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[0:07] Robert W. Schneider: Hi, I'm Robert W. Schneider, and welcome to Fifty Key Stage Musicals, the podcast, a companion piece to the Routledge Press publication, Fifty Key Stage Musicals, which is now available for purchase by going to Routledge.com or clicking the link below in today's show description.

[0:24] Robert W. Schneider: Today's episode focuses on chapter one, the 1866 production of The Black CROOK.

[0:31] Robert W. Schneider: And with us today is the author of that chapter, Professor Sebastian Trainor.

[0:36] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Sebastian Trainor is an assistant professor of theatre history at the Pennsylvania State University.

[0:41] Robert W. Schneider: As a scholar, he investigates charismatic but suspicious theatre historical anecdotes, of which The Black CROOK, I'm sure fits into that category, with an eye toward re-narrating them in more truthful contexts.

[0:55] Robert W. Schneider: His essays have appeared in Text & Presentation, Theatre Symposium, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and various edited collections.

[1:04] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Sebastian Trainor, I am so happy that you are with us today.

[1:07] Sebastian Trainor: Well, thank you for having me. I'm truly delighted to be here.

[1:45] Robert W. Schneider: September 12th. And with this particular spectacle, spectacular production that involved that was an extravaganza that involved music and dancing. I'm not sure we can quite use the term musical in the year 1866.

[2:11] Robert W. Schneider: And the second question we ask our authors is why did you want to codify this history? Why did you want to tell the story? You could have chosen any musical, and this is the one that you gravitated towards.

[2:24] Sebastian Trainor: Well, you already read sort of my research profile. I'm very interested in and suspicious of certain theatrical anecdotes that say that's a really great story. That story is just it's so good, there's gotta be something fishy about it. I mean, really, out of nothing at all, suddenly The Black CROOK burst onto the scene, and then we had American musical theater. I don't think that's really how artistic evolution works in my book. And so this is a story that kind of got flagged for looking into. Why does The Black CROOK get to be called the first musical when it surely had some kind of predecessor?

[3:09] Robert W. Schneider: And I am curious, and it's a little bit off topic, but I'm gonna ask anyway, have you ever analyzed one of these suspicious theatrical anecdotes? And then after you've done your research, realized, oh wow, it's actually not suspicious at all. All of this actually did occur.

[3:24] Sebastian Trainor: There's always an element of, yeah, it's not that the story is untrue, but it's that the narrative that gets repeated and repeated is very selective. And there are certain of the most sort of outrageous details that get inscribed again and again that sort of erase all of the rest of the history. So oftentimes what I find is that the story is true, but it's not the whole story. And when you know the whole story, it makes the story that gets repeated very often seem trivial and inconsequential and kind of makes me angry that the rest of this richer history is lost.

[4:12] Robert W. Schneider: Well, in speaking of richer history, let's talk about some of the titles that you mention as potential candidates of things that actually might have been the first musical or notable earlier achievements. Can you talk about some of these as early from as the 1700s, which I found so surprising?

[4:31] Sebastian Trainor: Well, I can conjure up the titles, and I would know exactly where to go and look for more information about them. A kind of groundbreaking 1960s article called The Black CROOK Myth really sort of by a music historian really sort of goes through the previous hundred years of the fusion of American music and theater on the stage, offering such titles as The Disappointment as early as 1767 as being a likely starting point for the American musical theater, or The Archers in 1796, or Norman Leslie, the show called Norman Leslie in 1836, or The Naiad Queen, particularly in 1841, which in its own way is sort of similar to The Black CROOK, but there's The Black CROOK plus. But these were plays with music, melodramas that became increasingly musicalized.

Sometimes there were sort of specialty solo numbers by popular music hall-like performers in them. In some of those cases, the music and songs were actually plot furthering in a way that you do not see in The Black CROOK. So there are different reasons to make the case for different ones of them. And then there are things that are against them, like, well, this one was an import, or this one happened in Boston, but it didn't happen in New York. So if it didn't happen in New York, it didn't really count.

[6:05] Sebastian Trainor: For some of those reasons, I mean, The Black CROOK as being a huge commercial success and being in New York and being a musicalized play, but mostly by virtue of being a huge commercial success, has kind of claimed the honor as the poster child for the first American musical.

[6:32] Robert W. Schneider: And it seems throughout American musical theater history, even though there might be shows like The Disappointment or The Archers that come before, unless you have that financial commercial commerce stamped seal of approval, it doesn't really enter the history book.

