2/5/13- Variety Entertainment

Booth's Theatre- century of realistic, blowout scenery (over-the-top sets)
Gas Lamps become Electric Lamps, leading to more control over illumination.

VARIETY ENTERTAINMENTS                                           (think: Las Vegas)

novel, spectacle, exciting

Burlesque- literary genre that parodies other genres

              EX: Scary Movie, Spaceballs, Airplane

Novelty- "Liliputian shows": little boys would play all the parts

             with the appeal being that it's both new & different

The Black Crook- first prototype of the American Musical

The Black Crook

Pantomime- dance that told a story

Mime- sketch comedy; like Saturday Night Live

Follies- sell tickets based on beautiful women

        - Radio City Rockettes

Oleo- frontispiece with advertisements (inventive commercial endorsements)

          (1800's to 1930's)

Minstrel Shows- most popular novelty shows of the 1880's

          (or: "Coon Shows")

          Al Jolson- most famous minstrel

          100 years as a performance phenomenon

MELODRAMA: "Melody Drama"= musical underscore

• always a happy ending= idealized
• Poetic Justice= virtue rewarded, vices punished
• spectacle; good vs. evil
• incorporates latest technology and special effects
• good guy saves beautiful woman (like Dudley Doright)

Classic Dudley Doright Melodrama

Nautical Melodrama- very popular form of the melodrama; water effects

         Ex. Cirque du Soleil's "O" show (currently in Las Vegas)

Gothic Melodrama- set in very exotic places & way back in time

         Ex. Excalibur, Kingdom of Heaven

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We learned about a lot of Variety Entertainment today. With the expanding technology of the time, spectacle shows and novelty productions began springing up quickly. Las Vegas would later benefit from these early crowd-drawing pleasures. Of real importance would definitely be The Black Crook, considered widely to be the prototype of the American Musical. This show would later pave the way for the majority of entertainment in Broadway. The most popular type of entertainment in the 1880’s was the minstrel shows. White men would put on “black face” and perform for massive crowds. This was a phenomenon that actually ran for about one hundred years. With this broad transition and influx of new forms of entertainment came the Melodrama, which I will refer to in the next lesson.