ABSTRACT
George Wood had long been a busy man in the American entertainment business (“a gentleman who has altered and refitted more theatres in this country than any other manager”) and at the time when he brought Lydia across the ocean to make her American début he was busier than ever. He was preparing to open his most spectacular entertainment complex yet, a large building on Broadway that would be called Wood’s Museum and Metropolitan Theater. Under its roof this construction would contain the whole range of entertainment available at an outdoor pleasure garden plus a museum of oddities, arrayed in regular Victorian glass-case style; a lecture room where living curiosities—giants, dwarfs, the Siamese twins—could be gaped at; a picture gallery; cosmoramas; waxworks copied from the exhibition of Madame Tussaud; and of course a theatre where afternoon and evening performances of all kinds could be witnessed.