[6:47] Sebastian Trainor: Yes, that's true. Although, you know, in the era of The Black CROOK in 1861, Laura Keene's company had an enormous success with a show called The Seven Sisters, based on a German short story called The Seven Daughters of Satan. And it was its own kind of fairies versus demons, spectacular scenery, musicalized extravaganza. And it ran for over 200 performances, which was, you know, before The Black CROOK eclipsed that. That was the longest run of a theatrical piece in the United States, not quite in world history at that point, but The Black CROOK did take that honor. But the difference between 1861 and 1866 was really the American railroads. Laura Keene's show didn't really have the same kind of afterlife as The Black CROOK did, because she didn't have the same capability for being able to tour something that was a very large scale production.

So when she went on tour, it had to be things that were easily transportable. And huge spectacle was not really in the offing in that year, but after the American Civil War, after the expansion of the railroads, the industrial capability for being able to reproduce a mechanical miracle like The Black CROOK existed. And that's sort of the difference between why I think we start with The Black CROOK rather than with Laura Keene's The Seven Sisters.

[8:30] Robert W. Schneider: As we said before we went on the air, one of the interesting things about The Black CROOK is in most musical theater textbooks, it has about three paragraphs dedicated to it, and it seems like it just sort of emerged out of the thin air, a singing, dancing, acting, integrated piece of music. And we know that is now not the case. Can you demythify for us the origins of The Black CROOK and how it came to be?

[8:57] Sebastian Trainor: Yes. And I mean, I can explain them because this part of the story is actually it's mostly true when you read it in the textbooks. And it's such a great story. This is part of its staying power, I'm certain. The BLACK Crook resulted from a combination of two completely unrelated theatrical pieces that were being developed by separate producers. One of them was named William Wheatley, and he ran a theater called Niblo's Gardens, which was the premier theater of its day. It was the most advanced technologically in New York at the time. Its only real rival was the Academy of Music on 14th Street at the time. That was extremely high-end and very ritzy. Niblo's Garden was not quite as high end, but still a very upscale kind of presenting hall.

William Wheatley in 1866, I do not know what the man was thinking when he agreed to produce this 10-year-old real clunker of a melodrama by a playwright called Charles M. Barras. I say playwright, he was really an actor and kind of a B-list actor who had been inspired 10 years previously when he saw a German opera called The Marksman, and he sort of appropriated its story wholesale, translated the opera into, well, I'll just write it in English and call it a melodrama and steal all the plot details, but I'll also mix in some elements from other shows like Goethe's Faust or The Naiad Queen, the scenes of kind of the underwater fairy kingdom and other plot devices that he liked as a kind of mix and match, and turned them all into this evil demons versus good fairies melodrama that ends in a big marriage.

The show is neither appallingly bad, but it's also not really particularly good. It's kind of standard fare for a melodrama of the era, and fairies and demons and evil sorcerers were stage tropes at the time. They were in every kind of show that there was. Wheatley was ordinarily a very savvy producer. So why exactly he agreed to produce Barras's show, I know that there was a co-production arrangement involved. Barras was investing his own money in the show. At any rate, Barras and Wheatley signed a contract to mount the show as the opener for the 1866 season at Niblo's Garden. So that's one of the shows that channels itself into The Black CROOK, and that's the one that gives it its title. Barras's show was called The Black CROOK.

[12:06] Sebastian Trainor: There were also two other producers who were actually trying to produce at the Academy of Music, and they were named Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer. They had seen, they had learned from Laura Keene's The Seven Sisters that spectacle really sells. Mechanical innovation is what's the coming thing in the 19th century when we didn't even have light bulbs, but the bicycle is brand new on the scene, railroads are just being developed, we're getting breakthroughs in medicine and penicillin every day. Some new mechanical miraculous invention is taking the world by storm, and the newspapers are really kind of coming into their own as a media for popularizing the newfangled inventions of the age. What the producers Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer did was they went to Europe and they said, "Well, we're not quite up to European standards yet in this country."

So all of the really innovative new mechanisms of theater, you'll find them in London, you'll find them in Paris, you'll find them in Berlin. And so they went and they toured Europe looking for something that they could just buy and bring to the Academy of Music to be the newest, most advanced show. And they found what they were looking for. In London, they found a transformation scene, which was its own sort of specialty entertainment at the time, which would be a very elaborate mechanical scene change that happens in full view of the audience very slowly, transforming a lake into perhaps an island that rises out of the water, and chariots descend from the clouds, and new theatrical mechanisms rotate other things on stage and deliver fairies through trapdoors, and one ooze and oz over the apparatus of the scene changing.

