The Theater
The Spanish Realist theater contains a wide spectrum of works, from the most conservative and non-critical positions to the most progressive and acid ones: from the high comedy of Adelardo López de Ayala and Ventura de la Vega, to the ethically overwrought theater of Benito Pérez Galdós and the sharp critique of Enrique Gaspar. Apart from these authors, the interest in costumbrismo reflected the most conservative mores of the bourgeois public. Costumbrismo had a new beginning, through genres like the zarzuela or género chico, the sainete or "theater by the hour". It was fundamentally a theater of middle class evasion of social problems, avoidng the creation of crises of conscience for the bourgeoisie. Alongside this, it tried to revitalize the old fashioned conservative value of honor through initiatives to revive romantic historical drama. These are exemplified by the works of Manuel Tamayo y Baus and by the Neo-Romanticism of the mathematician José Echegaray.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Realist Literature
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Tony Pastor, the pioneer of vaudeville, played the theater in 1876.... He had been preceded by P.T. Barnum, and an occasional performer such as Professor Simmons, “Great, Weird, Wondrous, and Invincibly Incomprehensible ... Basiliconthamaturgist.””
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“...I have never known a “movement” in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various “uplifting” activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)