Popular Theatre Research Articles

To brand or not to brand a product placement? Evidence from a field study of two influence mechanisms of positive portrayals of alcohol in film.

We propose that branded and non-branded product placements in movies are interpreted differently and that a movie with unbranded alcohol portrayals influences audiences' alcohol-related beliefs and choices indirectly, through the process of narrative transportation, whereas a movie with branded alcohol placements impacts audiences' alcohol beliefs and choices via a more basic social-cognitive process of influence. Ordinary moviegoers (N = 758) attended a showing of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011) in a popular theatre in Tacna, Peru. Subjects were randomly assigned to watch the original movie, with branded alcohol portrayals, or a brand-free, control version. Reactions to the movie and alcohol-related beliefs were collected in a survey immediately after the film exposure and real beverage choices were measured. The findings reveal that exposure to unbranded positive portrayals of alcohol produces story-consistent beliefs and alcohol choices through the process of narrative transportation and that exposure to branded positive alcohol portrayals produces direct effects in terms of alcohol expectancies and brand choice, despite lowering narrative transportation. Although viewers disengage more from the characters, and experience lesser enjoyment and perceived realism when exposed to actual brands in a movie, they still hold positive alcohol expectancies and are more likely to select the placed brand, a process consistent with social cognitive theory. The findings suggest caution about the recommended policy of removing branding from alcohol placements, such as in the case with plain packaging in tobacco, and instead call for effective policies to constrain alcohol product placement, as was done with tobacco placements.

From the Gorbals to the Lower East Side: the Cosmopolitanism of the Glasgow Jewish Institute Players

In this essay Paul Maloney and Adrienne Scullion investigate the ambitious agenda of theatre internationalism in the context of non-professional theatre making in Glasgow in the mid-twentieth century. For members of the Glasgow Jewish Institute Players, internationalism was represented through a diverse repertoire of classic European texts and contemporary American plays, presented alongside new original plays and sketches drawing on Yiddish and Scottish popular theatre tropes, and experienced through its members’ range of international diasporic networks, specifically with Jewish theatre makers in New York. It is argued that the internationalizing experience of the company and, specifically, its sustained exploration of immigration and of immigrants, achieves an important, even defining, role in the formation of a modern theatre industry and identity in Scotland. Historically interesting in and of itself, this article is also timely given a wider social and cultural ‘fear’ of contemporary migrants. The research encompasses a range of previously unexplored primary material including scripts, reviews, photographs, and company papers, including correspondence with New York-based playwright Sylvia Regan and new interviews with surviving company members. Paul Maloney and Adrienne Scullion work at Queen's University Belfast.

Littérature “d’en haut”, littérature “d’en bas”? La dramaturgie canonique allemande et le théâtre populaire viennois de Stranitzky à Nestroy by Marc Lacheny

Reviewed by: Littérature “d’en haut”, littérature “d’en bas”? La dramaturgie canonique allemande et le théâtre populaire viennois de Stranitzky à Nestroy by Marc Lacheny Katherine Arens Marc Lacheny, Littérature “d’en haut”, littérature “d’en bas”? La dramaturgie canonique allemande et le théâtre populaire viennois de Stranitzky à Nestroy. Forum: Österreich 2. Berlin: Frank & Timme. 2016. 351 pp. Marc Lacheny has provided scholars of Germanophone theater in the eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries with the book that has long been needed: an extended, eloquently written, and well-documented study of the relationships between the theater cultures of Vienna and the mythical “Germany” of early nationalist fantasy. This volume provides a critical overview of the existing scholarship and a clear vision of the work that needs to be done to counter the stereotypes enshrined in many existing literary histories of Germanophone theater authors. The result sets a new standard for work on the theater landscapes of Germanophone Europe: anyone working on “German” theater in the tradition of Gottsched, Lessing, and Weimar Classicism and anyone working on the “Austrian” Volkstheater or state theaters in the long nineteenth century will run the risk of total irrelevance if Lacheny’s incisive, important map is not accounted for. Littérature “d’en haut”, littérature “d’en bas”? is written from an admirable transnational, thoroughly engaging perspective, using international scholarship on theater both “high” and “low” as well as comparative approaches to redraw our map in an important area of theater studies. In starting from the relationship between “high” and “popular/low” literature in the day, Lacheny refutes the strict lines often drawn between “German” and “Austrian” theaters, the commonplaces in theater histories that set Weimar and the Viennese Volkstheater far apart from each other. Scholars have tended to isolate these different theater cultures on the basis [End Page 117] of nationalism and nationalist cultural politics, overestimating both Austria-Hungary’s purported cultural decadence and the cultural coherency of Prussia-turned-German-Empire. But Lacheny’s project is conceived in ways that, in research and argumentation both, squarely attack the isolation of the privileged place in literary history accorded to figures like Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller by looking at more than theater texts: this is the cultural history of theater in the German-speaking world, not the history of the poetics of plays in German. Lacheny sets these theater cultures onto a dynamic map of European theater to recreate transnational dynamics and moments of cultural contact, thus reclaiming how the Viennese theater functioned within this extended theatrical space. Here, Lessing’s and Schiller’s genius did not necessarily point the way to “real” theater (continued through figures like Hebbel), nor was Vienna known simply for “low comedy” (Nestroy) or drama derivative of the Weimar dioscuri (Grillparzer). Instead, Lacheny shows how Vienna’s dramatic theater and the Viennese popular theater, including its love for satire, were central to European theater conceived more broadly—the charges of “coarseness” that have echoed across theater history all too often arose from aesthetic nationalism rather than judgments of quality. To make this case, the text falls into three parts. The first aims at the myth of Weimar classicism, showing how Lessing and Goethe in particular in fact engaged with the popular theater of the sort that played in Vienna. It reconstructs both the critical debates familiar to Germanists and the dynamics between dramatic and comic theater writing that are usually familiar only to Austrianists. In so doing, he presents a notable aspect of cultural and theatrical life long ignored in scholarship but is now increasingly well documented (notably by Johann Sonnleitner and Matthias Mansky). The second section tracks how German Classicism’s plays were received and reused in Vienna, including accounts of straight dramatic productions and parodies/satires alike. Lacheny follows Karl Kraus as defining what was original in this reception by reference to Nestroy’s theater (Nestroy had even acted Schiller roles until 1830). The third section takes up Grillparzer’s dramas and comedies as revealing specific interactions between traditions, a narrative starting from the fact that the playwright’s uncle published the first collected edition of the works of Philipp Hafner, one...