They saw that and they said, "Yes, this is the kind of thing that we're looking for to bring to the Academy of Music," so they bought the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel and arranged for all of the apparatus that made it work to be shipped to New York during the course of the summer so that they could install it at the Academy of Music. And then they didn't stop there. They thought we can one-up what's being done here, and they hired a French ballet company on top of that because ballet had made some appearance and had been a big hit, especially the tights and the short skirts of the dancers had impressed critics, and they thought, "Well, we can bring some ballet into this and enhance the spectacle," and they were going to contact when they got back to New York Augustine Daly to write them a scenario to bring the scene change that they had brought together with the French ballet company to find some kind of shred of plot to make the whole story make sense.

[15:14] Sebastian Trainor: But whatever their plans were, when they got back to New York in June, they received the news that while they were away buying all this stuff for the Academy of Music, the Academy of Music had burned down in May, just a few weeks before they got back.

[15:29] Sebastian Trainor: So they had the ballet company on its way, all of the scenery and mechanical apparatus were being shipped to them and they had no theater. And they looked around at the theatrical landscape and they could count the theaters in existence then as well and say, well, the only other theater in New York City at the moment that can possibly accommodate all of this apparatus and innovation is Niblo's Garden.

[15:54] Sebastian Trainor: So they went and they talked to Wheatley, who already had a contract with Barras to produce this clunker of a show called The Black CROOK. But they also never had a play. This they just had a bunch of scenery and a dance company of French ballerinas coming to do the show.

[16:18] Sebastian Trainor: And so it didn't take them all that long to work out a deal where, all right, they look at the melodrama, they say it can definitely incorporate this spectacular scenery that Jarrett and Palmer are bringing. And Barras was supposed to be a producer, but they bought him out. And they just decided how about we give you a royalty for the use of your play, which is the thing that he wanted in the first place.

[16:42] Sebastian Trainor: So he was perfectly happy to say, yes, I will be glad to take a royalty and you can produce the show. And so they actually did a lot of renovation to Niblo's Garden, even though it was fairly well equipped. They made some additional changes to be able to accommodate the new scenery, investing about 25,000 into the actual theater itself, which was an enormous sum of money at that time.

[17:10] Sebastian Trainor: And then their expenses also had an outlay of about another 20,000 to 25,000 for all of the costumes and the talents and whatnot of pre-production cost of just to open the doors on day one was about $50,000, which was more than twice anyone had previously spent on a production in New York City at the time.

[17:31] Robert W. Schneider: Was there in the press at this time, or word of mouth in the streets, that something special was going to be opening at the garden somewhat soon?

[17:41] Sebastian Trainor: Well, this was also the age of P.T. Barnum. And I mean, these producers, Jarrett, Palmer, Wheatley, certainly they took a leaf out of his book. And they regularly had kept the press updated, had them walked through the theater as it was being remodeled. There were preview pieces on all of the new mechanical innovations that were coming, the capabilities of the new stage that they were modifying for the show.

[18:09] Sebastian Trainor: They advertised how much everything cost as though the price of the production were its main attraction. And I know we'll talk about this at the end, but I think we can draw a clear line, can't we, from what they're doing to producers in the 1980s and 1990s on Broadway.

[18:27] Robert W. Schneider: Oh, yeah.

[18:28] Sebastian Trainor: So they're clearly what's featured here is not the star performer or the talent, the star of the show becomes the spectacle of the theater and all of the expensive apparatus that we can deploy and having a gigantic animatronic King Kong on the stage. One goes to go and see a giant animatronic King Kong move about, or goes to see a whole bunch of people on roller skates as trains on a track that you know entirely loops the theater in a custom built theater. As much as the story or the music, the spectacle there is what's drawing an audience in.

[19:11] Robert W. Schneider: So what was the reaction on opening night when audiences got to see this thing they'd been hearing about for so long?

[19:18] Sebastian Trainor: I'm gonna paraphrase the Tribune's review here. It was something like the scenery is magnificent, the ballet is beautiful, the drama is rubbish. And it lasted five and a half hours. And they got that time down to about four hours. But strangely, many people stayed to the end because the spectacle was so no one has ever seen, no one in America has ever seen this before.

