Legitimate Theater Research Articles

Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, by Lee Jackson

Reviewed by: Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment by Lee Jackson Peter Bailey (bio) Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, by Lee Jackson; pp. xii + 304. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, $30.00. In this congenially informative study, Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, Lee Jackson tours the major sites, promoters, performers, and publics involved in the dramatic growth of Victorian entertainments. The music hall is the lynchpin account occupying the first third of the book; further chapters cover the commercialized dance scene, the pleasure garden, and the exhibition ground; concluding excursions to the seaside and football ground move beyond the book's main focus on London. The gin palace, a novel enhancement of the pub, foreshadows the music hall in the opulence of its amenities amid the cramped and dismal conditions of city life in the 1840s. Jackson captures the alluring ambience of its "gaslight and gilding," its efficient service and logistics likened by contemporaries to the new retail stores of the day (6). The same sources labeled gin palace proprietors as capitalists, a term and phenomenon Jackson seems to resist. Pubs were also the site of the traditional "free-and-easy," or local amateur entertainments that expanded into singing saloons to accommodate surging demand from the growing working-class population (33). Crucial for business were annual licenses for music and dancing and the sale of alcohol. These were contested by temperance and moral reform lobbies, who charged the halls with drunkenness and prostitution encouraged by licentious songs and performances. Jackson pays new attention to the magistracy in the ongoing struggle. The music hall, Jackson emphasizes, was "the century's greatest entertainment innovation" (33), and he re-examines the mythical figure of Charles Morton of the Canterbury Hall in suburban Lambeth as "Father of the Halls" (61). Morton's "ostentatious respectability" is credited with countering the music hall's dubious public image as the haunt of prostitutes and drunks, attracting working-class families, middle-class visitors and respectable females with more refined professional entertainment (58). Performers in a professionalizing work force played several halls across town a night in the "turns system," and the first national stars emerged (61). Competition from the new halls provoked fights over artistic trespass with the legitimate theater, as well as continuing charges of obscenity and a government enquiry in 1866. Jackson demonstrates how the halls' signature comic song exploited its sexualized double entendre to the delight of the crowd and exasperation of reformers. He also revisits notorious clashes between managements and [End Page 126] reformers, including the controversy over prostitution at the Empire in Leicester Square in 1894, which the young libertine Winston Churchill riotously joined. By then music halls were the prime site of a mass entertainment industry: they were purpose-built variety theaters, corporately financed and managed, truly palatial in size and appointments, and they attracted audiences in the thousands. Jackson stops short of any comparatively sustained study of the very institutions that contemporaries and historians branded as such whose "invention" is foregrounded in the book title. Jackson breaks new ground in examining the commercial dance scene, from genteel provincial assembly rooms to London's louche casinos and the notorious Argyll Rooms, to Blackpool's grand ballrooms for the working classes at the end of the century, though a mass dancing public was not realized until after the First World War. Pleasure gardens and their dancing platforms are followed by accounts of exhibition grounds of varying success that added entertainment to the more high-minded formula of London's Great Exhibition. Among the showmen entrepreneurs awarded heroic stature by Jackson, Imre Kiralfy is singled out for his White City, a vast exhibition site in 1890s suburban London, pronounced "the zenith, the ultimate in mass entertainment … amusement on an industrial scale, using industrial methods—from the tollgate to the mechanized rides" (247). Seaside towns became popular holiday sites as cheap and rapid transport by steamship and railway drew a new working-class public that was eager...

“Art, Luxury, Elegance”: Crafting an Aesthetic of Aspiration in São Paulo’s Early Cinemas

Between 1907 and 1914, approximately one hundred cinemas opened their doors in Sao Paulo. Many cinema producers—the men who financed, managed, or owned cinemas—competed for spectators by reframing moving pictures as an art form, movie theaters as highbrow theaters, and moviegoing as an elite refinement. The article explains this triple process of cinemas’ legitimization, arguing that its consequence was the dissemination of an aesthetic of aspiration. The aesthetic of aspiration was part of the spectacularization of Sao Paulo, made possible by new technologies for visual and textual reproduction. Cinema producers saturated Sao Paulo’s press with the lexicon of beauty, marketing art, luxury, and elegance at affordable prices. Reconciling traditional notions of aesthetic pleasure with novel practices of consumption, they repurposed the forms of legitimate theater to broaden beauty’s reach and desirability. At the same time, cinema producers constructed a hierarchy of cinemas that mapped onto existing social hierarchies. They linked beauty to classed and racialized exclusivity and implied that both were constant universals. The aesthetic of aspiration thus promised simultaneous social mobility and stability through cultural refinement, a promise that spoke to the desires of an urbanizing upper class but also an incipient middle class. If modernity in republican Brazil was an elite “project,” Sao Paulo’s cinema producers show that, in a globally integrating city, modernity was also a commercial enterprise.