Semarak Bangsawan: The Invigoration Project in Malaysia

Bangsawan is an important Malaysian popular theatre that flourished until the rise of television and film. The genre was chosen for revival efforts by the government culture officials and this article evaluates the history, successes, and missed opportunities of the project.

Look to the Crisis Actors

Look to the Crisis Actors Meredith Conti Tragedy. Travesty. Circus. Burlesque. Commentators have plumbed the depths of popular theatre history in hopes of describing Donald Trump’s administration and the corresponding sociopolitical climate of a bruised, divided nation. These Trump-as-spectacle narratives—in which the president is variously depicted as ringmaster, puppet, Shakespearean tyrant, or melodramatic villain—and the progressive handwringing they inspire fittingly gesture toward the “smoke-and-mirrors” politics of an aspiring autocrat. However, they also operate on simplistic or imprecise definitions of theatricality and performativity that equate both terms with inauthenticity, treachery, or vainglory.1 Trump and his supporters also engage with and organize around notions of vigilant public spectatorship in a hyper-performative age, although to different ends. Certainly, the campaign’s routine allegations of “fake news” presuppose that journalists script fictional events and impersonate principled reporters in order to deceive an increasingly credulous public. On the far end of the conservative spectrum, a faction of conspiracy theorists have weaponized antitheatrical biases by recasting the victims and survivors of traumatic events as duplicitous and paid “crisis actors.” However, the work of student-activists emerging from one such trauma, the 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, demands that we reevaluate and reposition the notion of crisis acting. In the wake of the shooting, a group of Parkland students, many of them members of the school’s drama club, documented, narrated, and politicized their collective trauma through a multimodal performance of survivorship and activism that was no less genuine because of its performativity. Indeed, the self-described “dramatic” students sparked the coalescing of a visible and persuasive youth-led gun-control movement, one that models how to organize efficiently and communicate widely, how to acknowledge privilege and practice inclusionary activism, how to take up space traditionally occupied by adults, and how speak truth to power.2 David Hogg conducted [End Page 439] and filmed hushed interviews with classmates during the school’s lockdown, the viral cell-phone footage of which is simultaneously raw in content and deliberate in intent. In her March for Our Lives speech, Emma González ritualized protracted silence as a means of memorializing the shooting’s victims, while unapologetically rejecting the codes governing protest speeches and the ubiquitous though insufficient “moment of silence.”3 And when their theatre teacher, Melody Herzfeld, received the 2018 Tony Award in Excellence in Theatre Education, the school’s drama club and choir students marked the honor by singing Rent’s “Seasons of Love” on the live telecast. The Parkland students anchor their gun-control activism in a precocious awareness—likely a product of their liberal education, arts training, and upbringings in a digitally saturated world—that the theatrical necessarily infuses the real. Parkland’s survivor-activists weathered accusations of being crisis actors—a claim that, in light of the teens’ involvement in theatre, struck a dissonant but reverberative chord. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Parkland student Cameron Kasky his thoughts on the conspiracy, he cheekily replied, “Well, if you had seen me in our school production of Fiddler on the Roof, you would know that no one would pay me to act, for anything.”4 While using antitheatrical rhetoric to weaken outrage or sow seeds of doubt is not new, the purposeful rebranding of trauma survivors as paid actors has become increasingly popular during the last few years. This lie works in several interdependent ways. First, it exploits the same spectatorial anxieties (and pleasures) activated by Barnum’s famed humbugs and Houdini’s underwater escapes: it calls into question the perceivers’ ability to interpret fact from fiction. “You were hoodwinked,” it scolds. “Perhaps you are not as good of a judge of character as you believed.” Second, recasting trauma survivors as professional actors presupposes that there are many more deceptions at play within the event in question. Videos can be doctored, victims and perpetrators invented, evacuations staged, and news stories faked. Third and perhaps most importantly, in their cries of “It’s all pretend!,” conspiracy theorists attempt to disable or inhibit natural empathetic responses to human suffering. Tagging Parkland survivors as crisis actors insinuates that they are benefiting monetarily from...