[19:56] Sebastian Trainor: So many reviewers are writing like nothing ever seen on this continent in the past, describing lavishly all of the amazing scenic transformation which ends the first act and then the second act and then the third act, and especially the finale of the show. Particular thing that they also talked about was they were very impressed by the production incorporated over in addition to the French ballet company, a very kind of large chorus of American actresses was also hired to be the equivalent of spear carriers.

[20:36] Sebastian Trainor: Well, they'd be they were fairies or demons or of some sort, but they were all wearing the 1866 equivalent of body suits and very little else. And this was more exposed, no flesh was exposed because the bodysuits completely covered all of their arms and their legs, but nonetheless, it entirely revealed the form of the performers who were on stage.

[21:09] Sebastian Trainor: And some of them didn't even wear skirts. So this was, but they were a ballet company. So on the one hand, this is a profane display of the female form on stage. On the other hand, it's excused because it's European and it's art. So what would be called burlesque or as a low class entertainment appropriate for taverns and just not very refined venues is suddenly artified by being put on stage in a good versus evil melodrama where good is going to triumph over evil being performed by a very artistic European company, but at one and the same time, it's more exposed legs on the American stage than anyone has ever seen before, at least certainly not in a respectable venue.

[22:15] Robert W. Schneider: And this idea of being able to show the female identifying body in little clothing, or like you said, showing the form, showing the form in the silhouette. Is this something that will inspire Florence Ziegfeld later on?

[22:29] Sebastian Trainor: Oh my, yes. I mean, there's a clear and direct line from what The Black CROOK innovated, the innovation of The Black CROOK and the idea that, you know, sex is going to be very profitable. I've got a quote here from somewhere from one of the producers. Legs are staple articles and will never go out of fashion while the world lasts. That was, and he went on a bit more about how this will make a lot of money in the show and he will give New York audiences a lot of them and he believes that on that basis his show will run for a very long time. And he was right.

[23:12] Robert W. Schneider: What was the length of the run of The Black CROOK?

[23:15] Sebastian Trainor: 474 performances, but they closed it early. It was still highly profitable at the time that they closed it. I mean, it was now drawing an out-of-town audience, but the show got an update every six months or so, like musicals of the 1920s, it had sort of set bits that they could just retire a piece of the spectacle and put in like in the second year in the summer of the second year, they put in a baby ballet, which involved over 75 small children who were between three feet tall and three and a half feet tall, doing as a military drill team in the fairy kingdom, doing an elaborate marching number. And that replaced one of the ballets that they retired.

[24:06] Sebastian Trainor: So they would update the show with new spectacles to try and get repeat audience, and the press would come back and they would review the new innovation of the show. And plus people were coming, it was a draw from all over the country of folks coming into New York because they had heard about this show and they must have it.

[24:25] Robert W. Schneider: Dare I ask dramaturgically, did anybody ever say, Why are there babies marching around in this story about fairy queens?

[24:33] Sebastian Trainor: Um, or were they just so dazzled by what they were seeing? Logic what goes out the window. Yes, they did say that, and they said the second thing as well, which is to say, this has nothing to do with the story. We really have no idea what the play is about. And if you didn't already know it from before, you certainly wouldn't get an idea. But we don't care because it's so amazing to look at.

[24:59] Robert W. Schneider: Was there singing in this show? Where is the music element to call it a musical?

[25:04] Sebastian Trainor: So the music is mainly composed for the ballet. So the music is mostly danced to rather than sung, but it does have some music hall numbers in it as well that can be changed. On opening night, a music hall B-list star, climbing star named Millie Cavendish, got positive reviews for a song that she sings in the first act called You Naughty Naughty Men. That is just it really doesn't have anything to do with furthering the plot, but it's a music hall number that gets dropped in. It wasn't custom written for the show, it was just a popular tune of the day.

[25:47] Sebastian Trainor: And there are some other music hall numbers that get inserted at various points through the play that are sung in a similar way, but really the draw was the ballet and the spectacle.

[25:56] Robert W. Schneider: So is it safe to say that any music that was being sung in The Black CROOK came from preexisting material? Nothing was being written specifically for a vocalist.

