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{ 143 } BOOK REV IEwS \ The Hanlon Brothers: From Daredevil Acrobatics to Spectacle Pantomime, 1833– 1931. By Mark Cosdon. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. xiv + 137 pp. $28.50 paper. Researchers of popular theatre performers know well the difficulty of finding evidence on their subjects, due to the common lack of surviving material and lack of attention by critics in the performers’ own time, and by archivists in succeeding eras. This makes the extremely detailed research done by Mark Cosdon for his The Hanlon Brothers: From Daredevil Acrobatics to Spectacle Panto­ mime, 1833–1931 even more impressive. Cosdon combed playbills and newspapers , mostly the New York Clipper, for reviews, advertisements, and relevant articles, and mined a hundred other sources for minute mentions of the group. Sources already in existence about the group have proven, according to Cosdon , inaccurate, incomplete, and largely sanitized by family members or fans. All of this has left a huge chore, and Cosdon largely meets the challenge. His goal, to“right the historical record”(3), is a hefty one on its own, and he can perhaps be excused for a paucity of analysis. The recitation of dates and events is exhaustive, and it appears that no small detail of performance has escaped notice. The dearth of detailed contemporary information makes it difficult to draw a personal picture of the Hanlon brothers’ characters, but Cosdon is able to make enough worthy conclusions to paint an intriguing, if spotty, picture of these performers. The text is arranged chronologically, a logical choice, but one that at times leads to a numbing list of dates and occasional confusion when an out-ofsequence reference results from an emphasis on theme rather than chronology. Interspersed between chapters are interludes on Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the Ravels, and George L. Fox. These sections provide some well-structured context for the career of the Hanlons due to their mutual influence. Jean-Gaspard Deburau revolutionized the character of Pierrot in his pantomimes at the Thé- âtre des Funambules during the first half of the eighteenth century. His scripts formed the basis for the highly successful shows that revitalized the career of the Hanlons after their acrobatics became too imitated and too physically difficult for their aging bodies. The Ravels held the place of the most beloved acrobats and pantomimists in the United States in the thirty years prior to the takeoff of the Hanlons. Although he cannot say with certainty, Cosdon makes a good case for the direct influence of the Ravels on the Hanlons, tracing the similarities in style and form, and outlining the most popular performances of { 144 } BOOK REV IEwS the former that could easily have influenced any Hanlon brothers who might have been sitting in the audience. And George L. Fox was the touchstone for American pantomime performance until his death in 1877, with talents for facial transformation and social commentary. Cosdon states that the Hanlons shared those talents and supplemented them with their acrobatics and sizable troupe to make them even more popular than Fox had. Additionally, they occasionally used the Humpty-Dumpty troupes, which sprouted up to take advantage of Fox’s pantomime of that name, as training schools, poaching their most talented clowns. Cosdon spends the majority of his time discussing the Hanlons’ most famous pantomime, Le Voyage en Suisse, although he makes little of the fact that the play was the only major work in the Hanlons’ repertoire not written by them. From Paris to New York and across the United States, Cosdon details the tours, the script changes, and the scenic inventions employed each year to keep the pantomime relevant and appealing to audiences. One of the greatest favors he does the reader is to provide detailed plot synopses and action sequence descriptions for this and other pantomimes, both from the Hanlons’ repertoire and others. This offers a glimpse into what the audience would have experienced and is not often available to anyone other than the researchers themselves, poring over old scripts. Cosdon does not attempt to analyze the social relevance or commentary of the plots or technical devices, but he provides enough information on historical context and specific performance conditions to make it possible for readers...

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