The Australian impressario J.C. Williamson, originally an American actor, created a theatrical empire in Australia that continued until 1976. The name J.C. Williamson meant control of venues, whether by lease or ownership, organization of product, i.e., . touring artists and productions, innovative and aggressive publicity, and the employment of mid-level side managers, to administer local arrangements. Although Williamson died in 1913, his company, known simply as, The Firm, actually grew significantly under his successor, George Tallis, until it became the largest theatrical company in the world. Tallis had organized a hugely successful tour of Sarah Bernhardt to Australia. His characterization in the Australian dictionary of biography provides a succinct summary of this new breed of theater manager. He was a born manager whose talents blended creative perception, visual imagination, good taste, intuition, and courage. Let's look at this characterization in more detail. It uses terms such as creativity, imagination, taste, intuition, which we would normally associate with creative artists such as writers or directors. Theatrical management in this sense was a creative undertaking in as much as it required excellent intuition, sensitivity to audience tastes and a great deal of risk as each large tour meant a huge investment of capital. Defining theatrical management is not easy because the terms are unstable. We find interchangeable expressions such as manager, impresario and entrepreneur. One could also add in the case of J.C. Williamson, magnate. Whatever the activities, and there are important differences, they all fulfill a managerial function in some way. Managing theater on a large, even global scale, needed a new understanding of the function of management. The most influential analysis of this new development is Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, an analysis of task management in order to improve efficiency in the workplace. Taylor elaborated what he called, scientific principles to free management from the serendipity of relying on some, as he said, unusual or extraordinary man. Taylor understood this new science as going beyond just efficiency in the workplace. It was very much an all-encompassing shift, or turn in modern life. The same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities, to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of businesses or our tradesmen, large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions, our universities, and our governmental departments. Taylor forgot to add the management of our theaters, but this is precisely what was going on. Theater historian Tracy Davis has argued that theater and entertainment may have been in fact among the first sectors of the British economy to show the organizational characteristics of centralized management and integrated production and distribution. We can test this hypothesis by looking at a highly successful theater manager, a true global player: Morris Edward Bandmann, the son of Daniel Bandmann. Bandmann Junior was born in New York in 1872, at the end of Daniel Bandmann's first world tour. His mother, Millie Bandmann Palmer, was an English actress in partnership with Daniel. They later divorced and young Morris appears to have spent time with both parents learning the theatrical trade. Like Sarah Bernhardt, Millie was famous for playing Hamlet, but her Juliet was also legendary, a role she insisted on playing well into her 50s, when she even performed alongside her son as Romeo. Morris was an accomplished actor who soon formed his own troop. Playing Romeo to his mother's Juliet was evidently not to his taste. However, it is his managerial career that marks a new phase in the organization of theatrical touring. Within a few years, he managed four separate companies in Britain, and in 1899 formed the Mediterranean Entertainment Syndicate to tour Gibraltar, Tangier, Malta, and Egypt, the first stage in building his famous circuit. Between 1900 and 1922, Bandmann established a theatrical empire that stretched from Gibraltar to Japan. The British Empire east of Gibraltar belonged to the Bandmann circuit. Belonged means that Bandmann secured the rights to the most popular West End plays and musical comedies. He assembled troops that reperformed these works in facsimile productions along the circuit. His activities were based around touring companies that operated on a rotation system. At the height of his activities, Bandmann had several companies moving around the globe in a rotating chain of changing genres and repertoires. In terms of scale, complexity, and global reach, the Bandmann circuit was unrivaled in the theater industry of the time. A remarkable feature of the Bandmann Enterprises was the fact that it was based, not in London, but in Calcutta, where he built a new theater in 1908, the Empire. A few years later, he built an even larger one in Bombay, the Royal Opera House. As well as theatrical entertainment, Bandmann also established a cinema business by introducing and distributing films, including the new kinemacolor technology, an early form of stereoscopic and color film. Bandmann's business activities reached a peak in 1919 when he floated two public companies, Bandmann Varieties Limited and Bandmand Eastern Circuit, which controlled different aspects of his enterprises. His early death in 1922, aged 50 from typhus, meant the end of the Bandmann circuit, although his companies continued to operate into the 1930s. By this time, they had moved into film distribution. Bandmann's death also coincided with a decline of large scale theatrical touring, rising costs, especially transport, combined with competition from cinema made the Bandmann model of global theater increasingly uneconomical. Although Bandmann based his operations in India, and it was his most important market, he did not have a monopoly, like J.C. Williams had in Australia. His most serious competitor was a Parsi actor turned wine merchant turned theater owner, J.F. Madan. The Parsi community in Bombay had embraced European style theater in the 1850s and established a thriving professional touring theater that performed throughout the Indian subcontinent and into southeast Asia. Madan began as an actor in one of the troupes. He later established himself as a merchant supplying the British army with wine and other provisions. This formed the basis of his fortune with which he began to acquire theaters. In 1902, he relocated to Calcutta at almost exactly the same time as Bandmann, where he founded J.F. Madan and Sons, and began showing films in tents on the Madan, the main city park, before opening the first dedicated movie house in Calcutta, the Elphinstone Picture Palace. From there, he began acquiring theaters all over India and started producing films. In 1917, his company Madan's Far Eastern Films joined forces with Bandmann to form the Excelsior Cinematograph Syndicate, dedicated to distributing films, as well as owning and managing a chain of cinemas. Bandmann and Madan were both competitors and partners. Although, after the First World War, cooperation dominated. The two companies specialized. Bandmann provided a high quality theatrical product, which was shown in theaters owned by Madan. Madan is often considered the father of Bollywood, one of the first major producers of films in India, yet his beginnings were in the theater in a time when film was considered just one form of theatrical entertainment. The success of Madan and Sons shows that the entrepreneurial model had itself gone global.
