Max Freeman

Max Freeman (c. 1852 – March 27 or March 28, 1912) was a German actor, theater director, theater manager, playwright, and producer who was primarily active in the United States. After beginning his career in his native city of Berlin in 1868, Freeman eventually moved to the United States in 1871 where he began his career in America as the theatre manager for the Germania Theatre in New York City. He had a lengthy stage career as an actor in America from 1873 until his death in 1912. Known as the "godfather of comic opera", and Count de Brionne in Anselma. The latter play was an English-language adaptation of Sardou's 1873 French-language play Andréa which was created by Leander Richardson for the Austrian actress Antonie Janisch (1848–1920), known on the stage as Madame Janisch. During its Broadway run, the play was at the center of several court battles over the performance rights to Sardou's work, and was ultimately barred from any further performances by the New York Supreme Court in December 1885.

Freeman adapted Jacques Offenbach's Orfée aux enfers into the English language 'Orpheus and Eurydice which was performed for the grand opening of Broadway's Bijou Theatre on December 1, 1883. Freeman also performed the role of Pluto in the production. In 1886 he portrayed Chevalier de Brabazon in the United States premiere of Edward Jakobowski's Erminie. In 1890 Freeman's original play Claudius Nero, a stage work Freeman adapted from Ernest Erkstein's novel Nero, premiered at Niblo's Garden on 22 October. The work was essentially an early musical, including songs and ballet.

Freeman directed his first stage work on Broadway in 1896, the comic opera Santa Maria by composer and librettist Oscar Hammerstein I. Other works he directed on Broadway included the musical Miss Manhattan (1897, libretto by George V. Hobart); Reginald De Koven's operetta The Highwayman (1897); the Edgar Smith and Louis De Lange musical's The Little Host (1898) and Mother Goose (1898); and the 1899 revival of Erminie in which Freeman also returned to the stage as Brabazon. He directed and starred in a few more plays on Broadway, including Ludwig Englander's The Rounders (1899, as Joseph), Hubert Henry Davies's Cynthia (1903), Gustav Kerker and Harry B. Smith's The Blonde in Black (1903, M. Carrousel Ladjos), and Henri Dumay's Mademoiselle Marni (1905); the latter being his last Broadway credit as a director. His other directing credits on Broadway included Broadway to Tokio (1900), Stanislaus Stange's Quo Vadis (1900), Sweet Anne Page (1900), Theodore Burt Sayre's Manon Lescaut (1901), A Modern Magdalen (1902), Gretna Green (1903), Love's Lottery (1904), and a A China Doll (1904).

Freeman continued to perform on Broadway into the end of career, with his last performance on the New York Stage being the role of Professor Diggs in Philip Bartholomae's Over Night in 1911. His other late career performances on Broadway included roles in Heidelberg (1902), Divorçons (1907), The Girl from Rector's (1909), and The Girl in the Taxi (1910). His final stage performance was in Cleveland in 1912 in A. H. Woods's Modest Suzanne.