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The French folktale about Bluebeard, a pirate who murdered his
many curious wives, is not one that most parents today would read to their children
as a bedtime story. In 1901, however, the Drury Lane Bluebeard
production followed centuries of British theater renditions and
was viewed as much a part of children and family Christmas
theater entertainment as Nutcracker is today.
In 1903 Klaw & Erlanger increased the silliness and added
aerial dancers, hundreds of performers and costumes, popular songs,
spectacular lights and scenery. The response from drama critics to
the chaotic result was begrudging. The pretty girls, comedians and theatric
components were acceptable individually, but there was too much
of everything except a storyline connection between the skits.
The conventional Bluebeard storyline altered almost beyond
recognition and there was too much hawking of products. More
than one observer remarked that Klaw & Erlanger's Mr.
Bluebeard was a feast for the eyes with insufficient reward for
the ear.
Children might have disagreed. For adults, Harry Gilfoil's Bluebeard
was moderately amusing but his trademark mimicry, after a decade of
performances on the American stage, had become tiring. For
children, his animal sounds, whistles and machine noises were
new and rollicking good fun. In this "everything but the kitchen
sink" production, he may have been cast primarily because he was
a funny man with box office appeal. Children probably saw him as
an adult who didn't act like one.
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Harry Gilfoil (1865-1918) was
in real life Franklin B. Graff, the family name
shortened from Von Graff. The son of Mary Ann and
Jacob B. Von Graff, the minister of the First
Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, Harry ran
away from home as a teenager. Around 1879 he joined
Haverly's Minstrels, beginning his thirty-five-year career
on the stage.
While on the road with the Minstrels,* Harry
met producer playwright
Charles H. Hoyt and snared a job. It was the beginning
of a sixteen-year association with Hoyt. Harry's
first role of note was as Rats in A Tin Soldier,
followed by the stationmaster in A Hole in the
Ground. His celebrity status grew around an 1897
role as an inebriated old gentleman about town,
Baron Sands, in A Stranger in New York, a part Hoyt
wrote specifically to showcase Harry's abilities.†
It was a role he would play for over two decades.
Harry was best known for whistling and
mimicking sounds. Among those for which he was best
known: fizzing soda fountain, approaching
automobile, screaming locomotive, buzzing bee,
sawmill, scissors grinder, dog and catfights.
Gilfoil was sometimes billed as "the man with a
hundred voices." In the role of Bluebeard in Mr.
Bluebeard‡ he is known to have imitated a frozen
pump and a phonograph. An unlikely story was
reported that he mastered mimicry as a young child
because he was born without tonsils and unable to
talk until age five.
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Other productions with which
he was associated included A Trip to Chinatown, The
Liberty Belles, A Yankee Girl, A Wall
Street Girl.
In Iroquois publicity stories, it was inaccurately
reported that Gilfoil was one of three Chicago
natives amongst Mr. Bluebeard's principal actors,
including Eddie Foy and Bonnie Magin. He was born in
Washington, D.C.
Harry was married to Louise De Rozas Graff. I didn't
find evidence of children but didn't look
thoroughly.
In the years after the fire
A year after the Iroquois Theater fire found Harry in vaudeville,
working the Baron Sands character, then described as
a satire of old age. In 1912 he briefly took the
first role in many years that did not involve
mimicry. He played the part of a broker in a
production with Blanche Ring, The Wall Street
Girl. It was some of his first work since the
death of Charles Hoyt.
Fourteen years later, Harry died of heart and kidney
disease. His obituary stated he had been off the
stage for several years before his death, but that
was inaccurate. Newspaper stories about his
appearances did not end until January of that year.
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