Touring West_19th-Century Performing Artists on the Overland Trails

8/6/2019 Touring West_19th-Century Performing Artists on the Overland Trails

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Touring West: 19th-century performing artists on theoverland trails

Antiques & Collecting MagazineMay 1, 2001 | Anonymous

AT THE BEGINNING of the 19th century, the performing arts were flourishing in the

new nation. Still, even the thriving seaports could not support full seasons for

commercial theaters and concert halls. To find sufficient work, performers traveled to

their audiences, commuting between inland and coastal cities, moving up and down theEastern seacoast, and eventually, as transportation methods improved, touring West.

Theaters such as Niblo's Gardens in New York or the Howard Athenaeum in Boston

imported European family troupes of performers. In addition to actors, these circuits

featured ballet dancers, slack and tightrope dancers, jugglers and acrobats.

Touring West: 19th-Century Performing Artists on the Overland Trails, on view at the

New York Public Library, New York, NY through July 7, 2001, celebrates the creators,

promoters and performers of professional theater, music and dance who toured the

American continent just before the twin inventions of cinema and recorded sound

changed the relationship between performer and audience forever. The time frame is

defined at one end by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and at the other by the

Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Performances are documented here through promotional ephemera, such as

broadsides, programs, flyers, handbills, souvenirs, postcards, and after 1848,

photographs. Through scores and prompt scripts annotated by musicians and stage

managers, we can learn what the audience experienced at the events. Business

records, ship and train schedules and shipping manifestos speak to the realities of the

tour.


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Throughout the exhibition, performers' lives are described. Childhood shipwrecks and

wagon train disasters live on in the memoirs of veteran performers such as Barrymore

family matriarch Louisa Lane Drew. Letters to loved ones and business managers

reveal the perils of performing Shakespeare. We can experience Sir Henry Irving

"railing" about mislaid scenery, or Edwin Booth being philosophical about presenting

Julius Caesar in a half-built theater. In composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk's diary, we

can find the sheer exhaustion of ship and train travel, as well as his vivid narrative of

learning about Lincoln's assassination while sailing from Panama to California.

MELODRAMAS

Touring actors sought vehicles that provided dramatic situations, rousing speeches, avariety of character parts for their companies, and starring roles for themselves. That

search eventually struck on the nation's own great conflict-the ongoing hostilities

between Native Americans and European settlers. When actor-manager Edwin Forrest

sponsored a competition for the "best tragedy in five acts, of which the hero, or principal

character shall be an aboriginal of this country," the winner was John Augustus Stone's

Metamora; or The last of the Wampanoags (1829). In 1843, Boston's National Theater

billed L.II. Medina's dramatization of Robert Montgomery Bird's virulently anti-Native

novel, Nick of the Woods or the Jibbenainosay, as "Grand National Drama."

SLAVERY AND ABOLITIONISTS

From the time of the American Revolution through the Civil War, the issue of slavery

divided the new nation. Although Abolitionist and Anti-Slavery societies, periodicals, and

fund-raising events focused principally on the mid-Atlantic and New England states, the

divisive issue was carried West via settlers and performers. Following the Missouri

Compromise (1820-21) and the Compromise of 1850, the issue of slavery was debated

each time a territory voted on statehood.

Touring singers spread an Abolitionist message to territory voters. The Hutchinson

Family were tireless campaigners and songwriters. Individual popular and parlour songs


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were also published and sold to benefit the Abolitionist cause. Many of the martial

songs and hymns such as George F. Root's "The Battle Cry of Freedom," are still

popular today.

The material in the exhibition is drawn from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, Jerome

Robbins Dance Division, Music Division, and Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of

Recorded Sound of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Eight maps

and the Map Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library provide geographic

and political information pertinent to the touring experience.

For additional information, contact the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,

Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018. Phone: 212-621-0609. Website:www.nypl.org.

Photos courtesy The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Copyright Lightner Publishing Corporation Jan 2009

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Touring West_19th-Century Performing Artists on the Overland Trails