Hallam, Lewis, Jr. (1740–1808), actor and manager. He came to America with his parents in 1752 and gave his first performance in Williamsburg in The Merchant of Venice. He continued to act small parts with the troupe until it left for Jamaica. In 1758 he returned with a new company organized by his mother and stepfather, David Douglass, the ensemble that soon was known as the American Company. By this time his art had matured, and Hallam was the company's leading man. He was thin, of medium height, and not unattractive despite a noticeable cast in one eye. To him fell the honor of being the earliest known American Hamlet and of playing Arsaces, the hero of the first professionally produced American play, The Prince of Parthia (1767). He essayed Romeo to his mother's Juliet, and ranged from Young Norval to central figures in contemporary comedies. After spending the Revolutionary War years in the West Indies, he returned in 1784 to reopen the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia and the John Street Theatre in New York. With John Henry he revitalized the American Company, working with John Hodgkinson and William Dunlap after Henry's withdrawal. Although he was approaching fifty, Hallam continued to play the same leading parts he had assumed twenty years before, for he was as good a performer as was active at the time, and he frequently staged imaginative, responsible, and applauded productions. For example, he restored Hamlet's Grave Diggers' scene, which traditionally had been shortened or eliminated, and attempted some semblance of correct costuming. With the opening of the Park Theatre he withdrew from management but continued to act almost until his death. Seemingly improvident, he is said to have died in poverty. Looking back, John Durang recalled Hallam as “a sterling actor, but an inactive manager. His style of acting was of the old school. He was celebrated in all the gentlemanly dashing profligateness of young men, in epilogues, correct in Harlequin, and performed them with ease and spirit to a great age.”

(hăl'əm) , c.1714–1756, Anglo-American actor and manager of the first professional theatrical company in the United States. He arrived from England with his company in 1752 and opened at Williamsburg, Va., with Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. In 1753 he built the first theater in New York City, on Nassau St., where he presented Elizabethan and Restoration dramas, farces, and operettas. The company played in Philadelphia, toured the South, and then went to Jamaica, where Hallam died. His widow married David Douglass, and in 1758 they formed the American Company, in which Hallam's son, Lewis Hallam, Jr., c.1740–1808, performed. The younger Hallam excelled in comedy. In 1767 he played in Thomas Godfrey's Prince of Parthia, the first American drama to be produced professionally. On the death of Douglass, Hallam took over the management and subsequently produced (1787) the first American comedy, The Contrast, by Royall Tyler.

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