Frank S. Chanfrau

Francis S. Chanfrau (1824 – October 2, 1884) was an American actor and theatre manager whose career spanned the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Born in New York City to French parents, he grew up near Essex Market and developed an early interest in performance after watching Edwin Forrest on stage as a boy. He entered the profession playing minor roles and doing impressions of star actors, including Forrest himself, as well as impersonations of various ethnic groups. According to T. Allston Brown, Chanfrau played every dialect known to the stage with the sole exception of Welsh.

Chanfrau joined the house company at Mitchell's Olympic Theatre in 1848, where his association with playwright Benjamin A. Baker proved decisive. Baker wrote A Glance at New York, a piece built around jokes, songs, short skits, and scenes following a Connecticut visitor through the city, with Chanfrau playing a Bowery b'hoy fireboy named Mose. Theatre manager Mitchell initially rejected the play, but when Baker was given a benefit performance, he asked Chanfrau to perform the Mose material in the afterpiece. The character's debut was met first with silence, then with an eruption of recognition from the audience that was, by contemporary accounts, unlike anything previously heard in the theatre. The play became a record-breaking hit, and Baker, Chanfrau, and Mitchell subsequently rewrote and retitled it New York As It Is, centering the action on Mose. Both A Glance at New York In 1848 and New York As It Is stand as Chanfrau's verified Broadway credits.

New York As It Is ran for 47 consecutive nights and became the most popular play in the United States to that point. A performance on April 26, 1848, drew such an overflow crowd that police and theatre staff were required to remove excess audience members from the stage. The success of the Mose character transformed the composition of the Olympic's audiences, drawing working-class patrons into sections of the house previously occupied by more elite theatregoers, a shift that contemporary observer William Northall noted with some dismay.

Beginning February 28, 1848, W. Olgivie Ewen leased the larger Chatham Theatre for Chanfrau to manage. Chanfrau renamed it Chanfrau's National Theatre and opened all sections of the house to working-class patrons rather than restricting them to the pit. He held the Chatham's lease until July 8, 1850, during which time he performed in melodramas and burlesques with a heavy concentration on Mose plays. The Mose series expanded to include titles such as Mose in China, Mose in California, and The Mystery and Miseries of New York, among others. During one week in 1849, Chanfrau performed A Glance at New York daily across two New York theatres and one in Newark, traveling the nine miles to Newark by horse and buggy after completing two earlier performances the same evening. Researcher David Renear estimates that between April 15, 1848, and July 6, 1860, Chanfrau appeared as Mose at least 385 times across seven plays.

In 1850, illustrator Thomas Butler Gunn created a graphic novel titled Mose Among the Britishers or The B'hoy in London, dedicated to Chanfrau. In the spring of 1857, Chanfrau became manager of the Bowery Theatre, then known as Brougham's Bowery Theatre. As the popularity of the Mose character declined, he turned to satires of Edwin Forrest, Shakespeare, and a version of Dan Rice's circus. In late June of that year he moved to the theatre at 585 Broadway, renaming it the New Olympic Theatre, where he performed primarily nostalgic material from the 1840s and early 1850s until August.

In the later portion of his career, Chanfrau found sustained success in two additional roles. He played the title character in Kit, the Arkansas Traveller approximately 360 times, and appeared in the Thomas de Walden play Sam 783 times. For the remainder of his working life he rotated among these parts, the Mose character, and other roles from his earlier years. His wife, Henrietta, was herself a well-known actress who performed professionally under the name Mrs. F.S. Chanfrau. Chanfrau died on October 2, 1884.