Tony Pastor - Biography

Biography

After his Spanish father (Antonio Pastor) came to New York and met his future wife Cornelia Buckley (from New Haven, CT), they lived in Manhattan. There they had a son, Antonio Pastor, who was born in Manhattan on the 28th of May, 1837, at his parent’s residence on the 100 block of Greenwich Street across from the old Pacific Hotel in the area that one day would be occupied by the World Trade Center. His father was a Spanish immigrant who supported his family as a barber and part-time musician.

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 at Robert Butler's American Music Hall, a variety theater located at 444 Broadway in what is now called Soho but was then the heart of the lower Manhattan theater 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 with the nearly all-male variety theater audiences, he knew 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 on the Bowery 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 1874, Pastor moved his company a few blocks to take over Michael Bennett Leavitt's former theater at 585 Broadway. The theater district was moving uptown to Union Square, however, and in 1881 Pastor took a lease on the former Germania Theatre on 14th Street in the same building that housed Tammany Hall. 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 Weber and Fields, George M. Cohan, Sophie Tucker, Lillian Russell, Buster Keaton, Gus Edwards, Eva Tanguay, Blossom Seeley, Benny Fields, May Irwin and Eddie Leonard.

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".