Tony Pastor
Encyclopedia
Tony Pastor 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.
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 show
s, 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 operetta
s 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".
soldiers, he attends an anti-slavery meeting where the abolitionist
s try to scrub off his dark pigment. The slave concludes by singing...
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...
University Press, 1971).
Impresario
An impresario is a person who organizes and often finances concerts, plays or operas; analogous to a film producer in filmmaking, television production and an angel investor in business...
, variety performer and theatre owner who became one of the founding forces behind American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The strongest elements of his entertainments were an almost jingoistic
Jingoism
Jingoism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy. In practice, it is a country's advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safeguard what it perceives as its national interests...
brand of United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
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
Antonio Pastor was born in ManhattanManhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
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
World Trade Center
The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The site is currently being rebuilt with five new...
. 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
Barnum's American Museum
Barnum's American Museum was located at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York City, USA, from 1841 to 1865. The museum was owned by famous showman P.T. Barnum and his partner and original owner, John Scudder. Prior to their partnership, the museum was known as Scudder's American...
. During the next few years he worked in minstrel show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....
s, 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
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....
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
Tammany Hall
Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was a New York political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789 as the Tammany Society...
. He alternated his theater's presentations between operetta
Operetta
Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...
s and family-oriented variety shows, creating what became known as vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
. His theater featured performers such as Ben Harney
Ben Harney
Benjamin Robertson "Ben" Harney was a United States of America songwriter, entertainer, and pioneer of ragtime music. His 1895 composition "You've Been a Good Old Wagon but You Done Broke Down" is regarded as one of the first published ragtime songs...
presenting a new style called "ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
" as well as other up-and-coming talents such as Weber and Fields
Weber and Fields
Weber and Fields refers to the vaudeville team of:* Joe Weberand:* Lew Fields....
, George M. Cohan
George M. Cohan
George Michael Cohan , known professionally as George M. Cohan, was a major American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer, and producer....
, Sophie Tucker
Sophie Tucker
Sophie Tucker was a Russian/Ukrainian-born American singer and actress. Known for her stentorian delivery of comical and risqué songs, she was one of the most popular entertainers in America during the first half of the 20th century...
, Lillian Russell
Lillian Russell
Lillian Russell was an American actress and singer. She became one of the most famous actresses and singers of the late 19th century and early 20th century, known for her beauty and style, as well as for her voice and stage presence.Russell was born in Iowa but raised in Chicago...
, Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".Keaton was recognized as the...
, Gus Edwards, Eva Tanguay
Eva Tanguay
Eva Tanguay was a Canadian-born singer and entertainer who billed herself as "the girl who made vaudeville famous".-Early life:...
, Blossom Seeley
Blossom Seeley
-Biography:Seeley was born Minnie Guyer, in San Francisco, California, USA. A top vaudeville headliner, she was known as the "Queen of Syncopation" and helped bring jazz and ragtime into the mainstream of American music. She introduced the Shelton Brooks classic "Some of These Days" in vaudeville...
, Benny Fields
Benny Fields
Benny Fields was a popular singer of the early 20th century, best known as one-half of the Blossom Seeley-Benny Fields vaudeville team...
, May Irwin
May Irwin
May Irwin , was a Canadian actress, singer and star of vaudeville.-Early life and career:Born at Whitby, Ontario 1862 as Georgina May Campbell, her father, Robert E. Campbell of Whitby, Ontario, died when she was 13 years old and her stage-minded mother, Jane Draper, in need of money, encouraged...
and Eddie Leonard
Eddie Leonard
Eddie Leonard , born Lemuel Golden Toney, was a vaudevillian and a man considered the greatest American minstrel of his day, at a time when minstrel shows were still acceptable as entertainment. He performed in vaudeville for 45 years before that medium faded in the 1920s, and was known for such...
.
In the musical Hello, Dolly!
Hello, Dolly! (musical)
Hello, Dolly! is a musical with lyrics and music by Jerry Herman and a book by Michael Stewart, based on Thornton Wilder's 1938 farce The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder revised and retitled The Matchmaker in 1955....
, 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
Elmhurst, Queens
Elmhurst is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It is bounded by Roosevelt Avenue on the north; Corona to the northeast; Junction Boulevard on the east; Rego Park to the southeast; the Long Island Expressway on the south; Middle Village to the south and southwest; and Maspeth...
, New York on August 26, 1908 and was interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, in Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
. 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 UnionUnion Army
The Union Army was the land force that fought for the Union during the American Civil War. It was also known as the Federal Army, the U.S. Army, the Northern Army and the National Army...
soldiers, he attends an anti-slavery meeting where the abolitionist
Abolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...
s 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-SingSing-singSing-sing is a gathering of a few tribes or villages in Papua New Guinea. People arrive to show their distinct culture, dance and music. The aim of these gatherings is to peacefully share traditions. Villagers paint and decorate themselves for sing-sings....
!
Biography
Parker Zellers, Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage (Ypsilanti: Eastern MichiganUniversity Press, 1971).