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film by William Paul

Reviewed by: When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film by William Paul Wes D. Pearce When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film. By William Paul. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 426 pp. $40 paper. With his new book, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film, William Paul has provided readers with a revelatory way to think and critique the early years of film exhibition in the United States. Focusing primarily on the first thirty years of film exhibition, and with special attention paid to New York City, Paul challenges many of the mythologies surrounding the early years of American movie exhibition. Paul's book is meticulously researched and is a rewarding and provocative exploration of a history many people think they already know. Much of Paul's analysis concerns the study of how the architecture of the "movie house" affected both the reception and the evolution of the exhibition of movies. That is, despite the "infinite reproducibility" of the motion picture, Paul argues, "how the image is situated in architectural space" (5) greatly affects spectatorship. I am old enough, although just barely, to remember when movie houses had just one screen, when the interiors of movie houses where awash with outrageous architectural details (such as a proscenium stage) and gloriously campy decor, and when the auditorium fell silent as the giant curtains swept open to reveal the movie screen and the start of something "magical." It is this connection between the site of exhibition and the reception of the "performance," or, as Paul suggests, an "[o]ngoing reciprocal relationship between movies and theaters, between text and context, [End Page 342] that has shaped both our expectations and our actual experiences of what a movie is" (19), that occupies the core of this book. When Movies Were Theater is more than just a revisionist history of early American film history; it is part architectural history, part popular culture history, and part theater history. Of particular interest to theater scholars is Paul's contention that, until the late 1920s, film exhibition and reception (and to an extent production) were inextricably connected to the aesthetics and reception of "legitimate theater."1 Paul challenges the notion that film and legitimate theater were immediate rivals and references many instances in the first thirty years of the twentieth century when film borrowed heavily from legitimate theater in order to legitimize the "moving images." For example, in chapter 2, "Store Theaters: A Radical Break," Paul draws upon several sources, including theater impresario/ moving picture exhibitor S. L. Rothapfel to detail the importance of presenting a varied and deliberate program of moving shorts. This successful type of exhibition programing copied aspects of vaudeville: "The vaudeville inheritance, then, was not left behind when movies moved from the vaudeville theater to a different home [the storefront theater]: rather, it is key to the development of motion pictures" (65). Earlier, Paul suggests that reception of motion pictures and the acceptance of late nineteenth-century staging practices (i.e., realism) both benefited from a new architecture that rejected the horseshoe auditorium and replaced it with an auditorium in which all the seats faced the "picture frame" stage. This new architectural arrangement provided a solution that solved "issues around realism for both live theater and motion pictures" (41). "Realism on stage and realism in motion pictures were oddly connected for contemporary viewers" (41), but the shared experience of the "new" theatrical architecture, be it the storefront theater for motion pictures or a state of the art live theater, allowed spectators to internalize the commonalities of space and reception rather than the differences of the artistic form. One last example of how motion picture exhibition drew heavily from legitimate theater practices to normalize the motion picture experience is found in chapter 5, "Uncanny Theater." In this chapter, Paul discusses the increasingly common practice of motion pictures being exhibited in legitimate theaters and the ensuing problem of space, insofar as "screens at the time ranged from twelve to twenty feet, [and] an 'ordinary stage opening' is … 'forty or fifty feet across'" (195). The solution was the evolution of the...

Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1920 by Holly George

438 OHQ vol. 119, no. 3 internment, and abundant illustrations, would be perfect for art history seminars, courses on immigrant cultural history, or courses exploring the broader effects of mass incarceration. The only drawback here is that Johns places Fujii solely in an American context. This reduces Fujii’s ongoing connection to the material culture of Japan, as shown in his paintings depicting mochi pounding or geta sandal, to an element of his “cultural identification” with Japan (p. 77). Issei were not culturally isolated from Japan. Their ongoing embrace of Japanese art, films, and literature was in fact central to many prewar social institutions. Finally, this book is evidence of important work being done by Densho, the Japanese Diaspora Initiative, and other institutions preserving the material culture of Japanese American history. The Wing Luke Museum’s conservation of a Fujii painting helped connect Johns and Kita, leading to this book and a touring exhibition of Fujii’s art. It is clear that these institutions are providing an invaluable platform for increasing scholarly collaboration and public understanding. Robert Hegwood Spokane, Washington SHOW TOWN: THEATER AND CULTURE IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, 1890–1920 by Holly George University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2016. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 280 pages. $29.95, cloth. Set against the backdrop of Spokane, Washington , between 1890 and 1920, Show Town elucidates the relationships between railroads , boosterism, newspapers, and shifting American mores. Holly George focuses her lens on the theatrical stage to “understand social relations and cultural norms, outside connections, and urban identities,” during a time when Spokane experienced a population explosion and its leaders negotiated the city’s identity (p. 6). Between 1880 and 1910, civic leaders and boosters sought to craft and sell an image of the city aimed at attracting the “correct” citizenry — an image that was distinctly white, privileged, and “respectable” (p. 20). The boosters’ mental construction of their boomtown, however, did not match Spokane’s reality of a largely itinerant working-class population. By combing through newspapers, archival records, census reports, and more, George sketches a narrative of these social and economic forces as they played out on Spokane’s stages. Show Town begins with the Auditorium Theater’s opening in 1890, which was Spokane ’s crowning theater achievement of civic promotion and a symbol to the upper class that they had achieved their vision of Victorian refinement and respectability. Civic leaders boosted the Auditorium as proof of Spokane’s urbanity, specifically eschewing the image of the raw wild west, and embracing, indeed copying, the sophistication of eastern metropolises such as Chicago and New York. While the Auditorium was to be the pinnacle of the respectable stage, in reality, the public had a “proclivity for the light and the naughty” (p. 17). Therefore, within a decade of its opening, the legitimate theater presented at the Auditorium was eclipsed by variety theater. Next, George discusses variety theaters, the salacious saloon-theater combo that became a battleground for Spokane’s soul. Variety theaters were spaces that mixed mainly male audiences, female entertainers and barmaids, and alcohol — a sometimes combustible combination . In a geographically isolated region of the Pacific Northwest, there was certainly an imbalance of the sexes, with more men than women. The city’s elite strived to craft Spokane into a respectable, middle-class “show town,” with the newspapers acting as the “guardian of public morals” (p. 55). But a key tension in this quickly growing city was the choice “between revenues and respectability” (p. 55). While leaders and boosters wanted to attract proper Victorian families, the birth of Spokane was predicated on the development of the railroads and the male-dominated industries of mining, logging, and farming. These resource-extraction industries depended on OHS Treasures Oregon Historical Society 1200 SW Park Ave., Portland, OR 97205 503.222.1741 • www.ohs.org Rediscoveries in the Museum Collection THIS GIRL’S PINAFORE (an apronlike dress), according to donation records, was made by Rachel Owens Davidson during her wagon journey to Oregon in 1846. The dress is made of blue-green colored cotton with a stylized floral vine print in white, yellow, green, and pink. The dress shows evidence of skilled hand-stitching and much less...

