History of the Musical Stage
1700-1865: Musical Pioneers
by John Kenrick
(Copyright 1996, Revised 2020)
(The images below are thumbnails - click on them to see larger versions.)
Humble Beginnings
When the eastern coast of the present day United States was a collection of thirteen British colonies, the most popular leisure activity was lifting pints of ale at taverns -- a comparatively healthy pass time in an era when impure drinking water was a leading cause of disease. The first professional theatres in the colonies appeared in Philadelphia and Charleston.
Although the city of New York City had been in British hands since 1664, the mostly Dutch populace considered theatre sinful. So professional acting troupes did not visit Manhattan regularly until the 1730s. Throughout the colonial period, British plays and players dominated America's stages. Musical offerings included --
- pantomimes - one act works which replaced spoken dialogue with wordless clowning and interpolated songs.
- ballad operas - comic plays peppered with popular ballads reset to new satirical lyrics.
The
location of the Theatre on Nassau Street as it appeared in 2004, a brick
office building dwarfed by skyscraping neighbors.
According to recent scholarship, the first full length musical play performed in America was Flora (or The Hob on the Wall), a ballad opera presented in Charleston in 1735. New York's first verifyable professional musical production was a five performance run of John Gay's satirical British ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, offered by Walter Murray and Thomas Kean's traveling theatrical troupe at the Nassau Street Theatre on Dec. 3, 1750.
Click here to read a script sample from The Beggar's Opera
The American Revolution had a devastating effect on professional theatre. In 1774, the new Continental Congress passed a resolution discouraging theatrical entertainments, and the individual states quickly passed laws forbidding stage performances. Professional troupes were forced to either disband or leave the country. Most anti-theatre laws remained in effect until the early 1780s, while the good people of Massachusetts and Rhode Island did not lift their bans until 1793. Theatre gradually reappeared, helped in part by the support of such prominent citizens as President George Washington, who frequently attended performances in New York and Philadelphia.
At first, the new Republic's stages relied on British plays and comic operas. Homegrown American musicals began appearing in the 1790s, but it would be some time before they matched the popularity of imported works. The earliest American musicals were mostly comic operas (satirical operas with original scores and libretti), but sources differ as to which was the first. Some prominent nominees --
- Edwin and Angelina, or The Bandetti was written in 1791, and supposedly received just one performance in December 1796.
- An anti-Federalist comic opera called Tammany, or the Indian Chief premiered in New York City on March 3, 1796; no copies of the libretto have survived.
- The Archers, or The Mountaineers of Switzerland, a comic opera by librettist William Dunlap and composer Benjamin Carr, premiered in New York on April 8th, 1796 at the John Street Theatre. Based on the William Tell legend, its initial three performance run was followed by two nights in Boston. In The American Musical Stage Before 1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962, p. vii), Julian Mates claims that The Archers was the first noteworthy homegrown American musical. While that may be debatable, it is currently the earliest American musical for which a complete score and libretto are known to survive.
Each American theatre company of the post-Revolutionary era presented a wide range of musical works. For example, in 1796, New York City's prestigious American Company staged 91 performances of 46 different musicals, which accounted for nearly half of their repertory. Almost every play seen in America in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries was presented with interpolated musical numbers, or offered musical "specialties" (song & dance acts) between the two or more featured plays seen in a typical evening. Even Shakespearian tragedies were performed with interpolated popular songs, or at the very least shared the evening with a one-act pantomime or comic opera as a "curtain raiser" or "after piece."
The Park Theatre was New York's first world
class entertainment venue. Seen at the center of this period print, it stood just across
from City Hall Park from 1798 to 1848.
In the early 1800s, Broadway was New York's main thoroughfare, making it the most desirable location for all businesses, including theatres. The city's expanding population was more ethnically diverse than in the past, and exhibited a passion for theatre. Melodramas became popular, offering forgettable stories enlivened by mood-setting background music, interpolated popular songs and lavish stage effects. There were also musical romances, more sentimental than comic operas but written in much the same musical style. The term burletta was originally used to describe comic operas that burlesqued popular topics, but this word was soon applied to any dramatic production that included songs.
For a comprehensive discussion of early American musical theatre, see Susan L. Porter's With An Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America 1785-1815. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Racial Barriers
In the summer of 1821, William Henry Brown (a black West Indian and former ship's steward) opened a "pleasure garden" in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. This was the first black-owned establishment in New York to offer entertainment to African Americans. With black audiences and performers barred from every other theatre in town, Brown drew capacity crowds. He soon built the American Theatre on Mercer Street, and drew curious whites by featuring all-black casts in the same blend of plays and musical acts found in white theatres.
At first, Brown's work was tolerated by the authorities and viewed with amusement by the press. That all changed when he had the audacity to lease a performance space on Broadway. White theatre owners hired street toughs to break up Brown's performances. When police were called in, they ignored the white thugs and arrested the black actors. When the matter came to trial, a white judge ruled that Brown's negro company was not to perform Shakespeare again, limiting itself to lighter material.
