From traveling show to vaudeville : theatrical spectacle in America, 1830-1910 / edited by Robert M. Lewis.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Lewis, Robert M., 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Performing arts--United States--History--19th century.

Performing arts.

Performing arts--United States--History--20th century.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xii, 384 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Summary:

Before phonographs and moving pictures, live performances dominated American popular entertainment. Carnivals, circuses, dioramas, magicians, mechanical marvels, musicians, and theatrical troupes--all visited rural fairgrounds, small-town opera houses, and big-city palaces around the country, giving millions of people an escape from their everyday lives for a dime or a quarter. In"

Contents:

Introduction: From Celebration to Show Business 1

The Dime Museum 22

Early Museum Shows 24

Ethan Greenwood's account of his New England Museum, June 1824 24

Nathaniel Hawthorne visits two sideshows in Salem, July 1838 25

Abram Dayton's recollections of New York museums in the 1830s, 1882 27

Selling and Seeing Curiosities 29

Barnum's appeal to the family: Sights and Wonders in New York (1849) 29

Barnum's advertising to visitors: Peleg Pettinghame to Timothy Touchmenot, 1861 34

Letters to a fellow showman: Barnum to Moses Kimball in Boston, 1843 35

Presenting Tom Thumb: Sketch of Life ... of Charles S. Stratton (1847) 37

Philip Hone and family visit Tom Thumb, 1843 and 1847 40

Mark Twain's impressions of the "Wild Men of Borneo," 1853 41

Mark Twain and the confidence-man's "Boney Part," 1852 43

New York Tribune condemns "Disgusting Exhibitions," 1853 46

Fanny Fern meets the Bearded Lady: Fern Leaves, 1854 49

Autobiography of Petite Bunkum's comic view of "The Whiskered Woman," 1855 50

Two upperclass comments on Barnum's "What Is It?" in 1860 and 1861 50

Sir Lyon Bouse's audience with a giantess, 1867 53

The family show: Gleason's on the American Museum, 1853 57

The Nation on "The Great Humbug," and Barnum's response, 1867 58

Dog Days of the Museum 61

Mark Twain sees a drab American Museum, 1867 61

William Dean Howells goes slumming, 1902 62

Journalist Rollin Lynde Hartt on the proletarian rabble, 1909 65

Minstrelsy 66

Routines: Songs, Speeches, Dialogue, and Farce 71

Billy Whitlock's song of love and marriage: "Miss Lucy Long," 1842 71

"Dandy Jim from Caroline" and bragging, 1843 72

De Negro's Original Piano-Rama on gold fever, 1850 73

End men chatter: Tambo and Bones on "Blackberrying," 1875 75

Olio: Oh Hush! Or, the Virginny Cupids, 1853 76

Commentary: Rise and Fall of "Slave" Creativity 85

New York Knickerbocker praises the only true "American poets," 1845 85

Putnam's Monthly regrets the bland "modern" songs, 1855 87

The New York Tribune surveys "The Black Opera," 1855 89

Reminiscences 90

Ralph Keeler recalls his experiences as a teenage performer in the 1850s (1869) 90

Mark Twain remembers the glories of the "real nigger show" in the 1840s (1906) 92

Bayard Taylor observes minstrel songs among Sacramento miners, 1850 94

Musical Comedy: Harrigan's Mulligan Guard 95

Irish, Germans, and "Coloreds" at The Mulligan Guard Ball, 1879 95

Edward Harrigan explains his interpretation of city realism, 1889 102

William Dean Howells applauds Mulligan authenticity, 1886 104

Confessions of an African American Minstrel 105

Bert Williams on comedy and life, 1918 105

The Circus 108

The Circus Debated 110

The American Sunday-School Union warns the foolish young, 1840s 110

Fanny Fern recommends a less-than-perfect circus to children, 1857 112

Performer Alfred Trumble justifies skills in the ring: A Spangled World (1883) 115

The Early Circus 116

Nathaniel Hawthorne observes a circus performance and a traveling caravan, 1835, 1838 116

Henry David Thoreau visits a menagerie, 1851 120

The circus comes to the village: The Knickerbocker, 1839 121

Walt Whitman reviews Dan Rice's circus show in Brooklyn, 1856 124

The New England itinerary of S. O. Wheeler's Great International Circus, 1863 126

Big Business 129

Manager W. C. Coup reminisces in the 1890s: Sawdust and Spangles (1902) 129

Barnum explains his operations to Mark Twain, 1875 134

Barnum introduces children to the circus "curiosities," 1888 135

Behind the scenes at Ringling Bothers, 1900 137

The itinerary of a typical large circus, ca. 1900 140

The Audience 147

Hamlin Garland's memory of the circus parade in "Sun Prairie" in the late 1850s (1899) 147

William Dean Howells recalls the appeal to boys in an Ohio small town, 1860s (1890) 149

Carl Sandburg remembers the sideshow in Galesburg, Illinois, in the 1890s (1956) 151

