The Black Crook - Background

Background

The Black Crook was born when a dramatic group and Parisian ballet troupe joined forces in New York. Henry C. Jarrett and Harry Palmer had hired the ballet troupe to perform at the New York Academy of Music, but the troupe was left without an engagement when a fire destroyed the Academy. They approached Wheatley at Niblo's Garden to see if he could use them. Wheatley offered them a chance to participate in a musical "spectacle" by combining their ballet forces with Barras's melodrama.

In operas, even comic operas with dialogue like The Magic Flute, the principal singers leave the dancing to the ballet troupe. In burlesque, music hall and vaudeville, there is little or no unifying story, just a series of sketches. So The Black Crook, with song and dance for everyone, was an evolutionary step, and has been called the first musical comedy. Cecil Michener Smith dissented from this view, arguing that while multiple scholars point to the show as the first popular comedy, "calling The Black Crook the first example of the theatrical genus we now call musical comedy is not only incorrect; it fails to suggest any useful assessment of the place of Jarrett and Palmer's extravaganza in the history of the popular musical theatre ... but in its first form it contained almost none of the vernacular attributes of book, lyrics, music, and dancing which distinguish musical comedy."

The production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances and revenues exceeded a record-shattering one million dollars. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a "musical comedy." In the late 1860s, as post-Civil War business boomed, there was a sharp increase in the number of working- and middle-class people in New York, and these more affluent people sought entertainment. Theaters became more popular, and Niblo's Garden, which had formerly hosted opera, began to offer light comedy. The Black Crook was followed by The White Fawn (1868), Le Barbe Blue (1868) and Evangeline (1873).

The production included state-of-the-art special effects, including a "transformation scene" that converted a rocky grotto into a fairyland throne room in full view of the audience. A scantily-clad female dancing chorus of 100 ballerinas in skin-colored tights, choreographed in semi-classical style by David Costa, was a big draw. It was respectable enough for the middle-class audience, but very daring and controversial enough to attract a great deal of press attention. The show's prima ballerina, Marie Bonfanti, became a star in New York.

An apparently similar show from six years earlier, The Seven Sisters (1860), which also ran for a very long run of 253 performances, is now lost and forgotten. It also included special effects and scene changes. Theatre historian John Kenrick suggests that The Black Crook's greater success resulted from changes brought about by the Civil War: First, respectable women, having had to work during the war, no longer felt tied to their homes and could attend the theatre, although many did so heavily veiled. This substantially increased the potential audience for popular entertainment. Second, America's railroad system had improved during the war, making it feasible for large productions to tour.