The Interactive Theater of Video Games: The Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor

In storytelling, films, and novels, is traditionally an observer, and by necessity a passive observer. In these media artists can often be seen as telling rather than sharing stories. To be sure, author provides space for a readers imaginative input, but you cannot change words. Both theater and, more recently, video games have been experimenting with, twisting, and turning on its head this traditional view of Unless you're Roger Ebert and believe that video games cannot and will never be art, video game designers, writers, and directors are starting to blur lines between interactive theater and games. (1) In recently released video game Gone Home, for example, is a young college student who returns home from Europe to find her parents missing and a note from her younger sister taped to front door. Reviewing game in The New York Times, Chris Suellentrop comments on work's gripping fiction, its closeness to literary realism. One of designers, Steve Gaynor, influenced by current hit Sleep No More, an interactive theater production to be examined later in this essay, observes that in Gone Home audience ... occupies same three-dimensional space as fictional inhabitants and that inside that space, players, like theatergoers, can choose where to focus their attention. Lucy Pebbles writing in The Observer speaks of game as if it were a video equivalent to audience's experience with Sleep No More: You piece together a sense of who everyone is and what happened through seemingly disconnected items and evidence hidden around house. And those connections are intentionally weak. It allows plot and conclusions to take place in mind of and not in action of game. For her, Gone Home takes gaming element away from screen, and into your head, making room for player/audience directly ... because they are alive to flexibility of choice and narrative. (2) We use video games and interactive theater here as reverse mirrors to raise larger aesthetic questions. Is this increased role for audience, whether offstage or at controls, ultimate goal, reality of both media? What happens to concept of plot or narrative when becomes a collaborator with playwright or with game designer? Is notion of author challenged, reduced, potentially rendered irrelevant with time, as audience's or player's control grows exponentially in these more recent experiments in theater and in video games? And is video game now a legitimate rival of, some would even go so far as to say successor to, legitimate theater which has been described, even dismissed as the fabulous invalid? (3) When filtering play through his or her own life experiences, needs, agenda, interests, preoccupations, spectator in theater has always been a player in loose sense of that word. But idea of spectator's having a direct role in action onstage or even a hand in plot, becoming a player in literal sense as it applies to interactive video games, is of more recent origin. The 1960s saw numerous productions that drew onstage, willingly or not, thereby blurring line between stage and house. As a result, performances were half scripted, half improv, latter coming into play when members joined actors onstage, their role ranging from nonverbal members of a crowd to new characters in ongoing story. Behind such experiments was principle of, even political need for, inclusivity, making spectator more than a passive receptor and challenging what innovators saw as stilted, even undemocratic theater of past. (4) An actor friend tells of a workshop performance in 1980s that offered a variation on such inclusion of audience. Those present were confronted with an actor dressed as Frankenstein's creature, standing motionless before them. …

Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors’ Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America Sean P.Holmes. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America Sean P. Holmes. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.In the shifting landscape and erosion of American labor unions, the actors' union known as the Actors' Equity Association (AEA) remains strong one hundred years after its formation. For actor to earn membership into AEA is respected distinction, identifying an actor as professional. Yet, as Sean P. Holmes explains in his introduction to Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors' Unionism in Early TwentiethCentury America, there is surprising recurrent gap in the histories of American theatre and American unionism that overlooks the initial rise and efficacy of this significant labor union. Holmes's book supplements this absence by exploring the emergence, success, and struggles of AEA prior to 1913 and in following years as it attempted to bridge the dichotomous division of actor as artist and laborer. By tracing the contentious relationship between theatre managers and actors in the early 1900s, examining the performative elements of the actors' strike in 1919, and investigating the failure of the AEA to claim stake in Hollywood, Holmes plots an engaging historical analysis that offers thorough detail and compelling examples. The book intelligently balances explaining how the AEA operated in its infancy and comparing why the union was unlike any other, particularly as it was composed of stage performers who continued to identify more closely with white-collar classes than the blue-collar proletariat (43).Through six chapters, which includes an epilogue and some photographs, Holmes provides comprehensive study clarifying why actors' unionizing was necessary but difficult as the profession is grounded in competition, individual success, and claims of artistic integrity that actors did not want to compromise. In the first two chapters the book navigates through the increasing commercialization of theatre and actors' strife under the managements of the Theatrical Syndicate and the Shubert brothers. These powerful management groups dominated New York theatre in the early 1900s and created ire amongst actors as they seemingly eliminated a notion of cultural hierarchy that sacral - ized the legitimate theater as high art (28). The AEA fought against unfair management practices, creating overdue protections for actors such as demanding pay for rehearsal time and aiding actors stranded on touring shows that abruptly closed. Holmes's examples of the plights of actors in these early years are numerous, well-researched, and entertaining. …

Acts of gaiety: LGBT performance and the politics of pleasure

Acts of Gaiety explores the mirthful modes of political performance by LGBT artists, activists, and collectives that have inspired and sustained deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change. The book explores antics such as camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside more familiar forms of legitimate theater. Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously by mainstream society, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of as a political value for LGBT activism. The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s-70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety that lay at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era and uncovering original documents long thought to be lost. Juxtaposing historical figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists (including Hothead Paisan, Bitch & Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers), Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest.

Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural ExchangeChinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. Alexander C. Y. Huang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+350.

<i>Alexander C. Y. Huang</i>, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange<i>Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange</i>. Alexander C. Y. Huang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+350.

