From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830-1910 (review)

Time to confess. When I first look at a scholarly book I have agreed to review, I skim it. I read the preface, the introduction, and then I decide which section or chapter I will delve into, choosing based on my interest areas and avoiding a linear processing of thesis. Eventually I do read the entire work, but I often find I am most interested in that which is most relevant to my academic interests. True to form, I intended on reviewing From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830-1910 with my usual, peculiar approach. But I was unable to maintain my critical methodology. From Traveling Show to Vaudeville was a gripping read for me, and I believe would be for others of the less than nineteenth-century theatre history inclined. Within each of the eight sections, editor Robert M. Lewis (a lecturer in American history at the University of Birmingham) has created a dialogue about a particular form of popular entertainment through his multifaceted materials and their placement. Overall, the great strength of this collection is that it puts you in the moment of performances. Lewis thoroughly and wonderfully recreates the conversations around these entertainments in their lived moment. As he states in the introduction, "From Celebration to Show Business," he looks to each section to prove the effectiveness of live performance. In a 150-year era, beginning with free public spectacles in the early republic and ending with the advent of motion pictures with sound, "live performance dominated American popular entertainment" (1).

The eight sections—The Dime Museum, Minstrelsy, The Circus, Melodrama, "Leg Show" Burlesque Extravaganzas, The Wild West Show, Summer Amusement Parks, and Vaudeville—are all expertly constructed. For example, in the first section on The Dime Museum, Lewis has included journalists' accounts of visiting dime museums, P. T. Barnum's own broadside and promotional copy for his public, excerpts from autobiographies by dime museum performers such as General Tom Thumb (Charles S. Stratton), photos of the "Wild Men of Borneo" (Hiram and Barney Davis) and the "Bearded Lady of Geneva" (Madame Josephine Boisdechene Clofullia), and essays by wonderful skilled writers like Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), and Horace Greeley on the attractions and atrocities exhibited in the dime museums. Equally important, Lewis has written pithy and contextualizing introductions to each piece, so that the reader has an idea of the complexity behind the words and images. The introduction to Greeley's piece on the dime museums, "Disgusting Exhibitions," tells us that Greeley was friendly with Barnum, and felt that many of the dime museums could reach for a higher standard, even if the New York City public demanded entertainment more "monstrous" (46).

The book contains great "amazing but true" stories to tell in class. Some of my favorites:

The Transcendentalists go to the circus—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau recount their contacts with the circus and an animal menagerie.

Melodrama playwright and director Owen Davis's formula for melodrama, which includes descriptions for all four acts as follows: "ACT I—Start the trouble. ACT II—Here things look bad. [. . .] ACT III—The lady is saved by the help of the Stage Carpenter. (The big scenic and mechanical effects are always in ACT III.) ACT IV—The lovers are united and the villains are punished."

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Maxim Gorky's critique of Coney Island, entitled "Boredom," published in 1907. When speaking of the rides, Gorky writes: "Joyous screams are heard, which strangely remind one of the merry yelp of a puppy let to the floor after he has been held up in the air by the scruff of his neck."

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I am teaching Introduction to Theatre here (again) this fall, and I am looking forward to having my students read a section of this book, accompanied by primary materials from my own collection and available on web sites such as the...