The Theater: Gentlemen, Be Seated

Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall last week honored a great anniversary in show business. One hundred years ago the Virginia Minstrels, at the Bowery Amphitheatre, introduced Manhattan to a new art form, conceived in blackface and dedicated to the proposition that the white man could equal Negro comedy, song and dance. The Music Hall’s directors strewed its stage with comedians and buck & wing dancers, got themselves a towering interlocutor in a yellow satin dress suit, and put on a 38-minute minstrel show of huge, streamlined proportions.

The Music Hall imported from his quiet Mount Vernon home minstrelsy’s last great survivor, white-haired, 75-year-old Neil O’Brien, star balladist and endman in the days of the late Lew Dockstader and George Primrose. Affably, Oldtimer O’Brien sat through the show, went backstage afterward and made a speech to the assembled company. “Any show that had the Rockettes in it,” remarked he, with dry tact, “would be a success.”

The minstrel shows that Neil O’Brien remembers had a lyrically warm, intimate, unregimented spirit that was missing at the Music Hall. The blackface tradition, in one form or another, dates from the colonial days when whites first saw and imitated Negro entertainers. As early as 1769, during a Manhattan performance of Isaac Bickerstaff’s comic opera The Padlock, an actor named Lewis Hallam got drunk on the stage in his role of a Negro slave and brought the house down. This eventually led to “the novel, grotesque, original and surpassingly melodious Ethiopian Band entitled the Virginia Minstrels.”

The classical minstrel show consisted of three parts. In the First Part, the flashy company of “coons” marched to their seats in a large semicircle on the stage. In the center the Interlocutor, in a resplendent tail coat, pronounced the inaugural “Gentlemen, be seated.”

Tambo & Bones. After a ballad or two, the Interlocutor addressed the show’s comic artists, who flanked the semicircle and were known as endmen. Because they originally played the tambourine and bones, the endmen were known respectively as Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones. Sample dialogue between the Interlocutor and Messrs. Tambo & Bones:

“Why is a journey ’round de world like a cat’s tail?”

“Coz it’s fur to de end of it.”

“Mr. Tambo, I disagree wid you; suppose dat de cat’s tail should be accidemptally singed?”

“Oh, in dat case, it wouldn’t be so fur.”

But the minstrel shows also contained the leading clowns of their day (Lew Dockstader’s specialty, delivered in a dress suit the seat of whose pants dusted the floor, was a farcical satire entitled “Modern Mother Goose”). For a First Part grand finale the entire company would pass in review in what was known as the “Walk Around.”

The Second Part, usually done before a curtain while the first act scenery was changed, was a vaudeville known as the Olio (supposedly derived from the Spanish “olla” as in olla podrida, meaning hodgepodge). A regular feature was the stump speech by the Black Demosthenes (or someone of similar title) on such timely topics as “Carrie Nation, the Masher.” The Third Part, or “Afterpiece,” was often a satire on a current play or opera.

Booth in Blackface. From 1850 to 1880 minstrelsy was the biggest thing in the U.S. theatre. Famed players like Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, William Macready and Edwin Booth were hard put for audiences in any town where “cullud opera” was playing. In 1850 the great Booth himself gave a blackface performance at Bel Air, Md. P. T. Barnum once corked his own face and appeared in such early favorites as Zip Coon, The Raccoon Hunt, Gittin’ Up Stairs. Stephen Foster wrote his masterpieces for minstrels. John Philip Sousa, Gentleman Jim Corbett and George M. Cohan’s father all did their blackface stints.

Minstrelsy gradually died with the onset of the vaudeville chains, then the movies, then the radio. “I doubt,” said pensive Neil O’Brien last week, “whether people would pay much more than $1 to see a good minstrel show today.”