Ned Wayburn

Who was Ned Wayburn?

Ned Wayburn, born Edward Claudius Weyburn, was a choreographer. He was born in Pennsylvania, a grandson of Samuel Fletcher Weyburn but spent much of his childhood in Chicago where he was introduced to theater and studied classical piano. At the age of 21, he abandoned his family’s tradition of manufacturing and began teaching at the Hart Conway School of Acting in Chicago. There he worked with three faculty members who influenced his growing interest in dance and movement: C.H. Jacobsen, Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, and Ida Simpson-Serven, whose teachings were based on Delsarte’s concepts about the meaning of gestures and their ability to communicate the emotion.

After leaving the school, Wayburn spent many years in theater staging shows for producers. He worked with such teams as William Hammerstein and Oscar Hammerstein, and Marc Klaw and A.L. Erlanger. In 1906, he began his own management group called the Headline Vaudeville Production Company. Through his own firm he staged many feature acts, while collaborating with other producers such as Lew Fields, William Ziegfeld and the Shuberts. In 1915, he began working with Florenz Ziegfeld and created the Ziegfeld Follies.