[26:07] Sebastian Trainor: Um, I don't think we can say that none of it. I do believe that the house composer, I know the house composer composed some of the dance music for The Black CROOK. And I think some songs were specially composed for it, but they went by the wayside. And it certainly combined preexisting material with some things that were custom created for that first show.

[26:38] Sebastian Trainor: And for audiences, you know, as we've said before, the myth in the history book is that people saw this show and they said, oh my gosh, you can have talking, singing, and dancing all happening at the same time in service to the story. Did people see that when they first saw The Black CROOK, or were they just so dazzled by the set and the human body that that aspect of it never really entered their minds?

[27:04] Sebastian Trainor: Um, I think it's the second thing. The BLACK Crook to my mind, it does innovate spectacular production in America. It certainly innovates theatrical touring as a model for every very successful and elaborate show that would tour after it. But it really feels like the end of the era of a kind of a German melodrama or French-inspired fairy ballet, both of which were popular throughout the 19th century. But this feels more like the end of that. I mean, it's the subject matter of the material is already out of date and passé at the time that The Black CROOK premieres, but what's not out of date is all the scenic spectacle and the mechanical innovation of the show.

[27:59] Sebastian Trainor: One of the things that I wanted to ask you earlier was can you tell us a little bit about the other types of performance that was going on around the same time as The Black CROOK? What other genres could an audience member go and see?

[28:13] Sebastian Trainor: We're in the era of the booths, who are particularly known for their Shakespeare performances. Blackface Minstrelsy is very popular in the 1860s and continues to be so, waning somewhat in popularity by the turn of the century. Music hall variety shows are going on. And what's also coming into existence is kind of the proto-vaudeville. I mean, it's the touring that will allow vaudeville to happen, but the kind of the continuous show that consists of short acts that run perpetually that are just specialty numbers that are booked in a theater are also there. You just come in whenever, you watch the show, you sit down for as long as you want, you leave whenever. If you stay long enough, you'll see the acts repeat.

[29:15] Sebastian Trainor: One of the things I found so fascinating about your chapter that I was not aware of until I was reading your work is the New York Herald and James Gordon Bennett.

[29:28] Robert W. Schneider: Uh can you tell us a little bit about him and what his thoughts were on The Black CROOK?

[29:33] Sebastian Trainor: I'm gonna find uh find some quote to read at you because he was really good at at uh at uh at thunder and luster uh uh against it.

[29:42] Sebastian Trainor: Uh oh, I wonder how much of him I quoted.

[29:44] Sebastian Trainor: I'm gonna go back to the case.

[29:45] Robert W. Schneider: Yes, you quote him in the book, and when you quote him, I feel like I'm reading a fire and brimstone sermon.

[29:51] Robert W. Schneider: Uh so I'm so interested to hear what got under this man's collar so much.

[29:57] Sebastian Trainor: Um well, there's an interesting story there. Uh and it's uh it's a kind of a uh a long segue. I mean, in part, I think that his uh his views of um uh he he wrote I I quoted something like uh on the stage of Sodom and Gomorrah, they had such shows as The Black CROOK. But here in New York, all decent citizens should should cry it down, and everyone involved in the creation of this show should be arrested and driven out of town.

[30:27] Sebastian Trainor: And every week he would write another editorial against The Black CROOK like that, which so far as I can tell, um uh just made people want to go and see the abomination for themselves. Um but I on the one hand, I think that his conviction is uh um is sincerely held. But at the same time, um one of the the earliest historians of The Black CROOK, um uh The Naked Truth, the inside history of The Black CROOK, published in 1897 by Joseph Witten, who was the um the accountant, the financial manager for Niblo's Garden.

[31:04] Sebastian Trainor: He wrote this this story of The Black CROOK, and he has his own theory about uh about the um about the uh Bennett's opposition to the show. Bennett uh uh was actually a friend of uh of Wheatley's, but no New York theater advertised in his newspaper because of a feud um led by P. T. Barnum. Um that P. T. Barnum was having uh with Bennett, where Barnum got all theatrical managers to boycott doing any advertising in Bennett's paper uh whatsoever.

[31:40] Sebastian Trainor: Um and uh in in part it seems as revenge against that, uh Bennett would sometimes get on a soapbox uh and um shout down the shows uh uh at the theaters that weren't advertising in his paper. This is a theory that was uh that was advanced by um by Whitten in his history of The Black CROOK, um based on the idea that well, Wheatley and Bennett were were friends, and Bennett recognized that that you know bad press might in fact lead to ticket sales.

