Music in Eighteenth-Century American Theater

An evening at the theater in eighteenth-century America was very lively event. One of the best and most amusing contemporary accounts is by Jonathan, the Yankee servant in Royall Tyler's play The Contrast, produced by the American Company in New York in 1787.1 Jonathan, having come to New York with his employer Manly from western Massachusetts, bumbled into the theater thinking it was hocus-pocus show. In his description of the adventure, he recounted: They shewed me away clean up to the garret, just like meeting-house gallery. And 'so I saw power of topping folks, all sitting round in cabins, just like father's corncribs;-and then there was such squeaking with the fiddles, and such tarnal blaze with the lights, my head was near turned. At last the people that sat near me set up such hissing-hiss-like so many mad cats; and then they went thump, thump, thump, just like our Peleg threshing wheat, and stampt away, just like the nation; and called out for Mr. Langolee. .. . He then mentioned the lifting up of a great green cloth that let him look right into the next neighbour's house where he learned later that they were having School for Scandilization. After while he saw a soldier fellow, who talked about his row de dow and one fellow whose name was Darby.2 The elements are all there: the audience in the gallery hissing and thumping and shouting for tunes and favorite performers before the play began, the more wealthy in their boxes (their little cabins), the fiddles squeaking, the everpresent green curtain going up to reveal of the two standard sets (an interior scene in drawing room) for the mainpiece, The Schoolfor Scandal, and references to the most popular afterpiece in America at that time, The Poor Soldier, with the singing of Patrick in his famous row-de-dow refrain and the wonderful antics of Darby

Adventure · Art · Art history · Servant · Visual arts · Engineering · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• The Cambridge Companion to the Musical

  Open Access•William A Everett, Paul R Laird•The Cambridge Companion to the…•2001

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