Touring West: 19th-century performing artists on the overland trails

Antiques & Collecting Magazine May 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 the Eastern 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.

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, a variety 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

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