Brown returned to his old location and abided by the court's order, but the damage was done. Continuing harassment forced him to shut down altogether in 1823. African American performers would not return to New York's legitimate stages until after the Civil War, and all-black productions would not successfully appear on Broadway until the next century.
(For more, see Marvin McAllister's White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003.)
Anti-black feeling did not prevent the rise of a new form of variety entertainment based on the villification of African American culture. White performers had been blacking up their faces and doing "colored" song and dance acts since Thomas Rice introduced the song (and character) "Jump Jim Crow" on variety stages in the early 1830's. In 1842, four unemployed actors banded together to present a full-length evening of blackface. Calling themselves The Virginia Minstrels (spoofing the then-popular Tyrolese Minstrels), their "plantation songs" and shuffling dances caused a sensation. This first minstrel show spawned a flurry of successful imitators. For decades to come, minstrel troupes toured the country, giving performances that usually included rudimentary one act musicals as part of an evening's entertainment. Horrifying by today's standards, minstrel shows were the first American-born form of musical theatre. (See Musicals101's special section on minstrel shows for more on this.)
Vague Definitions
In the 1840s, most American stage productions included some songs. Working and lower class audiences expected music as part of a night's entertainment, and shows aimed at these audiences were happy to oblige. Benjamin A. Baker's melodrama Glance At New York (1848) was a comic look at life on the streets of Manhattan, including petty thieves, gullible "greenhorns," and the street gangsters known as "Bowery B'hoys" -- most notably the semi-legendary roughneck "Mose." This show offered several musical numbers, including barroom ballads and other popular tunes. These songs had little if any connection to the plot, serving mainly to add atmosphere.
By 1850, original musicals were commonplace fare on Broadway, but no one was calling them "musicals" yet. A play with songs might advertise itself as a burletta, extravaganza, spectacle, operetta, comic or light opera, pantomime or even parlor opera. These classifications were so vague that The Magic Deer (1852) advertised itself as "A Serio Comico Tragico Operatical Historical Extravaganzical Burletical Tale of Enchantment" just to make sure potential ticket buyers got the point. At the time, Broadway theatre companies ran varied repertories, so it was rare for a single production to rack up more than a dozen performances. The scripts for these disposable entertainments are long-since lost, so we cannot be sure exactly what they were like.
The Seven Sisters
As New York City's population boomed, the demand for more ambitious entertainments grew. Riding the crest of this new cultural wave, actress-manager Laura Keene became one of the first nationally recognized stars of the American stage -- and the first American woman to succeed as manager of her own troupe. With a strong business sense and versatile stage talents, she produced and starred in a series of popular comedies and musicals in her theatre at 622 Broadway (just above Houston Street).
After setting Broadway's first "long-run" musical record with a 50 performance hit called The Elves (1857), Keene astounded New York when her "musical burletta" The Seven Sisters (1860) racked up an unprecedented 253 performances. Keene starred as one of seven female demons who come up from hell to go sightseeing in New York. The show included several patriotic tableaux hosted by Uncle Sam himself, including a grand parade of thirty-four chorines as the states celebrating the union, and a finale that featured George Washington rising from his tomb. The score borrowed various popular songs, including the minstrel classic "Dixie."
With its heady blend of patriotic fantasy, spectacular sets, and a "transformation scene" (where the stage set changed in full view of the audience), The Seven Sisters was a precursor to the more widely remembered hits that came later that decade. After the North was routed in the first Battle of Bull Run, any celebration of the American union rang hollow, so Keene closed the show. Because the heavy stage machinery required by The Seven Sisters made touring impractical, the show had no afterlife. Oh, how different things would be after the Civil War.
The Civil War
During the Civil War (1861-1865), most theatrical troupes remained in the more populous and prosperous North, but actors were often allowed to cross the battle lines to provide entertainment on either side. After an initial financial panic, New York City saw a marked increase in theatrical attendance as people looked for lighthearted distractions. Broadway's wartime musicals ranged from outright fantasies (Cinderella) to topical burlesques (King Cotton, or the Exiled Prince).
Laura Keene's troupe offered eight musicals as part of their ongoing New York repertory, until a downturn in New York's economy forced Keene to give up her theatre and take a repertory of non-musicals on tour from 1863 onwards. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 while watching Keene's performance in the popular comedy Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C.
After the war, the nation and the musical stage faced a time of extraordinary redefinition. In 1866, two productions set the course for the American musical theatre's future. The first (which is rarely noted) came in January, when a double bill entitled The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post became the first known Broadway production to call itself a musical comedy. Since no libretto or score is known to survive, we can't be sure what this material was like, but the very use of the phrase "musical comedy" shows change was in the air.
The second noteworthy theatrical event of 1866 came in September. Some have called this production "the first Broadway musical," which it clearly was not. However, The Black Crook was America's first bona fide musical blockbuster.