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Summary: "Tom" Shows

15878
MUSI 730 Anglo-American Operetta and Musical Theater I
Assignment 2, Article Summary by Prof. Steve Gerber      Summary
“Musical versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were first created in the 1850s and have remained popular into the 20th c. Over time they have incorporated virtually all types of American popular music, including the songs of Foster, spirituals, minstrel songs, parlor songs, hymns, and ragtime. An appendix of American music relating to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is included.” —RILM Abstract by T. Riis
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, depicting the cruelties of slavery in the American South, became an instant bestseller and galvanized northern anti-slavery forces while it enraged southern slaveholders. Its principal characters are Uncle Tom, a long-suffering Christianized slave; Simon Legree, a sadistic slave owner; Eliza, a slave woman who escapes to the North with her small child; Little Eva, an angelic and sensitive white child whom Tom has saved from drowning; and Topsy, an unkempt and naughty slave child whom Eva befriends and teaches. Although Stowe was herself initially reluctant to produce a theatrical version, ambiguous copyright and lax enforcement enabled creation of several stage versions by others, and these were popular entertainments around the USA for several decades.
Music was a central component of staged versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and many included songs especially-composed for insertion into specific productions, as well as interpolation of pre-existing popular songs and hymns (such as “Nearer My God to Thee” and “My Old Kentucky Home”) or newly-published songs and dances related to the novel’s themes or characters (such as the Hutchinson’s “The Ghost of Uncle Tom”). Although antebellum productions featured only white actors and actresses, by the 1870s genuine black performers, including fiddlers and banjo players as well as actors, were increasingly involved; after 1876 productions often included scenes featuring “Jubilee”-type singers of spirituals. By the 1890s, theatrical versions had become lavish and eclectic in their use of interpolated music ranging from old camp-meeting songs and new ragtime cakewalks to von Suppé overtures and Strauss waltzes. The most spectacular, A.W. Martin’s 1899 NY production, was literally a theatrical circus that opened with its own eight-block-long parade with brass bands, donkeys, and floats, catering to popular interest in extravagant variety shows revolving around a central theme.
Sources
Primary sources include vintage sheet music for 40 songs and dances published between 1852 and 1899, contemporaneous newspaper stories and advertisements, and playscripts and playbills preserved in various archives, principally the Harvard Theatre Collection. Secondary literature cited includes scholarly works on Stowe and her novel, on sheet music and 19th-century song, on blackface minstrelsy, on the Fisk Jubilee singers, on the New York stage, etc.
Significance
This research corroborates the widespread use of music to heighten dramatic impact in the 19th-century theater in general, and demonstrates the not-unusual blending of parlor song, minstrel music, and Negro spirituals in the “Uncle Tom” theatrical genre in particular. It also illustrates increasing integration of black and white performers into the genre over the course of fifty years.
 

This page has paths:

  1. Literature Summaries & Research Abstracts Steven Gerber

This page has tags:

  1. Topic: Genre/Form Steven Gerber
  2. Person: Stowe, Harriet Beecher Steven Gerber
  3. Work: Uncle Tom's Cabin Steven Gerber
  4. Topic: Antecedents Steven Gerber
  5. Topic: Ethnic Caricature Steven Gerber

Contents of this tag:

  1. Participant: Gerber, (Prof.) Steve