Comic Performance in Pakistan: The Bhānd by Claire Pamment

Reviewed by: Comic Performance in Pakistan: The Bhānd by Claire Pamment David Mason COMIC PERFORMANCE IN PAKISTAN: THE BHĀND. By Claire Pamment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 229 pp. Hardcover, $99.99. "Who's on first?" Claire Pamment characterizes bhānd as a type of performance that involves witty, verbal repartee between two male performers, an authority figure and a clownish foil who comments on current events "in metaphors that combine social, religious and/or cultural references" and in "play with paradoxes in their environment" (pp. 9, 20). I had to wonder why the author never cites either Abbott or Costello. Pamment's further description of bhānd as operating historically as "comic interlude" for popular theatre seems to demand some explicit [End Page 508] acknowledgment of the affinity between Pakistan's bhānd and the comic duos of burlesque and vaudeville in the United States (p. 15). But Pamment doesn't stumble into the neo-colonial trap so easily as I. Besides the fact that Pamment's book is too globe-conscious to allow some American phenomenon to assert itself as the topic's touchstone, its particularly compelling theory is a promotion of bhānd as a mode of performing, rather than as a form of performance with a discrete, historical lineage's implication of a genetic relationship with other like forms (Pamment identifies the first part of the book as "Genealogies"). Bhānd may have history and precedents, as any particular instance of performance surely does, but, as Pamment argues it, the presumption of bhānd's descent from any particular tradition has prevented us from seeing its peculiar flexibility and subversive force—a force that bhānd does not necessarily inherit from progenitors, but, rather, wields as what comes more-or-less inevitably when two people must keep the attention and favor of an audience with only their bodies, their words, and their imaginations as tools. Two broad concerns occupy, more or less, two equal halves of the book. The first is bhānd's place across centuries of South Asian history. The second is the manner in which bhānd currently operates in Pakistan. The first of these concerns is the more slippery of the two. Pamment acknowledges bhānd's uncertain origins and wrestles with the term's entanglement with performance genres and with sociopolitical communities. That is, during the recent few centuries, the term bhānd has signified not only a form of performance, but also the particular jati, or group of people who perform it, as determined by heritage, profession, and social class. This entanglement with two distinct concepts makes a neat, definitive history impossible. However, the uncertainty of the term allows speculation that leads Pamment to a number of intriguing propositions. As a performance form, for instance, bhānd demonstrates some of the problems with the term "folk theatre," a protean category of art as ubiquitous in politically-determined discourse as it is in scholarship. Touching the elite classes, modern venues, and sociopolitical currency as much as lower classes, the provinces, and tradition, bhānd, whenever it began, seems always to have defied the rather recently-constructed notion that certain kinds of performing preserve a cultural authenticity in a pre-present, pastoral aesthetic. Pamment's investment in bhānd's history also gives the lie to the idea that antipathy to theatre is embedded in Islam's very nature, and that theatrical performance is either completely absent in putatively Muslim countries or markedly impoverished. In sussing out bhānd's possible histories, the book offers a summary of the value that Islam [End Page 509] gave to theatrical performance—especially comic performance—from its beginning, and a compact catalog of performing forms across Islam's history, peoples, and regions. The book does not wander into descriptions of ruhozi, ortaoyunu, maskharaboz, etc., but does offer a compact list of topics that a person who wants to develop a familiarity with theatre in relation to Islam can pursue. Perhaps most importantly, Pamment's cautious history supports the contention that the modern iterations of bhānd emerge from a blend of Hindu and Muslim phenomena, as well as from elite and plebeian precursors...

‘I Like to Be a Swell’: Paupers at the Pantomime

In January 1866, journalist James Greenwood entered the Lambeth Workhouse disguised as a vagrant. Greenwood's account of his experience inspired a host of imitators, and inaugurated a mania for slum journalism. Critics have noted the voyeurism and the homoerotic subtext of Greenwood's ‘A Night in a Workhouse', but the impact of Victorian popular theatre on his narrative has received scant attention. This essay recuperates the links between workhouse and theatre: examining paupers' reception, criticism, and appropriation of popular forms of entertainment such as the pantomime and the music hall song, analysing the representation of the workhouse on the Victorian stage, and finally proposing the concept of the workhouse itself as a performance space. Greenwood provides a valuable source of information about the theatregoing habits of the houseless poor, the most marginalised demographic within audiences at the Victorian theatre.