Acting Out

In the turbulent context of interwar Polish politics, a period bookended by the right-wing nationalists’ repression of an ethnically heterogeneous state, several popular high-quality cabarets persisted in Warsaw even as they provoked and defied the nationalists’ harsh criticism. In their best, most influential incarnation, Qui pro Quo (1919–1932) and its successors, these literary cabarets violated the right’s value system through their shows’ insistent metropolitan focus, their stars’ role-modeling of immoral behavior and parodic impersonation, and their companies’ explicitly Jewish–Gentile collaboration. In the community of the cabaret, which was even more bohemian and déclassé than that of the legitimate theater, the social and ethnic antagonisms of everyday Warsaw society mattered relatively little. Writers and players bonded with each other, above all, in furious pursuit of fun, fortune, celebrity, artistic kudos, and putting on a hit show. This analysis details how the contents and stars of Qui pro Quo challenged right-wing values. Its shows advertised the capital as a sumptuous metropolis as well as a home to an eccentric array of plebeian and underworld types, including variations on the cwaniak warszawski enacted by comedian Adolf Dymsza. Its chief female stars—Zula Pogorzelska, Mira Zimińska, and Hanna Ordonówna—incarnated big-city glamour and sexual emancipation. Its recurring Jewish characters—Józef Urstein’s Pikuś and Kazimierz Krukowski’s Lopek—functioned as modern-day Warsaw’s everymen, beleaguered and bedazzled as they assimilated to city life. Qui pro Quo’s popular defense against an exclusionary nationalism showcased collaborative artistry and diverse, charismatic stars.

Using Intermodal Psychodrama to Personalize Drama Students’ Experience: Two Case Illustrations

J. L. Moreno (1889-1974), the founder of psychodrama, argued against legitimate theater, asserting it is a “rigid drama conserve,”1 a finished product of the preceding creative process. In particular, Moreno protested against the centripetal manner in which actors of legitimate theater assimilate a role from a written play: an external material, the written play, assimilates into the center, the actor. Moreno viewed such process as an imposition, for it is “not genuinely creative, but re-creative.”2 In line with this notion, Moreno decisively distinguished between the rehearsed art of “dramaturgy” and the extemporaneous art of “creaturgy.”3 Moreno also dissented with the scarcity of spontaneity in Stanislavsky’s prominent acting system of that time, in which, in Moreno’s view, spontaneity was limited “to the re-activation of [past] memories loaded with affect,”4 to “liberate the organism of the actor from cliches and make him as free and creative as could be for the task ahead.”5 According to Moreno, this intertwining use of spontaneous improvisation with rehearsed drama conserve involved Stanislavsky’s actors in a “deep psychological conflict”6—a state of being torn between the two dichotomous dimensions of dramaturgy versus creaturgy. To deconserve and revive the rigid theater of his time, in 1921 Moreno established the Viennese Theatre of Spontaneity, which later became the Therapeutic Theatre. It is only after Moreno immigrated to the United States in 1925 that his experiments with audience participation developed into the therapeutic method he called psychodrama. Morenian psychodrama is a group action method, an “art of the moment,”7 in which participants act out

When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture Elizabeth M. Sheehan Marlis Schweitzer. When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 320, illustrated. $39.95 (Hb). In When Broadway Was the Runway, Marlis Schweitzer sheds light on the multifaceted but little studied relationship between the fashion industry and commercial Broadway theatre from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In this lucid and detailed cultural history, Schweitzer uncovers connections and collaborations among theatre managers, department store owners, fashion designers, critics, advertisers, actors, and consumers. She establishes that the feminized phenomenon of fashion was a driving force in the development and reception of Broadway theatres as they became “fully commercialized urban spaces” (4). In turn, through her focus on fashion, Schweitzer demonstrates Broadway’s role in the development of modern consumer culture and in the formation of concepts and practices of labour, celebrity, beauty, subjectivity, and (especially) gender in America. When Broadway Was the Runway builds upon a substantial body of scholarship on the gendering of modern consumer culture in relation to the development of the department store, as well as work by scholars, such as Susan Glenn, Joel Kaplan, and Sheila Stowell, that examines how theatre shaped ideas and practices of femininity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and America. Schweitzer’s first chapter focuses on two key shifts in the late nineteenth century that enabled and encouraged collaborations between legitimate theatre and the fashion industry: the centralization of theatrical bookings and the growth of a female audience. Schweitzer shows that the same anxieties that shaped perceptions of department stores, anxieties about women’s economic power and about the culture of spectacle and consumption, also informed debates about the state of American theatre. Critics, and even actors, complained that the purported decline in the quality of the theatre was attributable to the “illiterate, candy-eating” women and “matinee girls” who attended plays merely to see actresses wear cutting-edge fashions (34). In fact, as Schweitzer contends, the stage emerged as a key source of sartorial knowledge for upper- and working-class women as they sought to fashion themselves as modern subjects. [End Page 423] In her second chapter, Schweitzer examines collaborations between theatres and department stores in the late nineteenth century. She argues that [a]s the most dominant, widespread entertainment form in the United States, with a demographic and geographic reach much greater than that of the individual department store, the legitimate theater and vaudeville, its popular counterpart, were well positioned to shape modern American consumer culture, especially tastes in fashion. (51) Moreover, she asserts that theatres’ efforts to attract consumers through displays of fashion worked to “naturalize the relationship between female spectatorship and consumption” and thus participated in “the production of the modern female consumer” (50, 53). At the same time, stages and, more specifically, actresses’ bodies became places where department stores and manufacturers could introduce brand-name goods, a phenomenon that dovetailed with the rise of realist dramas, which required costumes that audiences would believe might be found in contemporary drawing rooms and streets. Ties between theatres and the fashion industry hinged on the disciplining and commodification of actresses’ bodies, and Schweitzer draws on recent scholarship by Faye Dudden and Glenn (among others) to describe these phenomena. Discussing influential actresses, including Irene Castle, Sophie Tucker, and Aida Overton Walker, Schweitzer’s third and fourth chapters explain Broadway’s role in narrowing standards of beauty and tying consumption to social status. Yet When Broadway Was the Runway also follows Glenn’s work (as well as scholarship on theatre and the suffrage movement) by emphasizing how actresses’ engagements with fashion could work to expose the performativity of race, gender, and ethnicity or to enact controversial forms of female pleasure, desire, or self-expression. For example, Schweitzer maintains that actresses’ roles in choosing their own costumes “positioned women as artistic creators, producers of meaning, and interpreters of their own psyches” and, therefore, “encouraged women to engage in productive acts of imagination” (177). This dialectic between the possibilities and constraints for women in fashion and those for women in theatre animates the final chapter’s analysis...

