Comparative Drama articles from December 2006

Comparative Drama archives from December 2006

Introduction: popular entertainment and American theater prior to 1900.
December 22, 2006... Although Col. George A. Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn on 25 June 1876 was anything but a theatrical event, it certainly became one very soon after. By the middle of August, theatergoers in New York City were flocking to Wood's Theatre...

The "female Martinet": Mrs. Harper, gender, and civic virtue on the early republican stage.(American symbolic representations during the 1780s)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... On 12 May 1788 in New York, the Daily Advertiser ran a letter to the editor from "Z" a pseudonymous theater fan, commending one Mrs. Harper, an actress with the Old American Company of John Henry and Lewis Hallam Jr. "No actress deserves more...

Suffering silences, woeful afflictions: physical disability, melodrama, and the American charity movement.(Pennsylvania Institute of the Deaf and Dumb)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... On 17 February 1821 an audience assembled at the House of Representatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to attend a unique performance involving pupils from the Pennsylvania Institute of the Deaf and Dumb. Mr. Seixas, administrator of the...

Edwin Forrest's redding up: elocution, theater, and the performance of the frontier.
December 22, 2006... On a cold New York City night in mid-December, 1829, a twenty-two-year-old actor named Edwin Forrest revolutionized both the art of public speaking and the history of American drama. The audience who came to the Park Theatre that night not only...

Opposing forces: (re)playing Pocahontas and the politics of Indian removal on the antebellum stage.
December 22, 2006... In the spring of 1830, twelve-year-old Charlotte Barnes watched her mother, the popular actress Mary Greenhill Barnes, perform the title role in Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia at the Park Theatre in New York. The play by George...

The bride wielded a razor: images of women on the blackface stage of James McIntyre and Thomas Heath.
December 22, 2006... A newspaper advertisement for James McIntyre and Thomas Heaths 1919 musical play Hello, Alexander! describes it as a "Gorgeous Musical Extravaganza" featuring "50 Talented Singing and Dancing Broadway Beauties" The advertisement contains only...