Popular Theatre and its ›Invisible‹ Fans

This article argues that fan studies has typically neglected theatre as an object of fandom, whilst theatre studies has, in turn, marginalised audience and fan studies. Challenging these structuring invisibilities, I will consider how fandom has been discursively constructed in the theatre »field« (Bourdieu 1993). Media fandom has often been positioned as external to the world of theatre, or discursively limited to commercial productions such as West End/Broadway shows, especially musicals. Contra such assumptions, I will analyze discourses of fandom within the theatrical field, considering how generational and media-technological developments have supported a fan-like »participatory culture« with regard to both highly commercial and ›legitimate‹ forms of popular theatre.

Arte y transformación social en Buenos Aires: Análisis de una actuación cultural de Teatro Comunitario

Fil: Mercado, Camila. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofia y Letras. Departamento de Ciencias Antropologicas; Argentina

In flesh and bone: bodily image and educational patterns in early Reformation theatre

From its very beginning, the Protestant Reformation adopted the theatre as one of its educational tools. Together with choral music, visual arts, and preaching, Luther, Melanchthon, Oekolampad, and other Reformers promoted both the cultivated school theatre and the popular street theatre in order to spread the new faith, create a community ethos, enhance knowledge of the Bible, and raise contempt towards the common enemy, the Roman clergy. The body was, like in all performances, a cornerstone of its educational action. Drawing on both traditions, the classical and the popular one, the Reformers were able to build a “site-specific” theatrical pedagogy of the body in which the individual body of the hero and the collective body of the community acted in different roles, and in which the city, with its political and religious identity, was rethought as the place where the Volksgeist came to life and the glorious histories of the Bible were revived by and for the “chosen ones”. Focusing on early Swiss playwrights and a fugitive Italian writer, the analysis will trace the features of a stage repertory often neglected by history of education, and pinpoint some still open questions.

Teatro Kabuki: das origens à contemporaneidade

Este trabalho objetiva estudar o gênero kabuki, partindo de um panorama histórico para então comentar algumas performances recentes, como a do ator Kirk Nishikawa Dixon no filme curto “The Lion” e o denominado chôkabuki (que significa, literalmente, “super kabuki”), apresentando Konjaku Hana Kurabe Senbonzakura (“A festa das mil cerejeiras de ontem e de hoje”), com Shidô Nakamura e a vocaloid Hatsune Miku, um dos maiores ícones pop da atualidade no Japão. Discorre-se sobre a adaptabilidade do gênero kabuki e as características que permaneceram em meio a tantas mudanças: o papel do ator e sua relação com o público, o toque velado de transgressão e a inovação constante, corroborando o kabuki como um teatro popular do seu início até a contemporaneidade.

A MÁSCARA COMO FERRAMENTA DE FORMAÇÃO - ENTREVISTA COM TICHE VIANNA

A pesquisadora Tische Vianna relata um pouco de sua experiência com o teatro popular, o contato com a máscara e as investigações com o corpo e o gesto. Atriz formada pela Escola de Arte Dramática da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, e graduada em Filosofia pela Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina, Beatriz Maria Vianna Rosa é diretora e coordenadora do Barracão Teatro, em Campinas. Esta entrevista foi realizada e transcrita por Fábio Cuelli em 18 de Janeiro de 2017, em Caxias do Sul/RS, a pedido de Clóvis D. Massa, que preparou uma série de perguntas para organizar e direcionar a conversa com Tiche.

The relevance of strategic management accounting to popular culture: The world of West End Musicals

The study of accounting and popular culture presents an exciting new research agenda for management accountants. This study examines this development from a strategy perspective. Specifically, this paper adds to our knowledge of the potential for Strategic Management Accounting in action by studying the novel setting of the world of West End Musicals. Using a case study approach, this study challenges conventional SMA thinking from a ‘strategy-as-practice’ perspective, using the process of developing a popular theatre portfolio of activities. Findings indicate that strategy is a complex practice which is an inherently social process: Theatre producers negotiate a route to the market that is mediated by validating intermediary organizations that contribute and communicate the reputation of new cultural products and thereby support the strategic process.

Inventing The Performing Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia by Matthew Isaac Cohen