Writing Lives and Writing History

Writing Lives and Writing History Charles L. Ponce de Leon (bio) Noralee Frankel . Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv + 300 pages. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Elliott J. Gorn . Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year that Made America's Public Enemy Number One. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xx + 268 pages. Chronology, notes, and index. $24.95. Biographies are more popular than ever, selling in numbers that have made them attractive to publishers and authors alike. Surprisingly, among the most popular are historical biographies. Often written by journalists, talented "amateurs" without doctorates, or Ph.D.s who do not have academic appointments, these books have helped to rekindle the lay public's interest in history. But most historians—especially younger scholars—avoid biographical projects. In part, this is because the professional compulsion to produce something new makes biography appear unsophisticated. It is also because producing a definitive one that meets the high standards of the profession—and tenure and promotion committees—can be a daunting task requiring many years of laborious research, a task that can very easily turn into a lifetime. The tragedy here is that biographies of historical subjects require a historian's touch. As good as some of the biographies written by amateurs are—and a few are truly exemplary—there are major deficiencies in many of them that can't be overcome by dogged research, felicitous prose, and effective plotting. This is because the insights and perspectives we gain from the professional study of history are essential to understand the past and make sense of the men and women who shaped it. Happily, over the past few years more historians have been entering the field, and the likely result of this will be an overall improvement in the genre and a more lively public discourse about our history. Professional historians are especially needed to produce biographies of figures in cultural history. Aside from books on writers and artists working in the realm of "high culture," this is a field that has long been dominated by amateurs and, even worse, fans—writers with such an abiding interest in their subjects that details about the life completely overshadow the "times." A [End Page 326] hallmark of many of these books is an emphasis on shopworn and now discredited clichés—the "Roaring Twenties," for example—that the author regards as appropriate historical context. Providing a more sophisticated context for a biographical subject can be difficult, though, and requires a deft touch and expert editorial guidance. Too much attention to context can derail a narrative and diminish the moments of existential drama that draw many readers to biography in the first place. It's a tricky proposition—remaining focused on the individual, the reason that most readers have picked up your book, while at the same time conjuring a suitably complete and nuanced context, material that is vital for a thorough understanding of your subject but that might turn off many readers and limit your audience. Noralee Frankel's new biography of the entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee is a laudable effort to strike such a balance. A huge star in vaudeville and burlesque in the 1930s and 1940s and the subject of the acclaimed musical Gypsy, Lee was a well-known celebrity in the mid-twentieth century. But until Frankel, she hasn't been the subject of a full-length biography. After reading Frankel's engaging and informative book, this seems all the more puzzling since her life was eventful and she was involved in more than just show business. One likely reason for this lack of attention is the particular branch of show business for which she is best known. Lee gained fame for her popular striptease act, and despite working in vaudeville, in the legitimate theater, in the movies, and on television, she was never able to transcend her identity as America's most famous stripper. Another reason may well be that Lee was a shameless self-promoter. Over the years, she continually reinvented herself and effaced her past as it suited her. This not only makes it hard to discover the real person beneath...

Gender and Theatrical Realism: The Problem of Clyde Fitch

Clyde Fitch was the most famous playwright of the early twentieth century, but today no one studies him. The disconnect between his fame in his lifetime and his obscurity after death points to a major historiographical problem, a problem that began in Fitch's own day. Fitch's numerous contemporary critics, many of whom were early proponents of theatrical realism, criticized his plays as effeminate, bound by the narrow conventions of the legitimate theater that relied on women as its predominant patrons. By contrast, realism, as the critics under-stood it, was masculine, bringing the gritty reality of what contemporary commentators regarded as the real world to the stage. Criticizing Fitch's feminine dramatic sensibilities became a way of prodding him toward a strained realism in his own plays. Fitch's story illustrates the close connection of realism to the gendered hierarchy that became an unconscious element in the determination of literary value. In dismissing Fitch as worthy of scholarly attention, current theatrical historians have followed Fitch's contemporary critics. Even as they have eviscerated the gendered standards of the early twentieth century, present-day scholars have retained the critical judgments and the generic categories that the gendered standards produced.

Cora, ou l'esclavage (review)

