Josephine Hall

Annie Josephine Hall (April 19, 1865 – December 5, 1920) was an American actress and soprano whose Broadway career spanned from 1885 to 1903. Born in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, she was the daughter of Albert A. Hall and Marion J. Hall, both descendants of early New England settlers whose strong religious convictions led them to oppose their daughter's theatrical ambitions. Hall left home without her parents' consent in order to pursue a life on the stage. Her sister, Frances Hall, also pursued a performance career as an opera singer.

Hall began her professional life working under the stage name Josie Hall with Rice's Surprise Party, a troupe managed by producer Edward E. Rice. Her first engagement with the company came in 1883, when she played the young maid Jeanette in Pop during engagements in Maryland, Maine, and Ohio. On Christmas Eve of that year she made her New York stage debut in the same production at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. She continued touring in Pop through 1884, with stops in Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, and upstate New York. When the tour reached Pittsburgh in March 1884, Hall and several other performers left the show after the producers failed to pay their salaries. She rejoined Rice's reorganized company in July 1884, this time taking over the larger role of Adele Pop from May Stembler, and the resumed tour extended to Iowa, Massachusetts, and California.

Following that season, Hall was engaged by Eugene Tompkins of the Boston Theatre to star in Zanita, an original work co-authored by Tompkins and Dexter Smith, in which she played the trouser role of Prince Huon. The production premiered on September 16, 1884, to favorable notices in The Boston Globe, and ran in Boston through December before touring to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, the Academy of Music in Baltimore, and McVicker's Theater in Chicago in the early months of 1885.

By April 1885 Hall had joined a company headlined by Lillian Russell and again managed by Rice. On April 27, 1885, she made her Broadway debut at the Casino Theatre as Sarah in the operetta Polly, or The Pet of the Regiment, with music by Edward Solomon and a libretto by James Mortimer, running through June 19. The same company immediately followed with a production of Billee Taylor at the same theater, in which Hall portrayed Susan. For the 1885–1886 season she remained with Rice's company as Eulalie in a revival of Rice's Evangeline at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. When that production moved to Chicago in May 1886, Hall did not travel with it, instead returning to Rhode Island to perform in Under the Gaslight and The Two Orphans at the Providence Opera House. She later rejoined Evangeline in May 1887 for a Rice-produced run at the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston, and in September 1887 appeared again with Rice's Surprise Party in Eduard Holst and Woolson Morse's Circus in Town at the Bijou Opera House, playing a flying trapeze artist.

In the autumn of 1886, between her engagements with Rice, Hall joined Eben Plympton's theater company to play Baby Blanchemayne in the play Jack by Mrs. Harry Beckett. The production stopped briefly on Broadway at Wallack's Theatre in early November 1886 before playing the Park Theatre in Boston and the Brooklyn Theater. The tour continued into 1887 with engagements in Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, and Illinois, and returned to Broadway at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in February 1887. In November 1887 Hall appeared at Wallack's Theatre again in T. W. Robertson's School, produced by Henry Eugene Abbey. Shortly afterward she became seriously ill and was unable to perform. Reports in the American press in July 1888 indicated she had traveled to Europe to recover and had married a German baron while abroad. During that period she studied acting in Paris with François Jules Edmond Got. She returned to the stage in October 1888, replacing Maude Adams in The Paymaster at Niblo's Garden.

On June 11, 1889, Hall created the role of Abdallah in the world premiere of Blue Beard, Jr., with music by John Joseph Braham Sr. and a book by Clay M. Greene, Fred J. Eustis, and Richard Maddern, at the Grand Opera House in Chicago. The production was critically well received, and her performance of its "Cigarette Song" drew particular enthusiasm from Chicago audiences. She departed the production in July 1889 to join the company of Frederick Hallen and Joseph Hart in their musical farce Later On, touring nationally with that production through 1889 and into 1890.

On May 15, 1890, Hall gave birth in Philadelphia to Alexander A. Aarons, her son by Broadway composer and producer Alfred E. Aarons. She and Aarons did not marry until December 1899, more than nine years after their son's birth, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1911. Alexander A. Aarons went on to become a Broadway producer, known for a long professional collaboration with Vinton Freedley.

Immediately following the birth of her son, Hall came under the management of Charles Frohman, with whom she maintained a professional relationship throughout the 1890s. Among the productions Frohman oversaw was Bronson Howard's Civil War drama Shenandoah, in which Hall played Jenny Buckthorn. The tour began at the Hyperion Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in May 1890 and traveled through Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Alabama before continuing nationally into 1891. Another Frohman production in which she appeared was William Gillette's All the Comforts of Home, in which she played Emily Pettibone during its April 1891 run at Herrmann's Theatre in New York and a subsequent engagement at the Park Theatre in Brooklyn. She returned to Shenandoah in October 1891 at the Columbus Theatre in Upper Manhattan and continued touring in the production through at least March 1892. It was during this later phase of the Shenandoah tour, by February 1892, that she dropped the stage name Josie Hall and began performing as Josephine Hall.

On November 7, 1892, Hall appeared in the world premiere of Bronson Howard's Aristocracy at the New National Theatre in Washington, D.C., co-produced by Frohman and Al Hayman, playing Katherine Ten Broeck Lawrence. The production subsequently transferred to Palmer's Theatre on Broadway. Her Broadway credits during this period and into the early 1900s included the musicals The Knickerbocker Girl, The Ladies Paradise, The Military Maid, and Mam'selle 'Awkins, as well as the play A Royal Rogue. According to her 1920 obituary in The New York Times, she was particularly celebrated for her performances of the song "Sister Mary Jane's Top Note" and for her work in the Broadway productions of The Girl from Paris in 1896 and The Girl from Maxim's in 1899.

Hall retired from the stage in 1904 but briefly returned to performance in 1910 for Klaw and Erlanger's production of The Air King. She died on December 5, 1920.