Emma Carus

Emma Carus (March 18, 1879 – November 18, 1927) was an American contralto singer and Broadway performer born in New York City. Active on Broadway between 1900 and 1911, she built a career that spanned both theatrical productions and vaudeville, performing across major venues in New York and Chicago.

Carus began appearing in theatrical engagements in the late 1890s. In August 1897 she performed in the drama Rally Round the Flag at the Union Square Theatre, located at 50 East 14th Street, a venue owned by Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II, who had acquired it in 1893 for vaudeville programming. That same September she was described as a ballad singer ahead of her appearance at the Olympia Roof Garden on Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets. The following month she shared a program at the Pleasure Palace, an entertainment hall on East 58th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues managed by Frederick Freeman Proctor, alongside the Dunbar Sisters and Henry E. Dixey. In June 1898 she joined Troja, Jennie Yeamans, and the Washburn sisters on a bill presented by Sam T. Jack's Theatre in Chicago. Her Broadway activity continued into October 1905, when she appeared at Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre, her first Broadway engagement since a prior show at the Wistaria Grove on the roof of the New York Theatre.

Among her Broadway credits were the burlesque The Giddy Throng, the burlesque The King's Carnival, the musical The Hall of Fame, and the production When We Were Forty-one. Her most prominent Broadway appearance came in 1907, when she starred in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1907, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld at the Jardin de Paris on the rooftops of the New York Theatre and the Criterion Theatre. The production comprised thirteen parts structured as vaudeville acts, and Carus headed a cast supported by a chorus comparable to the one that had previously assisted Anna Held in The Paris Model. She also appeared in The Wife Hunters, a three-act musical play presented at the Herald Square Theatre at 1331 Broadway, based on a book by Edgar Allan Woolf. Her comedy number in that production was "Girls, Keep Your Figures."

In 1911, Carus is credited with playing a significant role in introducing Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" to audiences. The song became particularly associated with her in Chicago before spreading back to New York, where Al Jolson subsequently took it up and it gained widespread popularity. That same year marked the end of her Broadway career, though she continued performing in vaudeville. In March 1914 she sang at the Palace Theatre in a production starring Bertha Kalich, which also featured the Beauties of Jesse Lasky and George White. By 1914 she was in her fourth year on the interstate vaudeville circuit, this time accompanied by dance partner Carl Randall and performing a new repertoire that included the song "An Irish Suffragette."

Carus's personal life included several notable episodes. In June 1897, while at the Great Northern Hotel in Chicago, she fainted upon learning that her lover, James Burrows, had died by suicide in Nashville, Tennessee, where he managed a theater. She subsequently attempted to take her own life with a revolver but was stopped by friends. In April 1913 she secured a legal judgment against broker W. Lewis Stevens, whom she accused, along with his partner James W. Henning, of embezzling more than $2,200 of her money when their company failed in 1910. Stevens was arrested at the Iroquois Hotel at 49 West 44th Street in New York City. An avid baseball fan, Carus followed the New York Giants under manager John McGraw and attended every World Series from 1905 through 1913, during which time she publicly and incorrectly predicted a Giants victory over the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1913 World Series.