Reviewed by: Cora, ou l'esclavage Lesley Wright Barbier, Paul-Jules. Cora, ou l'esclavage. Ed. Barbara Cooper. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006. Pp. 216. ISBN 2-296-01575-1 Now best known for opera librettico-authored with Michel Carré, like Gounod's Faust or Thomas' Mignon, (Paul-) Jules Barbier (1825-1901) made his debut in legitimate theater. His play in verse for the Comédie-Française, Un Poète (1847) - which includes American characters and reference to slavery - was awarded a prize by the Académie Française. In the 1860s he penned several five-act dramas for the Ambigu-Comique, where Cora, ou l'esclavage had its premiere on August 21, 1861 , virtually coincident with the beginning of the American Civil War. Presented as a contemporary story, it attracted wide attention. Georges Bizet's comments catch the enthusiasm of the audience response: "Je suis sorti du théâtre profondément ému, et c'est de cette émotion que je viens vous remercier. Si la grotesque organisation sociale à laquelle nous sommes soumis pouvait nous faire oublier que nous avons du coeur, il suffirait de quelques oeuvres comme la vôtre pous nous le rappeler. J'ai donc pour votre drame mieux que de l'admiration, j'ai de la reconnaissance" (Dossier d'artiste, Jules Barbier, Bibliothèque de l'Opéra [F-Po]). Barbara T. Cooper, a specialist in nineteenth-century French drama and Alexandre [End Page 348] Dumas, père, has rescued Barbier's Cora, ou l'esclavage from oblivion with her recent critical edition (and several scholarly articles). She makes an excellent case for reading the play now, although she acknowledges its style is old-fashioned, its plot contrived and almost all the characters stereotyped. In these days of galloping digitization, high quality critical apparatus like hers is crucial to justifying editions of this sort. Making use of Barbier's papers (F-Po), Cooper discusses his references to travellers' commentaries, sociopolitical studies and scientific publications on slavery and race that grounded his drama in geographical, sociological and legal details for a public already familiar with Uncle Tom's Cabin. She also surveys Barbier's earlier manuscript drafts that reveal the work's genesis. Comments on Cora's initial reception appear to be based on only about a dozen of the numerous critics of that time, but excerpts of their reviews are partially reproduced in appendices. A fascinating selected bibliography of books and articles on slavery, theater, America and the press from the midnineteenth century as well as relevant modern critical sources follows the introduction. A useful addition here might be Mary Jean Speare's doctoral dissertation, The Transformation of Opéra Comique 1850-1880 (Washington University at Saint Louis, 1997), with its biographical essay on Barbier and an extended analysis of his collaboration with Michel Carré. Barbier's drama opens at a ball in Paris. There the beautiful, innocent, refined and fair-skinned heroine, Cora Gérard, attracts the gaze of the hero, the young French engineer Georges Bessières. Raised in France at her father's expense, she is unaware that she is part black and that her mother was a slave. She is also ignorant that she would be legally defined as property should she ever return to Louisiana. In this prelude, Cora is admired and courted. She finds out that her father, in financial straits, has also been injured and decides to go home, where during the next four acts she is ostracized and insulted, and eventually sold as a slave because of her father's insolvency. Georges abhors both slavery and racism. He believes that technology will provide the way to replace slave labor, just as it has revolutionized the lives of French peasants. He, too, travels to Louisiana. Barbier shows the evils of slavery without scenes of overt violence and without obviously black characters. He foregrounds the civilizing influence of French humanitarian ideals (particularly in the ironic comments of French-educated Curtiss, an American business partner of plantation owner Williams Johnson) and contrasts these with the racism and heartless mercantilism of the evil Kraig (another plantation owner) and the lustful Johnson. After many twists and turns, Cora's father is freed from...

Outside the Box: The Female Spectator, The Fair Penitent, and the Kelly Riots of 1747

This essay investigates the participation and agency of women performers and spectators in the eighteenth-century playhouse through an examination of a protracted conflict known as the Kelly Riots that took place in Dublin in 1747. This conflict, which was sparked by actor-manager Thomas Sheridan's attempt to end the custom of allowing male spectators access to the area behind the scenes during the performance, has traditionally been read as part of a renegotiation of the conception of the "gentleman." This article examines the role that women played in this conflict—not, as the standard interpretation has it, as endangered victims, but as members of a new constituency that appeared to be forming across lines of class, religion, and ethnicity, and which for that brief historical moment suggested an alternative model of identity that might threaten some of the power structures that were supporting and supported by the legitimate theater. The essay concludes with an extended reading of the performance that ended the first phase of the riots—the 19 March 1747 benefit performance of Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent—which offers a new perspective on the play as well as on the impact that the imposition of a stable and unbreakable curtain line had on the agency of the female spectator.

Keats in the Company of Kean

Company. [Compagnie, F]: an Assembly of People; a Society, or Body Corporate; a small Body of Foot commanded by a Captain; also Conversation, Fellowship. (1) Company. n.s. [compagnie, French; either from con and pagus, one of the same town; or con and panis, one that eats of the same mess.] ... 5. A number of persons united for the execution or performance of any thing; a band. (2) I. Keeping JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1817, JOHN KEATS WROTE FROM HAMPSTEAD TO his brothers George and Tom in Teignmouth, Devonshire. The two younger Keatses had left London to seek better environs for Tom, who would die from tuberculosis within a year. Left behind in the city to put the finishing touches on Endymion, John informed his brothers that he was busying himself with customary diversions--theater, reading, and dinners: I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two Brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior is to wit in respect to enjoyment--These men say things which one without making one feel, they are all alike; manners are all alike; they all know fashionables; they have a in very eating and in mere handling a Decanter--They talked of and his company--Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintances will never do for me ... (3) The letter derides the mannerism of Smith and his friends, members of the merchant class who aspired to cultural legitimacy through literary pursuits. (4) To Keats, speech and action betray a desire for conspicuous correctness. In the witticisms of these men, which make one start, and in the gestures of their very eating and drinking, Keats perceives an affectation that inhibits genuine interaction. Knowledge of fashionables and display of social distinction replace humour and feeling as the cohesive forces of the gathering. The diners' disdain for Kean and his another attempt to demonstrate distinguished taste, elicits from Keats a socially symbolic reversal in which comes to stand for those qualities the men themselves lack. (5) I take Keats's explicit alliance with Edmund here not only as an unapologetic embrace of a low social position against which critics commonly see him straining, but as an identification with the new modes of cultural experience embodied on the early nineteenth-century London stage. Kean's conspicuously vexed relationship to the situational possibilities offered by the dramatic text was, in Hazlitt's apt formulation, a radical departure from John Philip Kemble's personification of rhetorical mastery. Whereas Kemble's excellence resided in a demonstration of the single emotion called for by each dramatic scene, attracted audiences with an ability to present, in a moment, a mass of contradictory feelings. (6) With his pantomimic contortions and emotional outbursts, imported an illegitimate grammar of representation onto the Drury Lane stage, rendering the traditional relation between performer and audience uncertain and exposing the legitimate theater's increasing commercial reliance on lower-class modes of consumption. (7) His presence--not only in the theater but in London society--called attention to those low aspects of middle-class life that aspirants such as Smith, Hill, and Du Bois would have wanted to mask. The implications of Keats's emphatic desire to be of Kean's company, then, are greater than a simple difference of opinion between dining fellows. played a crucial role in shaping both Keats's attitudes towards his own social rank and his ideas about the changing nature of cultural experience. (8) Educated to an understanding of by Hazlitt's theatrical criticism, Keats's attention to the actor in letters and theatrical reviews in late 1817 and early 1818 coincided with and, I will argue, occasioned his thoroughgoing revision of the poet's role as a cultural intermediary for readers. …

