Like Spielmann’s chapter, Roxane Martin’s emphasizes the energy of a wealth of theatrical forms which, for decades marginalized by theatre historiography, are sites of innovation. Focusing on the particularly productive period of the long nineteenth century and on the dynamism of boulevard theatres, Martin draws her examples from vaudeville, melodrama, féerie, café concert, pantomime, operetta and music hall and the flow between these different genres. Martin describes how these theatrical forms, which did not enjoy the privilège and could therefore not officially contain text and dialogue, overcame censorship through innovation. The chapter reveals the new approaches to storytelling and plot, set design and musical composition that emerged, and the new careers to which these innovations gave rise, notably that of stage director.

Chapter Three analyzes Rogers’ move into vaudeville , the national entertainment circuit that fascinated the American public during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Oklahoman became a star attraction whose cowboy garb and tremendous roping skills delighted audiences all over the country. Rogers also gradually developed another skill that became his calling card – humorous commentary. As an emblem of the American West that was gradually disappearing in the wake of urban, industrial growth, and a natural humorist whose down-home jests and good-natured wisecracks delighted audiences, Rogers began to establish a national presence. This period also saw his stormy courtship of, and marriage to, Betty Blake, a young woman from back home. The marriage would last for the rest of his life.

The numerous revues that opened in spring 1924 reflected many different approaches to the popular and profitable genre. Five revues debuted over four days in May in New York (including I’ll Say She Is, starring the Marx Brothers; Innocent Eyes, featuring Mistinguett and on-stage nudity; and The Grand Street Follies, produced away from Times Square at the Neighborhood Playhouse). London had its own revues open that showed tremendous aesthetic contrasts, including Elsie Janis at Home starring the popular American entertainer, and two editions of major series: Ziegfeld’s Follies, which included a sequence dedicated to the memory of Victor Herbert, and George White’s Scandals, the last Scandals for which George Gershwin wrote music, premiered on Broadway.

Anna Muza surveys the theatrical traditions that Chekhov inherited at the end of the nineteenth century. Muza examines the influence of the “old forms” on Chekhov: the works of Shakespeare and Molière, of such nineteenth-century Russian playwrights as Griboyedov and Ostrovsky – and possibly most important of all – the lower-end fare that Chekhov enjoyed as a young reviewer, the vaudeville and farcical devices that he eventually raised to the level of high art.

Nativism, racism, and sexism are leading characters in this chapter, as are the songs for and against them. The Ku Klux Klan leads the way in musical contemptibility, but there are others, such as the xenophobes of the Spanish Flu epidemic and the songwriting purveyors of the postwar “Red Scare” against peace activists, labor activists, Germans, and suspected Bolsheviks. The immigrant community is under siege in the atmosphere of “100% Americanism,” and their songs – in the Cantonese opera houses, on the German and Italian vaudeville stages, in the Yiddish musical theaters, and in the ethnic recording studios – aim to fight back. The Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the lower 48 continue to resist the eradication of their song heritage, and the Mexican corridistas continue to sing of their border-crossing struggles. On the vaudeville stage, Eva Tanguay shows her contempt for conservative gender expectations, while the as-yet-unknown composers Florence Price and Ruth Crawford lay the groundwork for their own emergence.

The transatlantic circulation of circus acts during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries created opportunities for circus’s somatically spectacular acts to appear on pantomime and variety theatre stages. This chapter assesses a neglected aspect of circus scholarship: understanding how and why circus acts appeared in other popular entertainment forms. Circus, pantomime, and variety cultivated unity through their reliance on novelty. By tracing the performance engagements of a major circus-style act, Lockhart’s Elephants, in iconic variety venues in London, Paris, and New York City, I demonstrate the deep interrelatedness of modern circus and music hall/vaudeville. Performers frequently established and sustained their reputations in these economically powerful cosmopolitan centres, where heightened competition in the leisure marketplace increased circulation of circus performers. Nineteenth-century industrialisation and changing theatre regulations had transformed genres, allowing audiences more opportunity for leisure activities and theatres more opportunity to blur spoken drama and spectacle. The somatic spectacularity of circus acts provided essential counterpoints to pantomime and variety’s dominant performance modes. This dynamic relationship complicates our understanding of circus, pantomime, and variety as distinct genres, pressing scholars to reconsider the relative stability with which we deploy the terms and write their histories.

Chapter 6 traces the notion of racial intimacy in serial novels and the ambivalence about US racial categories.

Light musical theatre first appeared in Greece during the second half of the nineteenth century in the form of French operetta and vaudeville, bringing new morals that scandalized the nouveau-bourgeois society of Athens and divided the public into ‘Europeanists’ and ‘conservatives’. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Viennese operetta introduced light musical theatre, which thrilled Athenian audiences and represented the ‘imperial dream’ of the inhabitants of a small country on the fringes of Europe. Operetta inspired the creation of Greek musical theatre companies from the early twentieth century and became popular for tours of the south-eastern Mediterranean. This phase ended with the production of plays and performances of Greek operetta during the interwar period. This chapter offers a multi-sided approach to the expansion of operetta in Greek-speaking areas, which brought with it a renovation of the Modern Greek theatrical stage and life, invigorating it with a new repertoire and forming a new theatrical tradition. New operettas provided the frame for Greece’s twofold musical identity: Western and Oriental. Operetta served as a social melting pot between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ musical creation and was the source of many well-known songs

During the long nineteenth century, the Nordic countries witnessed economic growth, the industrial revolution and the prominent expansion of the bourgeois classes. The growing need for entertainment explains the popularity and increase in production of operettas from the 1850s onwards. Jacques Offenbach and his satirical operettas enjoyed success in Copenhagen at the Folketeatret. During the great Lehár craze, Danish performers toured Scandinavian cities. By the 1870s, Christiania (now Oslo) in Norway also had an operetta epidemic, and new venues opened for the active Danish and Swedish companies and some domestic initiatives. The first production of Offenbach’s Orfeus i underjorden in Stockholm was staged by Pierre Deland in 1860. An elegant new venue, the Oscarsteatern (built in 1906) had its first major success with Lehár’s Den glada änkan in 1907. A Swedish Theatre was erected in Helsinki 1860 and opened with Deland’s production of Orfeus i underjorden. Helsinki also accommodated Russian officers and their families, who found entertainment first in the Arkadia-theatre, where several Russian-language operetta productions were given. Operettas in Finnish found their best home at the Kansan Näyttämö (People’s Stage) founded in 1907 in Helsinki.