American Popular Entertainment Research Articles

Robert Heller’s Magical Mystery Tours

Robert Heller, a virtually unknown figure in music-historical accounts, trained in the 1840s at the Royal Academy of Music in London and gave the American premieres of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos with the Germania Musical Society. But he also pursued a parallel career in theatrical magic, using his musical virtuosity to elevate his social and artistic stature as a conjurer. Between 1852 and 1878, his magic act was seen by millions in Europe, East Asia, and the United States, including states and territories in the American West never visited by contemporary piano virtuosos like Thalberg and De Meyer. While magicians routinely incorporated music in their acts, Heller’s virtuosity set him apart from his conjuring peers, including those who were themselves musicians. Using his musical expertise, he blended the magic show with other popular forms of spectacle, including minstrelsy, burlesque, and the piano recital, framing the latter as an extraordinary attraction. Advertisements and accounts of his performances reveal the marketing strategies Heller employed to negotiate the crowded landscape of consumer culture and American popular entertainment, especially during the tumultuous years of the Civil War. These strategies included co-branding, altering the titles and descriptions of musical compositions (particularly “Dixie”), and joining forces with “Blind Tom” (Thomas Greene) Wiggins, the Black, enslaved musical prodigy whom Heller had briefly tutored; they performed together in Louisville during one of the magician’s last appearances in the South. Throughout the 1860s, Heller was influenced by gendered musical practices and regional attitudes toward race and politics, leading him to market his act specifically toward middle-class women, music lovers, Unionists, and those seeking postwar reconciliation.

Respectability, Prestige, and the Whiteness of Opera in American Popular Entertainment from 1890 to 1937

On 30 August 1902, The Capital, a Los Angeles magazine, informed its readers about the appearance of the Grand Opera Trio on the vaudeville bill at the Orpheum Theater. The author singled out one act: In presenting to Orpheum patrons this week the Prison Scene from “Faust,” the management of this popular playhouse has gone far beyond the top-notch mark of vaudeville and afforded Los Angeles an opportunity to hear one of the finest soprano voices on the coast today. Edith Decker is absolutely an ideal Marguerite, combining the facial and physical requirements of the character with a voice superbly rich and fresh, and her singing of the prison scene is something to remember. This is not superlative praise, but a well-deserved tribute to a singer of rare attainments. Abramoff is no longer the fine Mephisto of former years, but he shines with a reflected glory in having been the teacher of Edith Decker. Victor Claudio sings the tenor part.1

White Roots, Grey Flowers? Multiple Conceptions of Early Australian ‘Jazz’ and Pre-‘Jazz' History

Jazz history has largely been documented by individuals with deep respect and affection for the tradition, or a particular aspect of it. Their perspective has therefore often been aesthetic, qualitative and retrospective—who played the most ‘authentic’, virtuosic or innovative jazz and what were the black musical roots of the self-aware (if aesthetically divided) jazz movement that was manifest throughout the western world by the late 1930s? Consequently, the narrative of early jazz, in particular, is often reduced to a rigid pantheon of (mostly) male (mostly) African-American ‘Greats’, as epitomized in the controversial 2001 Ken Burns mega-documentary, Jazz. This article explores the different ways in which early Australian jazz-related history has been constructed by examining the perspectives or frames of reference adopted by Australian amateur and professional scholars, including collector-discographers, who have contributed to research into the ‘roots’ of what was perceived to be ‘jazz’ in Jazz Age (1918–1928) Australia. In examining the outcomes of their research, the article demonstrates that, far from being mysteriously transplanted from black New Orleans culture around 1918 like some exotic plant in a pot, so-called ‘jazz' and ‘jazzing’ in Jazz-Age Australia was largely the product of African-American-inflected white American and British popular entertainment, dancing and dance music trends, grafted onto a colonial history of blackface minstrelsy and the 1910s craze for Irving-Berlin-style ragtime song and dance music.

Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America AndreaMost. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America Andrea Most. New York: New York University Press, 2013.From the vaudeville stage to the cinema screen, we tend to assume American popular entertainment is unencumbered by religion: a free and easy realm reinvention. However, in Theatrical liberalism, Andrea Most argues for the Judaic dimensions of twentiethcentury popular entertainment.While historians have outlined the role of American Jews in establishing entertainment industries, Most argues the more radical proposition that American popular entertainment's celebration of the is a type of Jewish secularism. She seeks to identify and dissect the presence of, what she terms, theatrical within American popular culture, revealing its partial origins in Jewish faith. However, the project never fully convinces its reader because Most does not explore the personal beliefs of the cultural workers behind the scenes, making widespread claims about the influence of their faith ultimately unpersuasive.The most definitive summary notes that liberalism involves the embrace of theatricality as a viable social mode, the prioritizing of external action over internal intention, the celebration of self-fashioning as a uniquely American form of freedom, and the construction of a community based on obligations rather than rights (39-40). The author argues that liberalism arose as a distinctly American form during the turn of the twentieth century, which was enabled by the rise of entertainment industries and was concurrent with waves of Jewish immigration.For Most, the Judaic dimensions of liberalism are spiritual rather than ethnic. Although for centuries doctrinal reasons meant Jews lacked a distinct tradition, nevertheless, theatricality and reinvention have consistendy been read into some of the faith's central texts, as illustrated in Most's summary of the Genesis story of Jacob and Esau. Allegedly a product of this religious tradition, liberalism combined the salient features of Protestantism, liber alism, Judaic rituals and attitudes, and the inherent theatricality of a nation in formation (39). However, these other dimensions go underexplored. Most's discussion of liberalism feels imprecise and Protestant influences are largely overlooked.Chronological chapters reveal the transformation of liberalism through several case studies across the twentieth century. In her most convincing chapter, she analyses a range of Depression-era plays and films that celebrated the freedom of the theatrical, from the writing and adaptions of Edna Ferber's novels through to the backstage musicals of Warner Bros, and the freewheeling antics of Bugs Bunny. …

Sing a song of difference: Connie Boswell and a discourse of disability in jazz

AbstractAlthough a wheelchair-user and permanently disabled through polio, the southern American singer Connie Boswell was one of radio and vaudeville's biggest stars in the 1930s. She and her sisters were a compelling force in American popular entertainment for the first half of the decade; and when the group split in 1936, Connie carried on a solo career in radio, recording, film and television for another twenty-five years. Connie's unique position as the only visibly disabled ‘A-list’ female popular entertainer for most of the twentieth century – and one whose voice, both physical and musical, shaped the sound of jazz and popular music – makes her an obvious focus for any study that links popular music and disability. This essay is concerned with how disability may have operated as a discourse about and within Connie's chosen medium, jazz; and how disability studies can illuminate why the ways in which difference is figured in her work, initially a source of anxiety, could have also been a significant reason for her success.

"No Roof Except the Sky": The Rise and Fall of Airdomes in American Popular Entertainment

"No Roof Except the Sky": The Rise and Fall of Airdomes in American Popular Entertainment

Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression (review)