Reviewed by: Inventing The Performing Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia by Matthew Isaac Cohen Kathy Foley INVENTING THE PERFORMING ARTS: MODERNITY AND TRADITION IN COLONIAL INDONESIA. By Matthew Isaac Cohen. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. 352 pp. cloth, $65. Matthew Cohen is one of a small group of researchers who is filling in the gaps on twentieth-century Indonesian theatre historiography by determinedly combing archives. His most recent book will be of interest to those researching Indonesian dance, music, theatre, popular entertainments, and cultural history. It surveys how the performing arts reflected and modeled the altering social, political, and economic circumstances of colonial Indonesia. The information comes from detailed readings of colonial-era newspapers for information on performance events and artists' lives, which Cohen then filters through contemporary research on Indonesia's history and elucidates via contemporary cultural theory. His detail work allows him to revitalize our understandings of popular entertainments that were in their own era often ignored by elites and have subsequently been overlooked in Indonesian theatre histories. Cohen's characteristic style of examining newspapers and journals for evidence and then interpreting them via historical and cultural analysis was initiated in his The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theatre in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (2006), which did a particular case study focusing on the work of the Eurasian theatre maker Auguste Mahieu (1865–1903), showing how his innovative popular theatre company reflected the intercultural interactions around the turn of the twentieth century when Chinese, Indos (Eurasians), and Javanese artists collaborated to develop their new popular urban theatre form. His second book, Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on the International Stage, 1905–1952 (2010), took a larger frame in terms of time and geography but used some of the same research style and interpretive techniques: he looked at international reception and intercultural interactions of multiple performers of Javanese, Balinese, and European descent who toured Europe and the United States representing—or in some cases misrepresenting—Java and Bali. Performers who lived in or toured Europe included Dutch East Indies performers such as Dewi Dja, who began as a street dancer in east Java and ended up in Hollywood movies after doing stints touring internationally and performing in an American nightclub in Chicago. Western artists who presented themselves as Javanized were also detailed, for example, Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer who had spent time in the colony as a wife of a Dutch military man and found that Orientalism pleased her clientele in Paris, and Eve Gauthier, an opera singer who, after a relatively short period in the Dutch [End Page 488] colony, began representing Java on vaudeville stages and then went on to Western avant-garde art music circles. In Performing Otherness, Cohen showed how touring was a two-way street whereby Dutch East Indies performers garnered new ideas and status in creating their modern arts (in a way that might be compared to Sada Yakko and Kawakami Otojirō in Japan or Mei Lang Fan in China), while many Westerners who had some Javanese or Balinese experience became interpreters of the colony's arts in a transnational frame from the late 1890s to Indonesian independence. Cohen's current book covers the same time period as Performing Otherness, but instead of focusing on Euro-American spectatorship, this text gives the view from inside the modernizing colony, as thinkers and artists selectively borrowed Western forms or rethought local heritage for their changing audiences. Some topics that have been rarely reported in other sources are included: for example, impacts of Western or Japanese circuses and other late nineteenth-century touring companies, Japanese propaganda theatre in World War II, influences of Hollywood or jazz on Dutch East Indies popular culture, and so on. We also get a sense of the connections of companies and personnel between Malaya, the Philippines, and China. The work envisions an interconnected world in flux. Cohen has gained a wealth of information though reading memoirs, popular literature, newspapers, and other sources. His explanations, of course, remain significantly more detailed for the forms that garnered the attention of the elite or experienced Dutch or Japanese censorship (which thereby created records), but Cohen additionally turns up important information...

Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon

Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon Lisa Merrill (bio) and Theresa Saxon (bio) "[W]hen one is considering the crimes of slavery, the popular theater is as central as the courthouse." —Saidiya Hartman1 For over 150 years, productions and adaptations of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault's explosive 1859 melodrama The Octoroon have reflected differing and sometimes contentious meanings and messages about race and enslavement in a range of geographic locations and historical moments. In this melodrama, set on a plantation in Louisiana, audiences witness the drama of Zoe Peyton, a mixed-race, white-appearing heroine who learns after the sudden death of her owner/father that she has been relegated to the condition of "chattel property" belonging to the estate, since she was born of a mother who had herself been enslaved.2 Rather than submit to a new master after having been sold at auction, Zoe poisons herself and dies, graphically, onstage. [End Page 127] The play is famous in the annals of theatre and performance history for reactions to its depiction of slavery in antebellum America, and for the various rewrites to which the script was subjected in a Britain that had already abolished the slave trade. In London, in 1861 Boucicault famously rewrote the ending, allowing the heroine to survive and be united with her white lover in another (presumably more just) country, ostensibly England. Critical accounts of this adaptation have relied upon newspaper reports, as the playscript itself was never published. Within a short time Boucicault changed the ending again, this time leaving Zoe silent in the arms of her lover as both witnessed the burning of the steamboat Magnolia. This four-act edition was published widely, and it and the original US version have formed the basis for most critical assessments of The Octoroon. A key assumption so far has been that this four-act version became an authoritative text for UK productions and thus Zoe died no more on British stages. But we have found this not to be the case. Here, we discuss our archival discoveries of Octoroon promptbooks and playbills that reveal previously unknown aspects of the play's stage history and critically illuminate the ways that the transatlantic theatre of the mid-nineteenth century portrayed enslaved mixed-race figures and interracial relationships. Although theatre historians have known about Boucicault's original adaptation for over 150 years, no extant script for that original "British" version has heretofore been discovered. Now, however, our recent archival discoveries reveal portions of that long-missing script. At the University of Canterbury Kent we have discovered promptbooks of a later 1871 production of The Octoroon that provide specific textual evidence and blocking details that represent the first amended version as witnessed by London audiences a decade earlier, and described at the time in the London press. In addition, in the same archive we have uncovered evidence, which we discuss below, establishing that multiple versions of The Octoroon were being staged simultaneously, thereby further decentering nineteenth-century perceptions of both mixed-race bodies and contemporaneous binary definitions of race, thus complicating the received narratives of race and reception regarding this play. Moreover, in other archives we have found evidence that The Octoroon appeared on the colonial stages of Australia a full ten months before it was staged in London and therefore before Boucicault changed the ending. Our exploration of the performance history of The Octoroon in Australia further illustrates the potential shifting meanings of racial categories and representations of enslavement in nations whose colonial histories were built on differing constructions of racist oppression, genocide, and slavery. Thus we discuss the ways that productions of The Octoroon have served as a unique vehicle for depicting the transatlantic and colonial cultural attitudes that surrounded, and tensions that emerged from, antebellum representations of racialization, racial hybridity, interracial desire, and enslavement on both sides of the Atlantic and across British colonies in Australia. Furthermore, the actors' promptbooks we have located contain several different endings written into the same script. Such promptbooks demonstrate the tensions between archive and repertoire so powerfully articulated by Diana Taylor.3 Although constructed in the form of printed scripts, these objects were used repeatedly by a number of...

