Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: What, then, is the American?
- 2 The American century
- 3 The regions and regionalism
- 4 Immigration to the United States in the twentieth century
- 5 Religion in the United States in the twentieth century: 1900-1960
- 6 Shifting boundaries: religion and the United States: 1960 to the present
- 7 The Hispanic background of the United States
- 8 African Americans since 1900
- 9 Asian Americans
- 10 Women in the twentieth century
- 11 Queer America
- 12 The United States, war, and the twentieth century
- 13 The culture of the Cold War
- 14 Secret America: the CIA and American culture
- 15 Vietnam and the 1960s
- 16 New York City and the struggle of the modern
- 17 Music: sound: technology
- 18 African American music of the twentieth century
- 19 Hollywood cinema
- 20 Popular culture
- 21 Theatre
- 22 Society and the novel in twentieth-century America
- 23 “Preferring the wrong way”: mapping the ethical diversity of US twentieth-century poetry
- Index
- Series List
21 - Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2007
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: What, then, is the American?
- 2 The American century
- 3 The regions and regionalism
- 4 Immigration to the United States in the twentieth century
- 5 Religion in the United States in the twentieth century: 1900-1960
- 6 Shifting boundaries: religion and the United States: 1960 to the present
- 7 The Hispanic background of the United States
- 8 African Americans since 1900
- 9 Asian Americans
- 10 Women in the twentieth century
- 11 Queer America
- 12 The United States, war, and the twentieth century
- 13 The culture of the Cold War
- 14 Secret America: the CIA and American culture
- 15 Vietnam and the 1960s
- 16 New York City and the struggle of the modern
- 17 Music: sound: technology
- 18 African American music of the twentieth century
- 19 Hollywood cinema
- 20 Popular culture
- 21 Theatre
- 22 Society and the novel in twentieth-century America
- 23 “Preferring the wrong way”: mapping the ethical diversity of US twentieth-century poetry
- Index
- Series List
Summary
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American theatre was for the most part a medium of mass entertainment. In the cities, the theatre meant popular melodrama in enormous theatres like the Bowery in New York as well as the likes of Sarah Bernhardt from France touring in plays by Rostand and Racine and Ellen Terry and Henry Irving from England playing in Shakespeare and Shaw. American stars E. H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe, and Richard Mansfield acted in Shakespeare, and Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore starred in contemporary plays by American and English writers. The theatre also meant numerous American companies touring in old American standards like the ubiquitous Uncle Tom's Cabin and James O'Neill's thirty-year vehicle, Monte Cristo. Increasingly risqué revues like the Ziegfeld Follies played alongside minstrel shows and the wholesome family entertainment of vaudeville. To the early twentieth-century public, the theatre included burlesque, circus, and “extravaganza,” as well as the Yiddish theatre, the settlement house theatre, and the puppet theatre.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture , pp. 411 - 429Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006