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CHAPTER
10
I
n 1866 a French ballet company found itself stranded in New York City: the
theater in which the dancers had been booked to perform had burned to
the ground while the troupe was crossing the Atlantic. Meanwhile, a theater
manager in the same city was discovering that the new play he had committed
himself to—a pastiche of the Faust legend and Weber’s opera Der Freischütz—was
certain to be a failure without major surgery.
As luck would have it, each party came to the other’s rescue, and when The
Black Crook reached the public in September 1866 the supernatural scenes were
greatly enlivened by female dancers in fairy costumes that, by the standards
of the day, left little to the imagination. A motley mixture of melodrama, com-
edy, music, dance, and spectacle, The Black Crook became one of the nineteenth
century’s landmark stage successes, touring the United States through the end
of the century and beyond. It also marked the beginning of a native tradition
of musical theater that borrowed from European precedents without copying
them slavishly.
Although it would be too much of a stretch to call The Black Crook “the fi rst
musical comedy,” it did contain the building blocks of that yet-to-be-born
genre. In the decades that followed, the American musical comedy, or sim-
ply the musical, would grow alongside an assortment of imported European
stage entertainments, eventually fi nding a voice of its own, distinguishing itself
from its British, French, and Austrian infl uences. By 1900, the key to that dis-
tinctive voice was the popular song, as codifi ed by Tin Pan Alley song writers.
No musical show could succeed without appealing songs—songs that enjoyed an
independent life outside the shows that introduced them. A history of musical
comedy at the turn of the century is thus intertwined with the history of the
popular song in the same years. Developments in the popular song, in turn,
were closely tied to new styles of social dance. And pervading all three types
of entertainment—theater, song, and dance—was an electrifying innovation in
African American music: ragtime.“COME ON AND HEAR”
Popular Music, Theater, and Dance
at the Turn of the Century
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