In the Hegewisch neighborhood of Chicago, a steel-mill community in the south-east corner of the city near the Indiana border, you can still see the old Hegewisch Opera House. Today it houses nothing but a restaurant and storefronts, but when it was built in 1888, it was a station in the dazzling, non-stop, nation-wide network of touring melodrama companies. Uncle Tom's Cabin no doubt played there, and perhaps hundreds of lesser-known shows as well.
"Melodrama" means literally melody and drama, a play with musical accompaniment and usually singing and dancing by the actors as well. From the Civil War to World War I, it was the most popular entertainment in America. Nearly every community and small town had some sort of theater, with new traveling troupes arriving every week or two. Since each company performed the same plays every week, the general level of acting competence was high, the audiences were responsive, and a good time was had by all!
The most important characteristic of melodrama was the unyielding moral justice of every plot. The good guys (and women) were saints, the villians were fiends, and the villian inevitably was killed or ruined, typically in the last few minutes of the cliff-hanger plot. Although it's easy to sneer at such plots today, our favorite movies aren't so very much more sophisticated, and no movie will ever have the urgency and immediacy of live theater performed for an audience that had not been stunned by television.
Artwork: This scene is from a poster for the play The Corsican Brothers, by Grange and Montepin. Act III, in the forest of Fontainebleau: in a duel, Fabien dei Franchi kills Chateau-Renaud, slayer of his twin brother Luis.
(By Charles Ott. Reference: The Theater, An Introduction by Oscar Brockett, 1964. The artwork (and background) is from Scenes from the Nineteenth-Century Stage by Stanley Appelbaum, 1977. Used by permission.)
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