{ 156 } BOOK REV IEWS tainment drew stars away from the major circuits. These factors, as well as an unwillingness to adjust to the new economic landscape, resulted in the eventual disintegration of the monopolies. As with the preceding sections, Wertheim provides exhaustive financial data and first-person accounts of this demise , concluding his narrative with the death of Edward Albee in 1930. Wertheim’s account of the rise and fall of the Keith-Albee and Orpheum circuits is entirely straightforward in its approach, eschewing any theoretical underpinning. This sort of history doesn’t necessarily need that foundation, however, as its reliance on hard economic data and primary- and secondarysource accounts creates a clear and thorough narrative of a key period in American popular entertainment. Wertheim also declines to give any substantial analysis of the actual content of the acts that were being performed on the Keith-Albee and Orpheum stages, but again, this limitation is in keeping with the goal of the study. Vaudeville Wars ultimately overcomes its potential drawbacks by serving as a strikingly in-depth and comprehensive accounting of the economic history and managerial structure of big-time vaudeville. —TYLER AUGUST SMITH University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression. By Kristina Hinz-Bode. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. 292 pp. $45.00 cloth. Susan Glaspell (1876–1948), Pulitzer Prize winner, playwright, and novelist, was a founding member of the Provincetown Players and undoubtedly a significant figure on the theatrical scene in early-twentieth-century America. However, in the early 1980s she was virtually unknown to specialists of American theatre and American literature alike. In spite of the work done in the last thirty years by scholars intent on recovering the names of writers silenced by the patriarchal canon, and in spite of the surge of interest in Glaspell (see www.susanglaspell. org for recent publications and performances), Glaspell is still generally known only for the play Trifles or the short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” a rewrite of the earlier piece. Kristina Hinz-Bode’s Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression is a significant addition to Glaspell studies: it goes beyond not only Trifles but also the until recently dominant feminist approach to her work. The year 2006 also saw the publication of two volumes of essays, Disclosing Intertextu- \ { 157 } BOOK REV IEWS alities: the Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell (ed. Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo) and Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry (ed. Martha Carpentier), that approach Glaspell’s oeuvre from a variety of perspectives .And even earlier, J. Ellen Gainor’s Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–48 (2001) had concentrated on a cultural study of the plays, albeit with a strong feminist stance. Hinz-Bode, a youngergeneration scholar, refutes the purely feminist interpretations that second-wave critics have favored and focuses instead on the metaphysical or philosophical substratum of selected Glaspell plays—a stance that permits her to highlight the complexity of the playwright’s vision and to place her firmly within the context of early-twentieth-century thought and artistic expression. Contemporary reviewers of Glaspell’s plays were often disconcerted by what they considered an excess of verbosity and also by a seemingly ambivalent attitude toward human relationships. Glaspell’s plays were considered“talky,”as were those of G. B. Shaw, but her use of language to reflect the process of creation of meaning has generally been recognized by feminist critics as an example of écriture féminine some fifty years before the French theorists coined the term (see Marcia Noe,“The Verge: L’Écriture Féminine at the Provincetown,”in Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, ed.Linda Ben-Zvi [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995]). On the other hand, critics have agreed that one of Glaspell’s principal themes is the problem of individual freedom in society : in an early short story (1914), her young protagonist questions whether she should accept the “life in chains” that “affection and obligation” seemed to impose on her (“The Rules of the Institution,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, January 1914, 208), and these words are repeated in one...

Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (review)

Reviewed by: Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen Andrea Most (bio) Henry Bial. Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 195. $20.95 (Pb). Henry Bial’s Acting Jewish addresses the thorny and complicated question of how Jewishness manifests itself in American popular entertainment. Using a performance studies approach that privileges performance history and audience responses to films, plays, and television of the last sixty years, Acting Jewish argues that mainstream American entertainment “is a crucial site for understanding the relationship between Jews and American culture” (5) and that the particular strategy of what Bial calls “double coding” allows for a conversation about identity that is based “neither on questionable essentialisms nor on a politics of victimhood” (6). Double coding describes how the same cultural product can be read differently from two different reading positions: Jewish and gentile. The act of “reading Jewish” is a primary way of “acting Jewish” and even, Bial asserts, one of the most important means by which Jewish identity is established in American culture today. In other words, to “get” the Jewish codes of Seinfeld or Fiddler on the Roof serves to “affir[m] one’s membership in an imagined community of American Jews” (20). Those who do not “read Jewishly” can enjoy the same shows without experiencing this act of identification. Bial takes care to point out that the definitions of Jewish and gentile, as used here, are not essential or racial; rather, to respond “Jewishly” to a work of popular culture, one must simply be literate in the requisite cultural codes. Because of its methodology, Acting Jewish illuminates aspects of canonical works of American Jewish culture that might be overlooked by relying exclusively on textual analysis. For example, Bial makes fresh observations by focusing on questions of casting and acting styles. He argues that Death of a Salesman has been read as Jewish when Willy Loman was played by a Jewish actor because Lee J. Cobb’s or Dustin Hoffman’s Method acting –which draws on personal experience to build a character – uses the actor’s Jewish background and therefore creates a Jewish sensibility in the performance. Similarly, Bial fills important gaps in our understanding of Fiddler on the Roof by exploring the notably different performances of Tevye by Zero Mostel (on the Broadway stage) and Topol (in the mass-market film). Explaining the history that each actor brought to the role, Bial contrasts [End Page 638] Mostel’s shtetl sentimentality to Topol’s more robust, almost macho performance. The use of audience response to make the central argument of Acting Jewish proves to be less convincing, however. Reception studies are notoriously problematic because the evidence for audience response is so difficult to acquire. The “audience” for Bial seems to be almost exclusively reviewers for major publications and scholars of Jewish culture. While their responses do teach us something about the ways in which culture writers respond to Jewish-inflected works, it is not safe to infer conclusions about identity formation among American Jews more generally from these select and self-selecting responses. Furthermore, although Bial aims to identify both “Jewish” and “gentile” responses, a large majority of the responses he cites are “Jewish” ones. In his discussion of the 1950s sitcom The Goldbergs, for example, he notes how certain Jewish aspects of the show resonate with Jewish scholars, but then asks, “Do they resonate in the same way for an audience unfamiliar with these coded indicators of Jewishness?” (48). He implicitly answers this question in the negative but provides no explicit evidence. Similarly, Bial makes sweeping statements about the response of audiences to Annie Hall: The significance that viewers attach to Alvy’s “specific Jewish personality” is conditioned in large part by the cultural knowledge and expectations they bring to the film. Members of the Jewish audience . . . respond to the familiarity of the character. For them, Allen’s appeal lies in his ability to observe the humor in everyday situations. But audiences not familiar with Jewish performance codes see the intercultural encounter from the point of view of Annie. (98) This statement is unsupported by evidence, and...