The Tender Mother and the Faithful Wife: Theater, Charity, and Female Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

THE TENDER MOTHER AND THE FAITHFUL WIFE: THEATER, CHARITY, AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND SUSAN HARRIS I. NO PLACE FOR A LADY in 1745, thanks largely to the efforts of Irish obstetrician Bartholomew Mosse, the first maternity hospital in the British Isles was established in Dublin. A few years later, realizing that the Lying-In Hospital was chronically short of cash, and yet unwilling to give up his dream of expanding it, Mosse devised a novel solution. In his design for the hospital’s new site on Great-Britain Street, which would finally open in 1757, Mosse combined the hospital buildings with an entertainment complex that began with a pleasure garden and eventually included a suite of assembly rooms and the Round Room for which the hospital was eventually renamed.1 Money generated by the concerts, balls, and assemblies that took place on one side of the complex would pay for the medical care given to the indigent mothers who were delivering their children on the other. For modern readers, the pains of childbirth and the pleasures of entertainment belong to different worlds; the juxtaposition achieved by the construction of the Rotunda Hospital seems, if not inappropriate, at least bizarre. But to Mosse’s contemporaries, the relationship would have seemed natural enough. Throughout the first half of the century, polite amusements such as music, opera, and the theater had played an important role in raising money for Dublin’s charities, including and especially its hospitals. By the time the Lying-In Hospital first opened, Mercer’s HosTHEATER , CHARITY, AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN 18TH-CENTURY IRELAND 207 1 Only the pleasure gardens were completed during Mosse’s lifetime; they were patterned after London’s Vauxhall Gardens and included a coffee stall and concert hall (Browne 7, 10). After Mosse’s death in 1759, his successor Fielding Ould, carrying out plans that had been “devised by Mosse,” supervised the renovation of the pleasure gardens and the construction of the assembly rooms and the Round Room, which was completed in 1767 (Browne 20). pital, the Charitable Infirmary, and the Hospital for Incurables were all regularly benefiting from money raised by concerts and plays. Through charity benefits, theater in Dublin contributed significantly to the creation and maintenance of the public buildings that housed Dublin’s “hospitals and institutions for poor relief, such as almshouses and orphanages” (Greene and Clark 44). Many of the hospitals supported by theater benefits were established in the 1730s and 1740s, just as Dublin’s theaters were beginning to compete successfully with London’s; charity benefits, which generally drew large and brilliant audiences, provided important financial and cultural support for both institutions.2 The construction of the Rotunda Hospital’s new site simply materialized an already intimate relationship between cultural production and charitable institutions. What Bartholomew Mosse envisioned, and what would eventually be constructed along Great-Britain Street, was a permanent charity benefit. This article is an attempt to unpack the cultural significance of the charity benefit—for Dublin, for Ireland, and for the legitimate theater, but most of all for the women who were caught up in it as benefactors and patients, spectators and actresses, patrons and “proper Objects.” The phenomenon of the Dublin charity benefit suggests that linking the two public institutions most closely associated with the city’s resident “ladies of quality”—charities and the legitimate theater—helped further the AngloIrish élite’s attempts to reproduce Ireland-the-savage-wilderness as Irelandthe -civilized-nation. The construction of the Rotunda complex indicates that this process of reproduction was both discursive and material. The collaboration between private entertainments and public charities could reshape not only the identities of Dublin’s inhabitants but also the city itself—a city that was much under construction during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. My discussion will be grounded in a reading of a specific charity benefit : a 25 April 1745 production of Ambrose Philips’s The Distrest Mother at the Theatre-Royal in Smock Alley for the benefit of the Lying-In Hospital , which had just opened on its original site—a building that had once THEATER, CHARITY, AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN 18TH-CENTURY IRELAND 208 2 The period...

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (review)

Reviews493 how the enterprise in Lille and similar theatrical experiments failed. Of special interest is the book's extensive bibliography. The "selected" list, which is primarily in German, includes books, articles, dissertations, and unpublished manuscripts dealing with topics ranging from legitimate theater to puppet shows. The entries connecting art, media, and race are invaluable; and the bibliography points to another subject barely addressed in Theatre under the Nazis: cinema. This brief overview must conclude with a return to the book's first page and London's remarks about Mephisto—the 1936 roman à clefwritten in exile by Thomas Mann's son Klaus, who points a sharp pin at his onetime brotherin -law, the actor-director and Nazi collaborator Gustaf Gründgens. Klaus Mann's finely tuned novel was officially banned in Germany until 1980; the famous film version appeared one year later. The case, as London observes, demonstrates "that it was not easy to criticize those who had been directly involved in the theatre of the Third Reich." Robert Hinkel Western Michigan University Russell Jackson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 342. $60.00 casebound; $19.95 paperbound. The study of Shakespeare on film may seem an overnight success, but, like many such phenomena, its sudden success took decades. In the 1970s, the BBC created video productions of the canon, while Bernice Kliman and Ken Rothwell established The Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, following books on the topic of Shakespearean films from Jack Jorgens, Robert Hamilton Ball, and Roger Manvell. Throughout the 1980s, these reference tools were expanded. Increasingly VCRs and video disk players were available, which meant academic critics had access to a wider range offilm productions. A string oflively film versions appeared, building on the success of Kurosawa's Ran (1985), Branagh's Henry V (1989), and Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990). A generation of academics trained in both Shakespeare studies and film analysis began to look critically at Shakespearean movies. Moreover, a new interest in appropriation and intertextuality led a number of critics to consider the way Shakespeare's 494Comparative Drama works made their way onto the screen. Today, courses and books about Shakespeare on film seem to be everywhere, although one sometimes wonders about their merits. Douglas Brode's book about Shakespeare on film (Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Today [2000] ) has been widely and correctly criticized for its carelessness, while manywho offer"Shakespeare on Film" courses seem never to have seen a movie by Kozintsev,Welles, or Kurosawa. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film should provide much help, both by providing a firm basis for undergraduate and graduate courses, and by setting a standard ofexcellence against which one may judge newer books. Following an introductory essay by Russell Jackson in which he reminds the reader that film production is always about making—or losing—money, the book has three parts. The first, entitled "Adaptation and Its Contexts," includes four essays, pragmatic in tone. One by Jackson offers an overview of the history ofShakespeare on film, another by Michèle Willems concerns videotaped versions and the special problems which they pose. Two more examine specific plays, one by Barbara Freedman describing Richard III as an index to key moments offilm history and another by Harry Keyishian presenting Hamlet as a study example for questions about movie genres. A second part examines Shakespearean "Genres and Plays." Michael Hattaway considers the comedies. H. R. Coursen returns to the special case of Richard III. J. Lawrence Guntner considers Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear. Finally, Patricia Tatspaugh discusses the "tragedies of love": Romeo and fuliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. In part 3, the volume attends to auteurs, and the readerlearns about directors.AnthonyDavies, Pamela Mason, Mark Sokolyansky, Deborah Cartmell, and Samuel Crowl write respectively about Olivier, Welles, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Branagh. In the final section, a series ofessays address "Critical Issues." Carol Chillington Rutter examines the women characters on film, and Neil Taylor examines national and racial stereotypes. Disrupting the conventional academic triad ofgender, race, and class, this volume instead offers a third essay by Neil Forsyth on the "supernatural." Finally, Tony Howard writes about Shakespearean "offshoots," films that...

