University of Missouri Research Board

The Liberty Theatre Movement

During her research on The Enchanted Years of the Stage (2007), Londré began to find interesting tales of American theatre in World War I. One of the better-known phenomena is the Liberty Theatre project, which built theatres and provided entertainment to new recruits in American military training camps. One of the prominent individuals involved in these theatres, Irving Berlin, was initially an enlisted man, but had an “overnight promotion—because he had to give orders to all the people who were in the show!”