THE AMERICAN SHOW PRINTER: CURTISS SHOW PRINT AND HATCH SHOW PRINT

The history of American popular entertainment is documented in many different ways, ranging from materials such as correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, company records, oral-history interviews, and autobiographies that directly tell the story of performers, business managers, and behind-the-scenes crew, to material created by others and used for the promotion of the artists. In this second category fall the subjects of this article, two letterpress show printers, Curtiss Show Print of Continental, Ohio, and Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee. There were many show printers across the country from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, but the majority of these companies have closed, and their type and printing blocks have been discarded or dispersed. Although other printers altered their operations because of changes in technology that allow work to be done in less laborious ways, Curtiss Show Print and Hatch Show Print are still working and using the old equipment and techniques. Both Nyle Stateler, owner of Curtiss Show Print, and Jim Sherraden, manager of Hatch Show Print, realize the historical and research value of their show-print materials, and both have taken steps to save those materials, forging institutional relationships that are commitments for the preservation of their show-print work.

The Fockerized Jew?: Questioning Jewishness as Cool in American Popular Entertainment

This essay examines the recent upsurge in overt Jewish identity in American popular culture, using the film Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequel Meet the Fockers (2004) as a case study to demonstrate how the Jewish Jew is no longer avoided and when portrayed does not fall victim to stereotyping. While looking at these two films together, I describe a broader evolution in media from the de-ethnicized Jew, and for that matter the de-ethnicized Jewish actor, to performers flaunting (and thereby celebrating) Jewishness in a Christian-centric society that has found acceptance of the Other. The paper also questions what about Jewishness is cool and describes how viewer subjectivities influence the perception of coolness.