[32:13] Sebastian Trainor: I mean, if it's the case of uh um of negative press deliberately being used to boost to give the box office boost, it's probably the first documented one in uh in history. Um but uh uh but Bennett was certainly a uh a moralizer, and I think that that part of uh of his writing is uh is sincere conviction. And it may also be the fact that he recognized that his sincere conviction as a newspaper man was in fact going to boost the box office bottom line for Wheatley.

[32:47] Robert W. Schneider: Once The Black CROOK had made its name in New York City, were they able to tour the show with all of its technological requirements throughout the United States or even throughout the world?

[32:59] Sebastian Trainor: Um both yes and no. Um The Black CROOK by its original producers was uh was closed early when it was still making money because they had they were going to replace it with another spectacle that was more or less, you know, this the same kind of thing called The White Fawn, which uh they they closed the theater and reopened as soon as they possibly could with another show that was as much like it as uh as they could make it, because they thought, well, people have seen this one so much, so we're gonna give them something new.

[33:26] Sebastian Trainor: Um but franchises for The Black CROOK had been uh had been allowed in various cities by uh by Barras, the copyright holder. Um and it's uh really inside uh of a very few years um the other producers such as the Karalfis um came along and uh uh purchased the rights to create a touring spectacular version of the show.

[33:55] Sebastian Trainor: And then that's that's what sort of really became known. There was there was the already established legend of The Black CROOK name, and then the Karalfis uh uh some a few years later put together a really spectacular, truly touring um version of the show. But this is now a separate producer who is uh remounting um a product that is they that's not exactly the same thing as what was on the stage in New York, but it it is its own equally spectacular production.

[34:23] Sebastian Trainor: And that gets toured around. And um many historians uh will conflate these two shows as being well, it's The Black CROOK, it's The Black CROOK. Um it's the same thing. Well, it is, but but it isn't. Um and that begins to be toured around, and there are other imitators and other uh and other companies.

[34:42] Sebastian Trainor: And The Black CROOK itself is the product. So that's what tends to um to be the draw. Uh productions are put together that utilize the new railroad system to be able to go into places and uh um with um the state of publicity and communications being what it was through telegraph and through and through newspaper, um, and uh P. T. Barnum style hyperbole, um one tends to think, oh yes, I have seen the production of The Black CROOK that's in New York, but not really, not exactly.

[35:21] Sebastian Trainor: But for the next 30 years or so, the show is continually revived, it's played everywhere. It really does become the the first um offering of the idea of Broadway doesn't exist yet, even though Niblo's Garden technically is on Broadway. Um it The Black CROOK does become the first uh Broadway spectacular to really reach an uh an audience that is the entire nation, where it it has universal name recognition around the country.

[35:56] Sebastian Trainor: Um, and it's able to achieve that through the agency of the various touring companies. And I know that you said between 1870 and 1895, uh New York saw 15 revivals of this particular show.

[36:12] Robert W. Schneider: Uh how much money did this show make for its producers?

[36:18] Sebastian Trainor: Well, I I don't know all told in uh in that in that period, but I do know what the number was for the um for the uh for just the run at Niblo's Garden.

[36:28] Robert W. Schneider: Yes, yes, that was that's fantastic.

[36:30] Sebastian Trainor: Uh I I remember what the contemporary equivalent was because I had to I had to do the contemporary.

[36:35] Robert W. Schneider: And what is the contemporary equivalent?

[36:37] Sebastian Trainor: The contemporary equivalent was it made 10 million dollars, which uh to us it it sounds like kind of small change um today, but but that that amount of money was completely unthinkable. $660 uh thousand dollars in 1866.

[36:53] Sebastian Trainor: And I do the equivalent, that's that's the equivalent of uh of of $10 million dollars uh in that time. For their investment of 50,000. This is very seeing they tell you you can't make money in show business. And look at look at that. You just need a BLACK CROOK to get you where you need to go.

[37:10] Robert W. Schneider: Now we know that The Black CROOK for us is the foundation of our particular book because everything is going to spring from this. Can you tell us what did The Black CROOK as a whole or elements of The Black CROOK open the doors to that we now have still with us in the 21st century?

[37:32] Sebastian Trainor: Oh, yes. Uh well, we already uh already touched on um uh on the idea of it's uh it's it's innovating the idea of spectacular scenery that's uh that the new mechanical marvels that we're able to achieve in the theater are the reason for going to theater in the first place.