A roustabout's story: W.E. "Doc" Van Elstine, 1938 153

Melodrama 155

A Plea for an American Drama 159

James Kirke Paulding scorns a derivative postcolonial drama, 1827 159

Classic Melodrama 162

Charlotte Cushman's fictional tale of a professional actress, 1837 162

Walt Whitman on the style of the sensation story-papers, 1858 168

William B. English's novel, Rosina Meadows, the Village Maid (1843) 169

Charles H. Saunders' stage adaptation of Rosina Meadows, 1855 173

"Artemus Ward" and the abridged melodrama plot, 1865 180

Classic Melodrama's Audiences 180

Nathaniel Hawthorne at the National Theatre, Boston, 1850 180

"Doesticks" slums with the Bowery B'hoys, 1855 183

The Ten-Twenty-Thirty Melodramas 185

Porter Emerson Browne discovers the secrets of a good "mellodrammer," 1909 185

Owen Davis explains the writer's formula, 1914 187

Rollin Lynde Hartt among the "Neolthic" audience on the Lower East Side, 1909 189

Corse Payton's Friday matinee "pink tea" at the Academy of Music, 1914 193

"Leg Show" Burlesque Extravaganzas 195

The Black Crook 198

Joseph Whitton recalls the origins of a speculative venture, 1897 198

Charles Barras's script of The Black Crook, 1866 200

The Black Crook's most popular song: "You Naughty, Naughty Men," 1866 212

A Burlesque of Burlesque 213

Griffin and Christy's Minstrels' The Black Crook Burlesque (1866) 213

Reactions to the Controversy 217

Mabel Osgood Wright recalls the views of "Better New York," 1926 217

George Templeton Strong on the "Feminine-Femoral School of Dramatic Art," 1868 218

Mark Twain applauds the "beautiful clipper-built girls," 1867 219

Charles Dickens sees "preposterous" leg shows in New York and Boston, 1867-68 222

Louisa May Alcott is shocked at the "new world": An Old-Fashioned Girl, 1870 223

Olive Logan spurns the "Leg Business" as degrading, 1869 225

William Dean Howells is horrified by "The New Taste in Theatricals," 1869 229

Richard Grant White salutes the "Age of Burlesque," 1869 231

The Popular-Price Circuit 234

Billy Watson and his Beef Trust Beauties in Brooklyn, 1911 234

The Wild West Show 237

Origins 241

P.T. Barnum describes his "Indian Life on the Plains" show, 1875 241

Buffalo Bill Cody explains the origins and aims of his Wild West, 1888 242

McLoughlin Brothers tells young children of Buffalo Bill's "exhibition," 1887 243

Manager Nate Salsbury reminisces, 1902 245

Extracts from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Programs 247

Cody and Carver's Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition program, 1883 247

"Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West,' Prairie Exhibition and Rocky Mountain Show," 1884 249

America's National Entertainment on "Cody's Corral," 1885 256

Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World program, 1893 258

Exhibiting Indians 264

Healy & Bigelow's Kickapoo medicine show program, 1890s 264

Harper's Weekly journalists visit the Indian campgrounds, 1894 and 1898 265

Luther Standing Bear remembers his years with Buffalo Bill, 1928 272

The Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the dangers of the "show business," 1890 275

Criticism by a "civilized" Indian: Chauncey Yellow Robe, 1914 277

Summer Amusement Parks 279

Journalists and the "New" Coney 282

Julian Ralph compares the social freedom of the grand hotels and the Bowery, 1896 282

Winthrop Alexander surveys the new fantasy "wonder-world" of Luna Park, 1903 285

Architecture journalist Barr Ferree reviews Dreamland's buildings, 1904 290

Trade journal The Midway on the significance of electricity, 1905 293

Showmen and the "Amusement Business" 294

Journalist Edwin Slosson celebrates the pleasures of periol, 1904 294

Manager Frederic Thompson's theories of primitive childhood regained, 1907-10 295

Popular Responses 304

Two "undistinguished" immigrant women tell of Coney's escapism, 1902-3 304

O.

Henry's story of the search for the Greater Coney, 1906 305

Josiah Allen's wife's experiences at Steeplechase, 1911 308

Two Critics of Coney's Banality 311

Maxim Gorky and the cowed masses, 1907 311

Genteel critic James Huneker among the barbarians, 1915 312

Vaudeville 315

Vaudeville Defined 319

The Midway surveys "the acme of variegated theatrical amusements," 1905 319

Edwin Milton Royle on the merits and convenience of "lunch-counter" art, 1899 321

"Something for everyone": Caroline Caffin on the "democratic art," 1914 328

The Business 332

B. F. Keith explains the policy of the refined "continuous" show, 1898 332

Hartley Davis reports on the economy and efficiency of the "business," 1905, 1907 334

Booking manager George Gottlieb explains how to organize a program, 1915 335

A master class on the "mechanics of emotion" in vaudeville, 1913 338

Routines 340

Aaron Hoffman's sketch, "The Horse Doctor," 1911 340

A hen-pecked Jewish husband: "Abbie Cohen's Wedding Day," 1917 347.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0801870879

OCLC:

50844219