Introduction: Popular Entertainment and American Theater Prior to 1900

Although Col. George A. Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn on 25 June 1876 was anything but theatrical event, it certainly became one very soon after. By middle of August, theatergoers in New York City were flocking to Wood's Theatre for Harry Seymour's blood-and-thunder re-enactment Sitting Bull; or, Custer's Last Charge. (1) Meanwhile, out on Plains scout and part-time actor and playwright named William F. Buffalo Bill accidentally found himself on 17 July face to face with Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair. The two exchanged single, simultaneous blast of gunfire, which only survived. Taking his opponent's scalp in hand, almost immediately began to weave brief skirmish into larger and more complex battle of deliberately taken revenge for Custer, with as hero. Moreover, according to most reports, fought while decked out in a stage costume of black velvet slashed with scarlet and trimmed with silver buttons (2) Although he was at this particular moment in employ of U.S. Fifth Cavalry, had by this time become something of celebrity on East Coast for his highly stylized (some might say cliche-riddled) touring stage reenactments of his own exploits. Thus, his wearing of stage costume both arises from his ongoing interest in performing frontier persona and inflects event with theatrical note. And in autumn of 1876, further embellished importance of skirmish, and hence his reputation, by starring in New York in play he had commissioned about his killing of Yellow Hair called The Red Right Hand, or The First Scalp for Custer. The printed programs for this show reportedly included poetry and news releases about [the Little Big Horn battle], by which Cody and his managers traded on audience's belief that were transmitting news from front, representing events actually unfolding on plains even as spectators sat watching them in Boston, New York, or Omaha. (3) The transmutation of current events into theater represents but one ingredient in United States' long history of imbuing popular modes of entertainment with matters of cultural or national consideration. As further example of this phenomenon, consider Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787), where character Jonathan goes out in search of circus-like place he had heard of where a hocus pocus man ... could eat case knife only to find himself in proper playhouse watching Sheridan's School for Scandal The joke is that when they lifted up great green cloth Jonathan naively believed he and rest of audience were merely looking right into next neighbor's house (4) The Contrast is generally credited as the first comedy written by an American to be produced professionally and character of Jonathan as first instance of now-familiar Yankee rube character type. (5) Jonathan's misapprehension of nature of space in which he finds himself one evening once again points to relationship between popular theatrical entertainment and crafting of very frameworks within which knowledge of world could be organized or produced. Which is to say, Jonathan's search for performer of tricks leads him and, by extension, those who have come to theater to watch an actor perform this role to lesson in theatrical verisimilitude. In 1993 Gary A. Richardson observed that Whether out of religious, aesthetic, or ideological bias, nation's cultural arbiters have tradition ally been, at best, ambivalent about America's drama and its functions. This is especially true of drama before O'Neill, about which prevailing opinion seems to be that less said better. (6) Fortunately, this assessment is far less true than it may have been decade ago, for much admirable scholarship has in recent years given serious consideration to American theater prior to advent of literary Modernism. (7) Nevertheless, compelling and important questions still remain, among them questions about extent to which developments in American popular entertainment prior to 1900 contributed contemporaneously to culture's questions about such matters as high- and lowbrow art, popularity versus artistic quality, and representation of political and social events as entertainment. …

Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Edited by W. T. Lhamon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003; pp. 459. $39.95 cloth.

As the first published collection of early blackface-performance texts, W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture provides scholars of American popular entertainment with a much-needed sourcebook. These texts are collected in service of the book's larger purpose of evaluating the career of Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the first superstar of blackface performance, who became synonymous with his most popular character, Jim Crow. All the songs and plays gathered in Jump Jim Crow were performed by Rice (with the exception of the “street prose” section, which includes two contemporary, pamphlet biographies of Rice). The texts work with Lhamon's introduction to tell the story of Rice's career, which is a case study of the larger topic: the history of blackface performance before the rise of the minstrel show in the mid-1840s. As the plays collected here reveal, Rice's performance of blackface was fundamentally different from minstrel-show performance on many levels. The most important difference, Lhamon argues in his introduction, is that Rice's performances encouraged the white audience to identify with his blackface character, to laugh with him rather than at him.

From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830-1910 (review)

