Lebrun, Theodor

(Theodor Leineweber, 1822-1895)

   Manager, actor. Lebrun was among the most talented managers of a commercial theater in Berlin, especially in the seasons between 1865 and 1887 when he ran the Wallner Theater. He began his career to doing amateur theatricals for the Urania club in Berlin and then became a professional character actor in provincial venues such as Dessau, Stettin, Danzig, Breslau, Wiesbaden, and Riga. He began directing in Breslau in 1857 and leased the Wallner Theater from its owner Franz Wallner seven years later. Lebrun's initial repertoire featured comedies by Roderich Benedix and Gustav von Moser, but his premieres of Adolph L'Arronge provided successes that assured Lebrun a lengthy and profitable tenure in Berlin. The first of the L'Arronge hits was Mein Leopold, which continued in the Wallner repertoire for a decade after its premiere in 1873. Lebrun himself created the title role in Doktor Klaus, a comedy whose success equaled that of its predecessor and created a precedent for other L'Arronge comedies that dominated many repertoires, running thousands of times in scores of productions throughout the German-speaking world.

   By the early 1880s, Lebrun realized that his establishment could not prosper indefinitely on the triumphs of one playwright, and he premiered a modest comedy written by one of his former actors and his brother. The play was Der Raub der Sabinerinnen (The Rape of the Sabine Women) and the playwrights were Paul and Franz von Schön-than. The popularity of that play exceeded that of anything L'Arronge had written, and Lebrun later premiered several more Schönthan comedies, many of which became staples of profit-making production for scores of theaters. Lebrun's tactic of developing new plays among actors he had under contract proved a unique resource. Gustav Kadelburg had been one of the first actors Lebrun hired when he took over the Wallner, and by the 1890s Kadelburg and his collaborators, especially Oskar Blumenthal, had written several popular plays for Berlin's ever-expanding comedy market. Lebrun entered semiretire-ment in 1887 and concentrated on acting character parts at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg for two years. In 1889 he retired permanently to East Prussia.