"The Dramatic Poet and the Unpoetic Multitudes": Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Allegorized Theatrical Commentary in Book IV of Aurora Leigh

"The Dramatic Poet and the Unpoetic Multitudes":Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Allegorized Theatrical Commentary in Book IV of Aurora Leigh Anna Williams (bio) In an introductory note to the published papers of Manchester University's 1970 Victorian theater symposium, editors Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson encapsulate the current state of this critical field and accurately predict its future, stating, "It is still fairly respectable to know nothing about the nineteenth-century theatre, but it seems unlikely that it will be so for long."1 As they foresaw, the coming decades witnessed a resurgence of interest in the performances of the nineteenth-century stage—a justified reprisal that has invited the Victorians' own theatrical commentary back into the critical spotlight. In one such contemporary moment of theatrical criticism, Elizabeth Barrett (EBB) remarks on the current state of the "translation" of dramatic works for the Victorian stage in an 1842 letter to her confidante, the dramatist and fellow poet Mary Russell Mitford: In regard to the drama, I have been to the theatre—I have seen Shakespeare in London—but it was when I was a young child: and I admit to you willingly that in reading & taking pleasure from the written Drama, my ideas of it never enter the theatre from first to last. I have a notion,—that the theatre interprets between the dramatic poet and the unpoetic multitude,—& always where the poetry is high, desecrates it in translation.2 EBB's letter corroborates the commonly held critical belief—both contemporary and modern—that the early-to mid-nineteenth century was a dark age for the British theater. Implicit in this widely held opinion is an elitist hand-wringing over the inferiority of public taste that, as Michael Booth and others have noted, [End Page 309] was becoming increasingly democratized as Victorian playhouses selected and adapted works to please the growing numbers of lower-middle- and working-class theatergoers.3 Indeed, in this letter to Mitford and many others, EBB seems to argue against the very idea of the popular theater itself, stating that she has formed a notion that the "poetry" of written drama can never be fully realized in performance for the "unpoetic multitudes" and that "high" dramatic art is always lost in translation. EBB's letters between 1842 and Aurora Leigh's publication in 1856 reveal not only her friendships with dramatists such as Mitford, Richard Hengist Horne, and George Sand but also that she followed the London theater closely even after moving to Florence, both through this correspondence and through her following of the London newspapers.4 As she expressed in some of her earliest letters to husband-to-be and sometimes-playwright Robert Browning, she held the dramatic genre in very high regard. For example, she states on February 17, 1845, that she "look[s] to our old dramatists as to our Kings & princes in poetry."5 In this letter, as in the one to Mitford three years prior, EBB expresses both her familiarity with and adulation for the "old dramatists"—whom she notably does not call "playwrights" (as this term would allude to the staging of their works)—including chiefly Shakespeare. In this early correspondence, EBB also expresses in no uncertain terms her disdain for popular theater, admonishing Browning (albeit playfully) for "bearing to trust [his] noble works into the great mill of the 'rank, popular' playhouse, to be ground between the teeth of vulgar actors & actresses" (Barrett to Browning, 27 February 1845). In her next letter, from February 27, 1845, she clarifies that she does not mean to "blaspheme the Drama"—just that the contemporary theater "vulgarizes" the work of noble dramatists such as himself, as it has "no altar" and "the thymele . . . is replaced by the caprice of a popular actor." 6 Here again EBB alludes to and valorizes a bygone era of the stage (this time it is ancient Greece, which will prove significant in my argument) in order to condemn the contemporary theater and elevate written over performed drama. Significantly, later in this same note, she also shares with Browning that her "chief intention just now is in the writing of a sort of novel-poem"; it seems that at...