Reviewed by: From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910 Annemarie Bean From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910. Edited by Robert M. Lewis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; pp. viii + 384. $45.00 cloth. Time to confess. When I first look at a scholarly book I have agreed to review, I skim it. I read the preface, the introduction, and then I decide which section or chapter I will delve into, choosing based on my interest areas and avoiding a linear processing of thesis. Eventually I do read the entire work, but I often find I am most interested in that which is most relevant to my academic interests. True to form, I intended on reviewing From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830-1910 with my usual, peculiar approach. But I was unable to maintain my critical methodology. From Traveling Show to Vaudeville was a gripping read for me, and I believe would be for others of the less than nineteenth-century theatre history inclined. Within each of the eight sections, editor Robert M. Lewis (a lecturer in American history at the University of Birmingham) has created a dialogue about a particular form of popular entertainment through his multifaceted materials and their placement. Overall, the great strength of this collection is that it puts you in the moment of performances. Lewis thoroughly and wonderfully recreates the conversations around these entertainments in their [End Page 137] lived moment. As he states in the introduction, "From Celebration to Show Business," he looks to each section to prove the effectiveness of live performance. In a 150-year era, beginning with free public spectacles in the early republic and ending with the advent of motion pictures with sound, "live performance dominated American popular entertainment" (1). The eight sections—The Dime Museum, Minstrelsy, The Circus, Melodrama, "Leg Show" Burlesque Extravaganzas, The Wild West Show, Summer Amusement Parks, and Vaudeville—are all expertly constructed. For example, in the first section on The Dime Museum, Lewis has included journalists' accounts of visiting dime museums, P. T. Barnum's own broadside and promotional copy for his public, excerpts from autobiographies by dime museum performers such as General Tom Thumb (Charles S. Stratton), photos of the "Wild Men of Borneo" (Hiram and Barney Davis) and the "Bearded Lady of Geneva" (Madame Josephine Boisdechene Clofullia), and essays by wonderful skilled writers like Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), and Horace Greeley on the attractions and atrocities exhibited in the dime museums. Equally important, Lewis has written pithy and contextualizing introductions to each piece, so that the reader has an idea of the complexity behind the words and images. The introduction to Greeley's piece on the dime museums, "Disgusting Exhibitions," tells us that Greeley was friendly with Barnum, and felt that many of the dime museums could reach for a higher standard, even if the New York City public demanded entertainment more "monstrous" (46). The book contains great "amazing but true" stories to tell in class. Some of my favorites: The Transcendentalists go to the circus—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau recount their contacts with the circus and an animal menagerie. Melodrama playwright and director Owen Davis's formula for melodrama, which includes descriptions for all four acts as follows: "ACT I—Start the trouble. ACT II—Here things look bad. [. . .] ACT III—The lady is saved by the help of the Stage Carpenter. (The big scenic and mechanical effects are always in ACT III.) ACT IV—The lovers are united and the villains are punished." [188] Maxim Gorky's critique of Coney Island, entitled "Boredom," published in 1907. When speaking of the rides, Gorky writes: "Joyous screams are heard, which strangely remind one of the merry yelp of a puppy let to the floor after he has been held up in the air by the scruff of his neck." [312] I am teaching Introduction to Theatre here (again) this fall, and I am looking forward to having my students read a section of this book, accompanied by primary materials from my own collection and available on web sites such as the...

‘On with the Show’: American Popular Entertainment as Cultural and Social History

AbstractThis piece argues that American historians of commercial amusements before television have, in recent years, published important work that places their chosen entertainment forms within a reliable cultural and historical framework. Showman and promoter P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York is identified as central to the history of American show business from minstrelsy to vaudeville.

Weird & wonderful: the dime museum in America

Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics and stuffed animals--a dazzling assortment of attracted the gaze of the nineteenth-century spectator at the dime museum. This distinctly American phenomenon was unprecedented in both the diversity of its amusements and in its democratic appeal, with audiences traversing the boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and class. Andrea Stulman Dennett's Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America recaptures this ephemeral and scarcely documented institution of American culture from the margins of history. Weird and Wonderful chronicles the evolution of the dime museum from its eighteenth-century inception as a cabinet of curiosities to its death at the hands of new amusement technologies in the early twentieth century. From big theaters which accommodated audiences of three thousand to meager converted storefronts exhibiting petrified wood and living anomalies, this study vividly reanimates the array of museums, exhibits, and performances that make up this entertainment institution. Tracing the scattered legacy of the dime museum from vaudeville theater to Ripley's museum to the talk show spectacles of today, Dennett makes a significant contribution to the history of American popular entertainment.

"A Hero! Is Dot a Business?" Vaudeville Comedy and American Popular Entertainment

Except for silliness of their titles, Whirl-i-Gig, an 1899 Broadway musical show produced by comedy team of Weber & Fields, and Whoopee!, a 1930 Hollywood film comedy, would seem to have little in common. Separated by two decades of entertainment history and created by two distinct cultural media with their own peculiarities and conventions, Whoopee! and Whirl-i-Gig nevertheless were cut from same bolt of cloth. They exemplify what was arguably most salient aspect of American popular entertainment from late 1880s to mid-1930s-its hybrid nature. Whirl-i-Gig and Whoopee! both relied upon a mixture of aesthetic forms and practices, Both incorporated remnants of minstrel stage, both had elaborately staged chorus numbers, both were social comedies that simultaneously poked fun at WASP establishment and at ethnic outsiders. Finally, and most significantly, both featured romantic plots whose narrative conventions were disrupted by anarchical zaniness of what film scholar Henry Jenkins calls the vaudeville aesthetic: fast-paced word play, gags, and physical humor. The hybrid nature of American popular culture is often mentioned but rarely analyzed. A few film historians have examined interaction between vaudeville stage and silent screen, and historians of popular entertainment have acknowledged, but have not systematically explored, appropriation of vaudeville's values, forms, and themes by musical comedy, radio, and talking film.1 Although evolution of American popular entertainment