Class, Consumption, and Ethnic Performance in Vaudeville

During the last decade of the 19th century, vaudeville became the nation's most popular entertainment form, drawing unprecedented numbers of spectators and appealing to members of diverse socioeconomic groups by staging a rapid succession of acrobats, comedians, legitimate theater stars, pet-tricks, and dramatic sketches. In a cultural scene that Lawrence Levine and others tell us was marked by the historical separation between legitimate and mass cultural practices, critical observers (then and since) have greeted the diversity of vaudeville's audience and the range of its performance with a mixture of surprise and liberal enthusiasm.

The City as Playground: Culture, Conflict, and Race

The City as Playground: Culture, Conflict, and Race Elaine S. Abelson (bio) Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. By David Nasaw. New York: Basic Books, 1993. 312 pages. $25.00 (cloth), $14.00 (paper). Popular culture has been one of the most significant and enduring American exports in the second half of the twentieth century. Music, movies, television sitcoms and MTV, Coca-Cola and McDonalds, even the Levi’s that are no longer manufactured in this country, all carry the American label and, for better or worse, convey American cultural influence from one corner of the globe to the other. Although our cultural exports reflect our contemporary diversity and distinctive social conditions, they also reflect the contradictions and structures of historical con-flict in this country. Warren Susman wrote that the past is among the most important things about the present, and it is a segment of cultural past, the era of public amusements, that David Nasaw so ably elicits in his most recent book, Going Out. 1 A work of synthesis that freely incorporates and credits the recent scholarship of a number of well-known American social and cultural historians, Going Out recenters the historical narrative both to be [End Page 523] more inclusive and to focus on the complex interplay between popular culture and the ongoing social-racial tensions of American life. “They are all gone now,” Nasaw laments in his introduction—the vaudeville houses, movie palaces, world’s fair midways, the Coney Island Dreamlands and the Ebbets Fields—replaced by theme parks, shopping cum entertainment malls, and increasingly, suburban sports stadiums. The vital era of public amusements, born in the second half of the nineteenth century, comes to an end in this telling in the decades after the Second World War. Huge, general-interest audiences of another era fracture in this narrative of loss. What we have really lost, Nasaw suggests, and what are major themes of this book, is civic sociability and the public quality of urban leisure. Public, commercial, and decidedly urban, the new mass entertainments were the product of several independent but overlapping factors: the growth of the “downtown” and tourism, the development of rapid transit and electric street lighting, the mutual interests of real estate men and city officials, and rising wages and a shortened work day. Crucial to the creation of audiences for entertainment was a growing tolerance for amusement on the part of many liberal American Protestants and the grudging acceptance by many other Americans of the idea of pleasure and enjoyment without the protective coloration of education and self-improvement. 2 By the early 1890s, a night life that, according to Nasaw, had once comprised two extremes—opera, concerts, and legitimate theater for well-to-do patrons, or saloons and cheap entertainment for “sporting men”—was transformed by the emergence of vaudeville. The middle class, along with growing masses of first-generation white-collar workers, women as well as men, became avid consumers of vaudeville and similar commercial pleasures in cities across the country. But these pleasures were now morally acceptable and “decent”; drinking, smoking, and the more obviously tawdry ambience of the concert saloons were banished from the vaudeville theaters, as were prostitutes from the third tier. “Respectable” became the operative word for the new world of live, affordable, heterosexual entertainment, and suddenly, urban people, young people in particular, had some place “to go at night.” Going Out documents the “something for everybody” philosophy that took hold of commercial entertainment. Borrowing from almost every previous entertainment form, world’s fairs, amusement parks, and early moving pictures consciously and successfully sought to broaden their appeal and reach out to untapped audiences, particularly white middle-class [End Page 524] women. Shoppers at the large and centrally located department stores were particular targets for afternoon performances. Nasaw demonstrates that with the institution of the continuous vaudeville show (“After Breakfast Go to Proctors” became the operative slogan), even temporal boundaries became anachronistic. Elites were as necessary to the success of public entertainment as were ordinary wage earners. In a conscious attempt to attract the attention of the most desirable class of patrons while creating distance from earlier forms of popular...