[37:52] Sebastian Trainor: Um that's there there isn't film uh at the time. There isn't uh anything any place else you're going to see a spectacle. I mean, you can see a free spectacle of the of the railroad trains going by, but uh the the the kind of kind of large-scale entertainment of um an avalanche happening or uh a train crash on stage, these are the these are the mechanical marvels that theater is beginning to develop at the time, and they become the the centerpiece of entertainment.

[38:22] Sebastian Trainor: And it's really The Black CROOK spectacle that uh that pioneers that. And of course, that we've already briefly spoken about King Kong or maybe Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark or Starlight Express or uh or Cats, but these uh uh entertainments where where the spectacular gimmick is really pulling the audience into the theater is is one of the legacies that we get from The Black CROOK.

[38:49] Sebastian Trainor: Another we've already talked about the uh the scantily clad ballet um and just the very idea that uh that sex sells um is identified by a number of theater historians as The Black CROOK is the first sort of major step of making the chorus girls a fixture of uh of the American musical theater and we also touched on how that leads to uh uh down a path toward the Ziegfeld Follies uh uh especially of 1920s and and 1930s which um um which uh was uh a very kind of elegant packaging of um of a procession of uh of of showgirls in lavish display and so both the display and uh and the uh and the show girls are uh um a major part of that entertainment that is you know was there ever a plot to the Ziegfeld Follies?

I i expect there was something which unified it all but it was probably more along a theme than uh than any particular story that's being delivered but uh beyond those two uh elements of the idea of you know the the infusion of the importance of of the chorus girl and uh um the the spectacle that can be achieved when producers are pushed to the very limit of their resources uh in uh in investing and innovation.

[40:17] Sebastian Trainor: Beyond those two things, I think the real legacy is um is is it changed the paradigm with which producers think about um think about the theater. What The Black CROOK did was its profitability, its profitability so far exceeded the run that it had in the theater of Niblo's Gardens.

[40:40] Sebastian Trainor: Producers would usually think, all right, what am I going to do for my show in this season? Oh wow, the show ran for the entire season. That was a good season. Or the idea that it could run for 16 months, no one had ever even heard of that before.

[40:52] Sebastian Trainor: So runs on that scale were unimaginable until The Black CROOK achieved that. But when The Black CROOK achieved that, knowing that that thing was possible, then that became the goal for producers. And seeing that The Black CROOK had an aftermarket in uh in the tours and with the railroads, now again, this became the aim of producers, not to create the show for a particular theater in a particular time in a particular space, but to create a show that's going to be a national phenomenon and run for in various forms for 30 years.

[41:26] Sebastian Trainor: And that leads us to the kind of global franchises that are conceived that way from the beginning. With each production in whatever language uh it needs to be in being as as identical as possible. Or sometimes they have to be built in custom built theaters.

[41:52] Sebastian Trainor: But that kind of global franchise of an entertainment product is a type of thinking that was enabled by The Black CROOK. And I think basically it is for that reason um that uh that The Black CROOK manages to hold on to its place as having been the very first musical, even though it wasn't really a musical, as we would identify by the time we get around to a kind of integrated book musical of the golden age, such as Oklahoma, where the where the where the choreography and the book and the songs all further the plot in a unified way.

[42:32] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Sebastian Trainor, thank you so much for joining us today. You know, I I said this before we went on the air, and I will just I will say it on the record. There are so many, it's almost like a Roshomon uh of versions of what was The Black CROOK, what happened to The Black CROOK, how did this happen? Your chapter, I think is the definitive history of this particular show and its impact on the American musical theater.

[42:58] Robert W. Schneider: So thank you so much for uh taking this story and guiding it with such clarity and with su with such um intelligence. Thank you so much for that. It's a fabulous read.

[43:13] Sebastian Trainor: Oh, my pleasure. It was uh it was a privilege to have the opportunity to look into this and a reason to finally clarify the history of this show uh for for myself and and my students.

[43:24] Sebastian Trainor: And now I think for for countless readers, so thank you for that. Um listeners, please make sure to purchase a copy of 50 Key Stage Musicals by visiting Routledge.com or by clicking in today's show description.

[43:35] Robert W. Schneider: If you want to learn more about The Black CROOK, please also review the links in the below description. I'm Robert W. Schneider, and thank you for listening to 50 Key Stage Musicals, the podcast. Bye-bye.