The American stage: social and economic issues from the Colonial period to the present

List of illustrations Notes on the contributors Preface Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller Acknowledgements Introduction: American theatre history scholarship Oscar G. Brockett 1. The theatre and its audience: changing modes of social organisation in the American theatre Douglas McDermott 2. Puritan mercantilism and the politics of anti-theatrical legislation in colonial America Peter A. Davis 3. 'Lady-managers' in nineteenth-century American theatre Vera Mowry Roberts 4. Hustlers in the house: the Bowery Theatre as a mode of historical information Rosemarie K. Bank 5. Museum theatre and the problem of respectability for mid-century urban Americans Bruce A. McConachie 6. Social awareness on stage: tensions mounting, 1850-1859 Walter J. Meserve 7. The development of the American theatre program Marvin Carlson 8. The Hyers Sisters: pioneers in black musical comedy Errol Hill 9. Money without glory: turn-of-the-century America's women playwrights Felicia Hardison Londre 10. 'For laughing purposes only': the literature of American popular entertainment Brooks McNamara 11. E pluribus unum: Bernhardt's 1905-1906 farewell tour Stephen M. Archer 12. Commercialism glorified and vilified: 1920s theatre and the business world Ronald H. Wainscott 13. Quicksilver revisited: a portrait of the American stage in the 1930s Charles H. Shattuck 14. The economic structure of the Federal Theatre Project Barry B. Witham 15. The American Repertory Theatre (1946-1947) and the repertory ideal, a case study Daniel J. Watermeier 16. Sojourning in Never Never Land: the idea of Hollywood in recent theatre autobiographies Thomas Postlewait 17. Consuming the past: commercial American theatre in the Reagan era Alan Woods 18. Narrative strategies in selected studies of American theatre economies Margaret M. Knapp 19. Multiculturalism versus technoculturalism: its challenge to American theatre and the functions of arts management Stephen Langley 20. Checklist of selected books on American theatre, 1960-1990 Don B. Wilmeth Index.

Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The "Coon Song" Phenomenon of the Gilded Age

American Popular Entertainment in 1977, the performer-scholar Max Morath noted, with reference to the song of the 1890s, that the phenomenon right now resides exactly where it should-on the back shelves of the pop museum collecting dust. It's a sociological curiosity and nothing more. 1 While one might well sympathize with the liberality of Mr. Morath's sentiment in his consignment of a major pop culture phenomenon to the dustbin of long dead, distasteful exotica, it has become clear that few contemporary students of American culture accept the implication that because racist phenomena are distasteful they are no longer important. It may even be said that the ongoing reassessment of the meaning of the coon song craze (of which this essay is a part) would suggest that the national fascination with coon songs between circa 1890 and 1910 underlay a major shift in white perception of blacks; a shift whereby existing stereotypes came to be either confirmed or embellished and indelibly encoded as part of the semiotic system of the period.2 The stereotyping of black Americans in the popular culture did not, of course, begin with coon songs. The British music halls of the eighteenth century occasionally introduced comic black figures, some of which were exported to Colonial America where, through the process of ascription, a set of assumptions about black characters would come to be accepted as a

The Language of American Popular Entertainment: A Glossary of Argot, Slang, and Terminology

The Language of American Popular Entertainment: A Glossary of Argot, Slang, and Terminology

American Popular Entertainment: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment. Edited by Myron Matlaw. Westport, Connecticut & London: Greenwood Press, 1979. 338 pp. - Blacks in Blackface: a Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows. By Henry T. Sampson. Metuchen, NJ & London: Scarecrow Press, 1980. 562 pp.

American Popular Entertainment: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment. Edited by Myron Matlaw. Westport, Connecticut & London: Greenwood Press, 1979. 338 pp. - Blacks in Blackface: a Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows. By Henry T. Sampson. Metuchen, NJ & London: Scarecrow Press, 1980. 562 pp.