Everything about Tony Pastor totally explained
» For Tony Pastor the saxophonist and bandleader, see
Tony Pastor (bandleader).
Antonio Pastor (
May 28,
1837 –
August 26,
1908) was an American
impresario, variety performer and theatre owner who became one of the founding forces behind
American vaudeville in the mid-to-late
nineteenth century. The strongest elements of his entertainments were an almost
jingoistic brand of
United States patriotism and a strong commitment to attracting a mixed-gender audience, the latter being something revolutionary in the male-oriented variety halls of the mid-century.
Biography
Tony Pastor was born in
Brooklyn,
New York.
He embarked on a show business career at a very young age, obtaining a job singing at
P.T. Barnum's
Scudder's American Museum. During the next few years he worked in
minstrel shows, the circus business, and as a comic singer in variety revues. He established himself as a popular songwriter during a four-year run in a saloon at 444 Broadway in the
Bowery district. Pastor published "songsters", books of his lyrics which were sung to popular tunes. The music had no notation, as it was assumed that the audience had a collective knowledge of popular song. The subject matter of his music may be shocking to modern audiences, but was intended to be bawdy and humorous rather than revolutionary.
Though Pastor was popular in the Bowery
saloons, he noticed that his audience was primarily male and that his ticket sales would double if he attracted a female audience. Eventually Pastor began to produce
variety shows, presenting an evening of clean fun that was a distinct alternative to the bawdy shows of the time and more appropriate for middle class families. In
1865 Pastor opened Tony Pastor's Opera House in
Manhattan in partnership with
minstrel show performer, Sam Sharpley, whom he later bought out. The same year he organized traveling minstrel troupes who toured the country between April and October of each year. With shows that appealed to women and children as well as the traditional male audience, his theater and touring companies quickly became popular with the middle classes and were soon being imitated.
In
1881, Pastor leased the Germania Theatre on 14th Street in
New York City that became widely known as Tony Pastor's Theater. He alternated his theater's presentations between
operettas and family-oriented variety shows, creating what became known as
vaudeville. His theater featured performers such as
Ben Harney presenting a new style called "
ragtime" as well as other up-and-coming talents such as
Lillian Russell,
May Irwin and
George M. Cohan.
In the musical
Hello, Dolly!, the song "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" includes the line, "We'll join the Astors at Tony Pastor's." It also references seeing "the shows at
Delmonico's," which suggests that the character doesn't really know about upper class social life in New York.
Tony Pastor died in
Elmhurst,
New York on
August 26,
1908 and was interred in the
Cemetery of the Evergreens, in
Brooklyn. He was 71, and though greatly mourned at his death as one of the last gentlemen of the early vaudeville halls, the medium had passed him by with the advent of the vaudeville circuit in the
1880s. Pastor had remained a local showman in an epoch that increasingly came to be dominated by regional and national chains. Fighting against the monopolies for the rights of individual local showmen was an undertaking that marked the last years of his life, earning him the nickname of "Little Man Tony".
Music
According to the humor of the time, Pastor wrote several songs that negatively portrayed ethnic stereotypes, such as
The Contraband's Adventures, the story of a freed slave. After the slave is set free by
Union soldiers, he attends an anti-slavery meeting where the
abolitionists try to scrub off his dark pigment. The slave concludes by singing...
...De nigger will be nigger till de day of jubilee
For he never was intended for a white man.
Den just skedaddle home-leave de colored man alone;
For you're only making trouble for de nation;
You may fight and you may fuss
But you never will make tings right
Until you all agree for to let de nigger be
For you'll neber, neber, neber wash him white!
Though he separated some ethnic groups in his music, he also intended to unite the lower and middle classes. In songs like
The Upper and Lower Ten Thousand, he defended the common man of the Bowery in lyrics like...
If an Upper-Ten fellow a swindler should be
And with thousands of dollars of others make free
Should he get into court, why, without any doubt,
The matter's hushed up and they'll let him step out.
If a Lower-Ten Thousand chap happens to steal,
For to keep him from starving, the price of a meal,
Why the law will declare it's a different thing-
For they call him a thief, and he's sent to Sing-Sing!
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