• Humble Beginnings
• Racial Barriers
• Vague Definitions
• Seven Sisters
• The Civil War

(The images below are thumbnails – click on them to see larger versions.)

Humble Beginnings
When the present-day United States was a collection of thirteen British colonies, live entertainment usually meant lifting pints of ale at a public house. The first professional theatres appeared in Philadelphia and Charleston. Although New York had been in British hands since 1664, the city long retained the spirit of its Dutch founders, so professional acting troupes did not appear there regularly until the 1730s.

It is not surprising that British plays and players dominated America's colonial stages. Musical offerings of that period included --

- pantomimes - one act works which replaced spoken dialogue with wordless clowning and interpolated songs).

- ballad operas - comic plays peppered with popular ballads reset to new satirical lyrics.

The location of the Theatre on Nassau Street as it appears in 2004 -- now a brick office building dwarfed by skyscraping neighbors.

According to the best contemporary scholarship, the first full length musical play performed in America was Flora (or The Hob on the Wall), a ballad opera presented in Charleston as early as 1735. New York's first-known professional musical production was a five performance run of John Gay's satirical British ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, offered by Walter Murray and Thomas Kean's traveling theatrical troupe at the Nassau Street Theatre on Dec.3, 1750.

Click here to read a script sample from The Beggar's Opera

The American Revolution had a crippling effect on all forms of theatre. In 1774, the new Continental Congress passed a resolution discouraging theatrical "entertainments," and the individual states soon passed laws forbidding all stage performances. Professional troupes were forced to either disband or leave the country. Most of these anti-theatre laws remained in effect until the early 1780s, but Massachusetts and Rhode Island did not lift their bans until 1793. The new Republic's stages remained heavily dependent on British plays and comic operas. Native born musicals began appearing in the 1790s, but it would be some time before they would match the popularity of imported works.

The earliest American musicals were comic operas (satirical operas with original scores and libretti), but sources differ as to which was the first. Some prominent nominees --

• Edwin and Angelina, or The Bandetti was written in 1791, and supposedly received just one performance in December 1796.

• An anti-Federalist opera called Tammany, or the Indian Chief premiered in New York on March 3, 1796, but no copies of the libretto have survived.

• The Archers, or The Mountaineers of Switzerland, a comic opera by librettist William Dunlap and composer Benjamin Carr, premiered in New York on April 8th, 1796 at the John Street Theatre. Based on the William Tell legend, its initial three performance run was followed by two nights in Boston. In The American Musical Stage Before 1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962, p. vii), Julian Mates claims that The Archers was the first noteworthy homegrown American musical. While that is debatable, it is currently the earliest American musical for which a complete score and libretto survive.

Every known American theatre company of the post-Revolutionary era presented a wide range of musical works. For example, in 1796, New York City's prestigious American Company staged 91 performances of 46 different musical works -- accounting for nearly half of their repertory. Almost every theatrical performance seen in America in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries offered interpolated musical numbers, or threw in musical specialties between the two or more featured plays seen in a given evening. Even a Shakespearian tragedy might include a song, or at the very least add on a one-act pantomime or comic opera as a "curtain raiser" or "after piece."

The Park Theatre was New York's first world class entertainment venue. Seen at the center of this period print, it stood just across from City Hall Park from 1798 to 1848.

In the early 1800s, Broadway was New York's main thoroughfare, so it was the natural place for most early theatres to appear. The city's growing population developed a passion for theatre, and producers were happy to cater to this growing audience. Melodramas became increasingly popular, offering forgettable stories enlivened by mood-setting background music, interpolated popular songs and lavish stage effects. There were also musical romances, original works which were more sentimental than comic operas but written in much the same musical style. The term burletta was originally used to describe comic operas that burlesqued popular topics, but this word was soon applied to almost any production that included songs.

For a comprehensive discussion of early American musical theatre, see Susan L. Porter's With An Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America 1785-1815. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Racial Barriers
In the summer of 1821, William Henry Brown (a black West Indian and former ship's steward) opened a "pleasure garden" in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. This was the first black-owned establishment in New York to offer entertainment to African American audiences. With blacks barred from every theatre in town, Brown drew capacity crowds. He soon built the American Theatre on Mercer Street, and drew curious whites by featuring all-black casts in the same blend of plays and musical acts found in white theatres. 