Greasing the Global: Princess Lotus Blossom and the Fabrication of the "Orient" to Pitch Products in the American Medicine Show

Greasing the GlobalPrincess Lotus Blossom and the Fabrication of the "Orient" to Pitch Products in the American Medicine Show Chase Bringardner (bio) It was a swashbuckling world, peopled by a few geniuses and a great many rascals. It was a world in which the romance of the four corners of the world could be found in the flame of the pitchman's gasoline torch. The torches are gone, but the names they led to fame are not. —Violet McNeal, Four White Horses and a Brass Band In her 1947 autobiography, dramatically entitled Four White Horses and a Brass Band, Violet McNeal recounts her days as the premiere female pitch doctor on the medicine show circuit. She describes her journeys throughout the United States in great detail, dotting the countryside with her fellow performers, a wooden wagon, and an endless supply of medicinal cures for a multitude of common ailments. On the medicine show circuit, McNeal most often portrayed a character by the name of Princess Lotus Blossom, a visitor from the Far East well versed in Chinese remedies and cure-alls. Throughout the book, she recounts the development of this character from its initial beginnings at the hands of her "mentor" and husband Will Cooper, to its first appearance on the medicine show stage, to its final performances and subsequent retirement. To further supplement the character of Princess Lotus Blossom, McNeal and her associates also devised elaborate stories to impress audiences and convince them of the wonders of Tiger Fat salve, Vital Sparks, or other vaguely "Oriental" products. Taken together, the character and the stories created an elaborate performance designed to create the maximum amount of wonder and the appropriate amount of exoticism to sell the optimum amount of product. [End Page 49] The underlying culture of the medicine show visible just beneath the surface of these elaborate performances, and McNeal's navigation of that often rough terrain reveals a rich and complicated interplay of the global with gender and racial identity. McNeal's performance of "yellow face," or the donning of makeup and other facial prosthetics to appear "Asian," through the character of Princess Lotus Blossom, for example, facilitates and fosters the commercial and capitalist system of the medicine show—popular theatre used fundamentally to sell products—and illustrates how those concerns influenced her performance decisions. McNeal's gender in a predominately male, hierarchically structured performance tradition informed her decision to portray Asian characters onstage. Performing during a time of increased immigration from China and Japan, McNeal engaged with prevalent stereotypes that labeled Asian immigrants as interlopers, vagabonds, thieves, sexual objects, and opium addicts. These stereotypes contributed to and strengthened Orientalist fantasies that objectified the Asian immigrant and transformed people into products for commercial means. McNeal's performance directly reflects and borrows from this historical and cultural moment. Drawing from McNeal's own account of the process of developing and staging the character of Princess Lotus Blossom, I examine how, at the site of medicine show performance, McNeal's gender, race, and class identities operated through her "yellow face" performance. McNeal's character, Princess Lotus Blossom, revealed the struggle between capitalist and commercial endeavors of the form while simultaneously exhibiting the supposed freedoms, rites, and opportunities that performance afforded her over the "typical" woman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am chiefly concerned with letting Violet McNeal speak through the vivid passages of her autobiography. The male-dominated medicine show culture often silenced female participants, and thus a focus on McNeal's own account serves as an intervention in this patriarchal history. Documenting and decoding McNeal's experiences as expressed in her life work privileges her knowledge over the power structures and forms that often dictated her everyday practice. The evolution of McNeal's Princess Lotus Blossom must be understood within the context of the often-overlooked popular form and performance culture of the medicine show itself. Medicine shows traveled throughout both North and South and brought urban ideas and practices, such as sophisticated advertising campaigns and increased standards of cleanliness, to rural areas throughout the United States. Like the modern-day late-night television infomercial, medicine shows used performance as a means to sell...

