Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [903]
Yiddish melodrama provided glamorous diversion and emotional communion for tenement dwellers and a sense of empowerment for the politically impotent. Ghetto audiences cheered historical spectacles of Jewish heroism, oohed and aahed at tableaux of ancient kings and prophets, shouted denunciations of villains, howled with laughter at tomfoolery and clownishness, demanded popular songs be repeated, and often kept performances running till midnight.
The plays were packed with topical references to life along East Broadway, helping greenhorns learn their way around an alien land. They also evoked heartbroken recollections of loved ones left behind; Tomashefsky always worked a mama song (like “A Letter to Mother”) into his plays no matter what the subject. Masters of bricolage, these Lower East Side playwrights ransacked all European drama for bits of theatrical business and mingled opera tunes and synagogue chants with abandon. They desacralized Shakespeare with a vengeance, domesticating the Bard, turning Capulets and Montagues into feuding Jewish sects; after the first Yiddish Hamlet the crowd was so pleased it called for the author. In the 1890s, a new generation of performers and intellectuals—notably playwright Jacob Gordin and actor Jacob Adler—warred against cheap “three-hankie” melodramas and called for “serious” theater. But even then Yiddish drama would remain grand and flamboyant, an affair of shouts and whispers, deeply in touch with the lives of ordinary immigrants.
Poster advertising a performance at King Solomon at the Thalia Theater. (Library of Congress)
Popular Italian dramaturgy followed an almost identical course. Amateur actors took to the stage in 1882, with a farce at Concordia Hall. Soon there were several theatrical clubs in action, like the Circolo Filo-Drammatico Italo-Americano (1885), which played in halls like the Bowery’s Germania Assembly Rooms, and offered special performances on saints’ days in church basements. Like their Yiddish counterparts, Italian actors offered long and varied evenings: thrilling melodramas, commedia dell’arte skits, Pulcinella farces, songs and dances in Neapolitan or Sicilian, and comedies like Pasquale, You ‘re a Pig. Again, theatrical pastiche was the norm, with Schiller, Sardou, and an Italianized Shakespeare sharing time with local dramas set in Little Italy. In the 1890s Italian theater too entered a more polished phase with the arrival of professional actors lured by the popularity of the circolo groups. Antonio Maiori, who came in 1892 and established a company, had a harder time of it than Jacob Adler, however, as opera remained the art form of choice in the community.
New York Chinese theater began with professionals. In June 1889 the traveling Swin Tien Lo (Most Sublime Company) arrived from San Francisco and performed at the Windsor Theater on the Bowery. In 1893 the community got its own company when a wealthy merchant rented a Doyers Street basement, hired thirty actors, and opened a Cantonese theater.
VARIETY: THE SPICE OF BOWERY LIFE
While these cultural stewpots bubbled on their separate burners, the Bowery’s variety stage—another pastiche performance form—was absorbing many of their assorted traditions into a more commercialized culture.
Variety emerged as a distinct branch of the entertainment industry only in the 1870s and 1880s, but the presentation of brief entertainment bits by singers, dancers, and monologuists had long been part of New York’s theatrical tradition. Until the fifties, variety acts had been interpolated in, or ancillary to,