Melodrama, the Stage, and the StreetFriday, January 24

Melodramatic ActingMelodramatic acting was partly inspired by Baroque and Rococo styles, but it had its own simplified code of gestures and postures. In American melodrama (and later in silent film) these poses were often based on the system developed by François Delsarte (1811-1871).

Melodramatic Music• Songs were sometimes written

specifically for individual productions by songwriters looking for quick cash, but like the texts of melodrama, the music of melodrama relied heavily on recycling—of classical music, of folks songs, and of popular ballads.

• The types of music used to indicate particular moods and situations became heavily codified.

• Sheet music for songs from popular melodramas were widely printed and sold—but as with the sales of the plays themselves, the profits went to the printers, not the writers.

Tableaux and Dioramas in 19th-Century Visual Culture

Dutch allegorical tableau vivant from the 1850s

Tableaux and Dioramas in 19th-Century Visual Culture

Tableaux and Dioramas in 19th-Century Visual Culture

Louis Daguerre’s diorama theatre, on the Boulevard du Temple (Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS)

Melodrama and Stagecraft• Staging innovations popularized through

melodramatic production included:• Scrolling backdrops and treadmills to simulate travel• Photographic backdrops• Mechanical scenery with moving parts• Sets built to resemble cross-sectioned buildings, allowing

simultaneous action in different rooms• Experiments with coloring light and changing light levels

to reflect different times of day.• Fireproofing scenery and props, which made a wider range

of stage effects safe to use.

Dion Boucicault (1820-1890)• Born Dionysus Lardner Boursiqout in

Ireland

• Began his theatre career in the 1840s, working in London and on Paris’s “Boulevard of Crime.”

• Lived and worked in New York from 1854-1860 and from 1875 to 1890.

• The most famous English-language playwright in the world at the height of his career.

• Other big hits were the anti-slavery melodrama The Octoroon (1859), and the Ireland-set melodramas The Colleen Bawn (1860) and The Shaughraun (1874).

Melodrama and the Theatre Business• The “legitimate” theatres in London (e.g. Theater Royal Drury Lane)

saved themselves from financial ruin by putting their productions of the classics on double bills with melodramas. Most of the great Shakespeareans of the 19th Century also acted in melodramas.

• The unprecedented popularity of melodramas such as Black-Eyed Susan and The Poor of New York led theatres to adopt the now common practice of doing a long, continuous “run” of a single show.

• Boucicault invented the modern concept of the licensed touring production as a way to prevent writers and companies outside of New York from pirating his work.

• Boucicault’s lobbying for the legal rights of playwrights, who received miserable pay in the American theatre, helped bring about the International Copyright Agreement of 1886, which gave playwrights control over the publication and production rights for their plays.

Barnum’s American Museum

Left/Above: the exterior of Barnum’s American Museum, a few blocks south of Five Points.

Right/Below: The “lecture hall” in Barnum’s museum, so-called because it was considered indecent for middle-class women and children to go to a “theatre.”

Recreating the Street Onstage• The Poor of New York was adapted from a French

play called The Poor of Paris by Edouard Brisebarre and Eugene Nus.

• When The Poor of New York opened in Liverpool in 1864, Boucicault renamed it The Poor of Liverpool and changed all of the streets and landmarks in the text to match the geography of Liverpool.

• In Manchester, it became The Poor of Manchester.• When it opened in London, it became The Streets

of London, while it ran in Dublin as The Streets of Dublin.

Five Points and the Bowery

Reconstruction of Five Points c. 1860 in Martin Scorsese’s film The Gangs of New York (2002)

Street Fights and Theatre Riots

Left: a street battle between the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys in 1857, a few blocks from where The Poor of New York premiered.

Right: caricature of a brawling Bowery audience at a performance of Sheridan’s 18th-Century comedy of manners A School for Scandal.

Street Fights and Theatre Riots

The infamous “Shakespeare Riot” at Astor Place, May 10 1849

Immigrant Theatre in North America

Playbill for Jacob Gordin’s The Jewish King Lear (1892)

-The Yiddish theatres were among the best-attended theatres in New York in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Their repertoires included a mixture of melodramas, vaudevilles, translated classics, and domestic dramas that were forerunners of American Realism.

-Some of the first North American productions of Athenian tragedy in the original Greek were performed by Greek immigrants in New York and Chicago.

-Immigrant theatres sprung up slightly later in Canada, but the Toronto scene in the early 20th Century included Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, and Finnish theatres, and there are still active Yiddish theatres in Montréal and Winnipeg.

Melodrama and Ethnic Stereotyping

Melodrama and Ethnic Stereotyping

(Incidental Note: Nell, Dudley, and Snidely Whiplash are all using variations on Delsarte poses.)