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick Victor Emeljanow British Drama of the Industrial Revolution. By Frederick Burwick. Cambridge UP, 2015. Cloth $99.99. 320 pages. It is perhaps no coincidence that the term "melodrama" began its groundbreaking journey toward cultural and theatrical significance during the throes of the Vietnam War, which contributed to making the boundaries between high and low art irrelevant just as much as the emergence of the postmodern condition. As long ago as 1964, Michael Booth, Brooks McNamara, and Eric Bentley were some of the critics and theatre historians responsible for bringing to our attention the rich [End Page 130] values of popular entertainments among which melodrama proved to be an enduring dramatic genre. Since then critical works have proliferated exponentially, starting with examinations of the content of melodrama and its various manifestations to a status in which theatre historiography has recognized the conditions which gave rise to melodrama and, more importantly, the social and cultural seedbed out of which it sprang and which the genre never forgot. It is in this context that Frederick Burwick's recent book should be placed: it both reinforces the contemporary scholarly interest in melodrama as social documentation, and positions the form as a demonstration whereby the conditions of living could be made immediately accessible to both metropolitan and provincial spectators. Those conditions were of course inextricably tied to the consequences of the Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1840 in particular. Jane Moody's volume, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Burwick's Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre 1780-1830 (Palgrave, 2011) both focus on theatres in London, the magnet city that drew those who had been deracinated by the turmoil of industrial change in the British provinces during the period under discussion. Burwick's new book, however, charts a journey that starts in London as players joined provincial theatre companies to perform plays with which they had become identified in the metropolis. As well, that journey enabled theatre practitioners to select their vehicles, which they regarded as appropriate for the particular venues and towns where they toured. In so doing, they were able to support the need for solidarity by performing plays that might reflect the immediate concerns of their audiences, whether they comprised out-of-work handloom weavers (who were part of the cotton, wool, or carpet industries), steel workers, miners, or even the tradesmen and members of the Friendly Societies who sponsored individual performances. Burwick's contention is that "the meaning of a play changes with every change in the performance location" (10), which reflects the protean nature of melodrama and its progeny and is one of this book's most valuable contributions to the discourses around genre, theatre venues, and the composition of audiences during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Burwick compellingly develops the theme that London's illegitimate theatre became the "dramatic newsreel of the modern metropolis" by re-emphasizing the significance of "the theatre as an agency of reform directly involved with the labour movement" (7, 16). Such comments affirm the immediacy of a changing theatre culture that mirrored the struggle for political reform and social stability, both of which would elude most of the population throughout the period. Nevertheless, Burwick clearly illustrates the role of the theatre in the period as providing a dynamic and influential forum that gained its strength and relevance in tandem with the growing demand for social reform. This demonstration of the theatre's close engagement with the concerns of its audiences is very welcome. Burwick's book does this with great skill. He identifies some of the key documents that recur as their lifespan was being extended by the numerous revivals in the provinces. For example, Samuel Foote's The Mayor of Garratt, or, The Election was first performed at the Haymarket theatre in 1763, [End Page 131] but the elements of political satire kept it very much alive in provincial centers such as Huddersfield (1826) and Belfast (1837), among others. James Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback, depicting the faults of the aristocracy, was originally produced at Covent Garden in 1832, just as the 1832 Reform Bill...

New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway ed. by Edna Nahshon

MUSICAL THEATER AND OPERA New York's Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway. Edited by Edna Nahshon. New York: Columbia University Press, in association with the Museum of the City of New 2016. [328 p. ISBN 9780231176705 (hardcover), $40; ISBN 9780231541077 (e-book), $39.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.Yiddish theater arrived in New York in 1882 while still in its infancy. Just six years earlier, Ukrainian-born Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908) had established a theater company in Iasi, Romania. His operetta The Sorceress was the first in a long series of dramas, melodramas, comedies, operettas, and musicals that lit up the stages on New York's Second Avenue for some seventy-five years. At its height in the 1920s, more than a dozen theaters on the city's Lower East Side and in the outer boroughs attracted thousands of attendees per week to shows ranging from high-class Shakespeare translations to the basest vaudevilles.By the 1950s, the Holocaust in Europe and assimilation in the United States combined to reduce potential audiences to the point that theater pretty much died out in the following decade. All that was left was for the actors, producers, writers, and composers to write their memoirs, for scholars to write histories of a glorious past, for companies to undertake the rare revival-and for Edna Nahshon to mount a superb exhibit that also resulted in the book under review. Much more than a mere byproduct or companion to the exhibit, New York's Theater serves as an excellent history through images, together with illuminating essays by Nahshon herself and other scholars.The greatest value offered by the book lies in its three hundred illustrations, many in color, drawn primarily from material at the Museum of the City of New with contributions from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Library of Congress, and other sources. In addition to many photographs of theater stars, we find reproductions of posters, programs, scenes from shows, sheet music, set designs, costumes, and costume designs. There are photos of theaters and of important historical events, such as crowds of mourners lining the streets for the funeral of actor Jacob P. Adler (pp. 20-21).In the chapter Overture: From the Bowery to Broadway, Nahshon provides a fact-filled capsule history of the theater. She ends the essay by quoting director Robert Sanford Brustein, who suggested that the essence of theater lives on today in the work of Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen (p. 44), to which she adds Donald Margulies and Tony Kushner (p. 48), and I would add Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.In the chapter Yiddish New York, Hasia Diner briefly tells the story of speakers' arrival in the city beginning in the 1870s. Nahma Sandrow, author of the comprehensive Vagabond Stars: A History of Theater (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), contributed the chapter Popular Theater: Music, Melodrama, and Operetta in which one of the more curious reproductions is that of a poster depicting the non-Jewish African-American Thomas LaRue in full cantorial regalia. The text on the poster identifies him as Tevye, the Black Cantor, the Greatest Wonder of the World (p. …

El secreto, esencia de la comedia lopesca-calderoniana, y su intensificación en Sor Juana

Secrets, the essence of drama as a genre since its classical origins, characterize Medieval popular theatre and tipify Lope's comedia which Calderon perfects. Reworking their theatrical heritage, Sor Juana carries this genre beyond the horizon of expectation, as she intensifies the techniques that generate the complication of secrets from the first act of both of her comedies, Los empenos de una casa («Pawns of a House») and Amor es mas laberinto («Love is a Greater Labyrinth»).