The First Hundred Years of the American Lyric Theater

Abstract

For its first hundred years the American stage was primarily musical, and understanding this fact may help us understand theater in the United States today. An increasing number of studies concerning America's early theater is available. In addition, due to extensive graduate programs, local theater histories covering small areas have begun to appear (over 100 titles show up in Fredric M. Litto's American Dissertations on the Drama and Theater'). The result is that some interesting conclusions about American lyric theater may now be drawn. It is reasonably well known that writers of the eighteenth century created an almost unbelievable assortment of theatrical forms. Ballad opera and its offspring-the pasticcio and comic opera-found ever-larger audiences. Burlettas and farces, especially operatic or musical farces, and interludes and pantomimes (straight pantomimes, and speaking pantomimes, and serious pantomimes, each with distinctive characteristics) and rope dances and ballets and masques and extravaganzas and olios-all these were popular and took their places alongside the pastoral and comedy and tragedy. Add to all these the presentation of plays of the past and the repertory becomes awe-inspiring. If most of the dance forms originated in France, the singspiel in Germany, opera and pasticcio in Italy, and comic opera in England, nonetheless, America as recipient had a musical stage as the basis of her repertory. Those cities along the eastern seaboard where the drama throve in the 1700s saw a repertory in which well over half the works presented were musicals.2 Even straight drama was almost never performed without music. Comedies without songs, dances, and marches were virtually unknown. Tragedies without musical processions were rare. Where plays of the past had neglected to include music, the eighteenth century corrected the oversight by adding songs, choruses, and full musical accompaniment. Thirtytwo songs in The Tempest and thirty-three in A Midsummer Night's Dream were not atypical. Performers were expected, probably as an outgrowth of The Beggar's Opera