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In his thundering sermons he often denounced theatergoing as a “sin”—never mind that he became involved in an adultery scandal. But during one sermon, he admitted to the lesser sin, declaring, “Yes, I have been to the theater.” Jaws dropped. “Mr. Beecher,” he repeated, “has been to the theater. Now, if you will all wait until you are past seventy years of age and will then go and see Joseph Jefferson in
Rip Van Winkle
, I venture the risk that it will not affect your eligibility for heaven, if you do nothing worse.”
    P.S. One of Beecher’s sisters became more lastingly famous: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Abraham Lincoln called her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”
    Q : When did performance spaces shift from outdoor to indoor?
    A : Greek and Roman amphitheaters were, of course, open air. And matinees meant just that: performances commenced in the morning. By the Elizabethan era, public theaters—like Shakespeare’s Globe—were partly open to the heavens, and performances began in the afternoon. Renaissance Europe favored the comfort of indoor shows, which no matter the time of day necessitated developing the art of stage lighting.
    Q : Who was the most famous actress with the shortest career?
    A : Nell Gwyn (1650–1687), who acted for six years. Purportedly the daughter of a madam and possibly herself a prostitute, she was for a time an orange seller at London’s famous Drury Lane Theatre. At fourteen she debuted on stage. She earned fame playing fast women—for, as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, another English actress, said a few hundred years later, “A good woman is a dramatic impossibility.”
    Gwyn also got laughs in comedy and excelled at “trouser roles” (wearing male clothing). But when Charles II chose her for his mistress, she left the stage for good (if not for good). Nell continued building her fortune, though on his deathbed Charles supposedly implored his brother, next in line to the throne, “Don’t let poor Nelly starve.” At Gwyn’s death, she was worth £100,000, or some $6 million today.
    Q : Did anyone ever become a Broadway star via a striptease?
    A : Of course it was a mock striptease, but dancer Joan McCracken, who’d appeared in
Oklahoma!
, became a star in choreographer Agnes de Mille’s 1944 hit
Bloomer Girl
. McCracken played a maid-of-all-work and performed a comical 1861-style striptease that audiences loved. A mock strip had also made a star of Mary Martin in the 1938
Leave It to Me
, via Cole Porter’s vampy “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
    P.S. McCracken was at one point married to Bob Fosse, later to fellow dancer and future novelist Jack Dunphy. When novelist Truman Capote met Dunphy, he was smitten and determined to have him. Capote theorized that anyone, if you concentrated on that person long and intensely enough, could be
had
. Dunphy left McCracken and the stage, and he and Capote became a couple for the rest of their lives.
    Q : Who was the oldest practicing playwright?
    A : George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), at ninety-three. But his 1949 play
Buoyant Billions
was not a hit.
    Q : Who was the father of the American musical?
    A : Don’t assume. Some would say the “father” was a mother: playwright-actress-novelist-lyricist Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824). Only one of her plays exists in its entirety. By age twenty, she’d failed as a governess, so being of a literary bent, she wrote
Victoria
, an epistolary novel. Her most popular book,
Charlotte Temple
, was continuously in print from 1795 to 1906, with two further printings after World War II. But though the novel had over two hundred editions, it didn’t make Ms. Rowson rich, for there were no copyright laws then, and royalties didn’t exist.
    The Englishwoman eventually found herself on the stage in the new United States. That led to writing plays, one of which was
Slaves in Algiers; or, a Struggle for