At first, Brown's work was tolerated by the authorities, and viewed with amusement by the press. When he had the audacity to lease a performance space on Broadway, the establishment reacted with alarm. White theatre owners hired street toughs to break up Brown's performances, and when police were called in they ignored the thugs and arrested the black actors! A white judge ruled that Brown's company was not to perform Shakespeare again, limiting itself to lighter material. Brown returned to his old location, but continuing harassment forced him to shut down altogether in 1823. African American performers would not return to the legitimate stage until after the Civil War, and all-black productions would not successfully return to Broadway until the next century.

(For more on this often overlooked chapter in theatrical history, see Marvin McAllister's White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003.)

Anti-black feeling did not prevent the rise of a new form of variety entertainment based on the denigration of African American culture. White performers had been blacking up their faces and doing "colored" song and dance acts since Thomas Rice introduced the song (and character) "Jump Jim Crow" in the early 1830's. In 1842, a group of four unemployed actors who had experience doing blackface routines in circuses banded together to present a full-length evening. Calling themselves The Virginia Minstrels (to spoof the popular Tyrolese Minstrels of Switzerland), their "plantation songs" and shuffling dances were a sensation. This first minstrel show spawned a flurry of successful imitators. Minstrel troupes soon toured the country, giving  performances that usually included rudimentary one act musicals as part of an evening's entertainment. (See Musicals101's special coverage of minstrel shows for more.)

Vague Definitions
In the 1840s, most stage productions included some songs. Working and lower class audiences expected music as part of a night's entertainment, and shows aimed at these audiences were happy to oblige. Benjamin A. Baker's Glance At New York (1848) was a comic look at life on the streets of Manhattan, including petty thieves, gullible "greenhorns," and the street gangsters known as "Bowery B'hoys" -- most notably the semi-legendary roughneck "Mose." This show offered seven musical numbers, some of which were borrowed from other scores. These songs had minimal connection to the plot, serving mainly to add to the general sense of merriment.

By 1850, original musicals were commonplace fare on Broadway, but no one was calling them "musicals." A play with songs might advertise itself as a burletta, extravaganza, spectacle, operetta, comic or light opera, pantomime or even parlor opera. These classifications were so vague that The Magic Deer (1852) advertised itself as "A Serio Comico Tragico Operatical Historical Extravaganzical Burletical Tale of Enchantment" -- just to make sure potential ticket buyers got the point. At the time, most Broadway theatre companies ran varied repertories, so it was rare for a single production to rack up more than a dozen performances. In most cases, the scripts for these disposable entertainments are long-since lost, so we cannot be sure exactly what they were like.

Seven Sisters
As New York City's population boomed, the demand for more ambitious entertainments grew. Riding the crest of this new cultural wave, actress-manager Laura Keene became one of the first nationally recognized stars of the American stage -- and the first American woman to succeed as manager of her own troupe. With a strong business sense and versatile stage talents, she produced and starred in a series of popular comedies and musicals in her theatre at 622 Broadway (just above Houston Street).

After setting Broadway's first "long-run" musical record with a 50 performance hit called The Elves (1857), Keene astounded everyone in New York when her "musical burletta" Seven Sisters (1860) racked up an unprecedented 253 performances. Keene starred as one of seven female demons who come up from hell to go sightseeing in New York. Surviving programs list a score cobbled from now-forgotten songs, plus the minstrel classic "Dixie" for a slam-bang finale. With a fantasy theme, spectacular sets, and a "transformation scene" (where the entire stage set changed in full view of the audience), Seven Sisters was a clear precursor to the more widely remembered hits that came later that decade.

The Civil War
During The Civil War (1861-1865), most theatrical troupes remained in the more populous (and more prosperous) North, but actors were usually allowed to cross the battle lines to provide entertainment on either side.

As is usually the case in wartime, New York City saw a marked increase in theatrical attendance as people looked for lighthearted distractions. Broadway's wartime musicals ranged from outright fantasies (Cinderella) to topical burlesques (King Cotton, or the Exiled Prince). Laura Keene's troupe offered eight musicals as part of their ongoing New York repertory, then toured nationwide from 1863 onwards. Sadly, Keene is mainly remembered because President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching her performance in the comedy Our American Cousin in 1865.

After the war, the musical stage -- like the nation -- faced a time of extraordinary redefinition. In 1866, two events set the course for the American musical theatre's future. The first (which is rarely noted) came in January, when a double bill entitled The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post became the first known Broadway production to call itself a "musical comedy." Since no libretto or score is known to survive, we can't be sure what these shows were like, but the very use of the phrase "musical comedy" shows change was in the air.

The second big theatrical event of 1866 (which is often noted) came in September. Some have called this production "the first Broadway musical" -- which is nonsense. However, no one can deny that The Black Crook was America's first bona fide musical blockbuster.

Next: 1860s - The Black Crook