 deaths and brought Klaw & Erlanger bitter criticism. In the same year they opened their flagship New Amsterdam Theater in New York, where the Aerial Gardens became the longtime stage for the Ziegfeld Follies.^[1]

From 1896, Klaw and Erlanger joined with others to form the Theatrical Syndicate which held an effective monopoly over the booking of stage performers into first-class legitimate theaters across the United States. Its control of the theater market was brief. As the Syndicate attempted to bring vaudeville from its "lowbrow associations by presenting only the finest, class acts", pressure from the independent Shubert family and accusations of trust building forced the Syndicate to lose much of its market power in 1910.^[2] After 1910, Klaw and Erlanger continued to play a role in the syndicate, which still sparred with the Shuberts for market share for years. Klaw and Erlanger also ran their own productions, experimented with vaudeville, and embarked on film production from 1913 to 1916. They dissolved their partnership in 1919, remaining independently active afterward.