“Now, I don't want to take anything away from the French resistance,” protests a character in a recent novel. “… Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné's movie, his Children of Paradise, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters might have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul.” It is a fatuous remark, the kind we expect from the determinedly fatuous hero, but its praise of Carné suggests with embarrassing accuracy the seductiveness of Les Enfants du Paradis. A Paris of romantically roiling passions, of pure Pierrots and gay Robert Macaires, of the Boulevard du Crime, whose little theatres stand as metaphors for the brash vitality of le peuple — it is a spectacle that few of us can resist. All our dreams of the City of Light (save those of shabby accordionists strolling beneath balloonbedecked Eiffel Towers) are contained in its opening shot, alive with the turbulent crowds of the old quartier du Temple.

When Henry Fielding enlarged his one-act afterpiece, The Welsh Opera (1731), he named the new version The Grub-Street Opera to point to the extensive travesty it contains. The title also makes a target of hack-writers of the day and implies a connection with The Grub-Street Journal, whose authors maintained a policy of non-partisan satire on hack-writing. The amount of imitation it contains makes it resemble the literary travesty of The Author's Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730), likewise written by Scriblerus Secundus, Fielding's pseudonym which alluded to the “Scriblerus” of his illustrious contemporaries, most obviously to Pope in the Dunciad notes and “Peri Bathous” (1728). The Grub-Street Opera has remained a puzzle to scholars of Fielding's plays, perhaps because its relationship to contemporary drama, politics, and journalism has been neglected.

In the late eighteenth century, and with increasing momentum in the early nineteenth, the minor theatres in London steadily challenged the monopoly of the two patent houses—with great ingenuity in circumventing several Licensing Acts; with highly imaginative and lively (albeit generally unsophisticated) bills; and with eager support from the workers, flocking to the capital as part of the industrial age, for whom the minor theatres provided escape. By the time Planché's “Mother Drama” admitted confusion about her sons “Legitimate Drama” and “Illegitimate Drama” on the stage of the Olympic Theatre on 16 April 1838, the minor theatres had prevailed.

In 1956 a small group of scholars, all of them engaged in some way or other in the study of theatre, past and present, met and founded a certain remarkable organization. I hardly need to explain that that organization was the American Society for Theatre Research, then and still the only organization of American scholars devoted entirely to promoting the cause, the activity, and the results of research in theatre. Nor is it necessary here for me to recapitulate, even briefly, the course of events that now sees us celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society. Fortunately, one of those founding members, Thomas Marshall, has generously accepted the charge offered him a year ago by the ASTR Executive Committee to write a concise history of the Society from the time of its founding. That review of the first twenty-five years has just come off the press, nicely timed for distribution to all members in attendance at this meeting. Subsequently it is to appear also in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Society's journal, Theatre Survey.

It was bright in London on that day toward the close of the nineteenth century—or at least there were bright intervals. In the early morning the sun sparkled on the silver Thames, and as one strolled north along the Victoria Embankment from Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth's sonnet came to mind. Farther north still, as the river turned more and more to the east above Charing Cross it was pleasant to wander in the gardens. This was historic ground. At the foot of Buckingham Street was the seventeenth century Water Gate of York House and then the region known as the Adelphi, built by the brothers Adam. It had once been the site of Durham House, the home of the fourteenth century Bishop of Durham, and later of Lady Jane Grey and of Sir Walter Raleigh. Adelphi Terrace, looking on the Thames, had been inspired by Robert Adam's visit to the palace of Diocletian at Spalato though remodeling had now altered its original design. Robert and James Adam had resided at No. 4; Thomas Hardy had worked at No. 8; the Savage Club occupied Nos. 6 and 7. There were dramatic associations too. David Garrick had lived and died at No. 5; Richard D'Oyly Carte was in the Adam residence; and Bernard Shaw had recently moved into No. 10.

In every theatre historian there lurks the shadow of the amateur. For the commitment always begins with a sharing of the theatre-goer's delight in seeing the curtain rise, and a strong sense of being in the presence of history in the making. To record this moment is the instinct of the enthusiast; to recapture it from the past is the function of the historian.

African artists cannot and do not choose their subject matter, says critic Tejumola Olaniyan. “They are, on the contrary, chosen by their subjects.” While that liberates artists from the “heavy burden of a head-scratching search for what on earth to create their art about,” Olaniyan observes, it also imposes “the much heavier burden of how on earth to fashion from that surfeit of ‘what’ an imaginative sublimation worthy of the label ‘art.’ This has been the contemporary African artist's greatest challenge, more so than artists in other climes.”1

These three quotes will serve as a starting point as I enter into this discussion of the import and role of theatre history. While I make a case for theatre history generally, my examples and thesis are drawn from African American theatre history most specifically. My argument is for a critical historicism, a process that recognizes the need to historicize and situate dramatic criticism as well as the need to theorize history or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to “rub history against the grain.” Rubbing history against the grain means that we must interrogate the past in order to inform the present, remaining cognizant of the material conditions that not only shape theatrical production but the historical interpretations of production. It implies a need to work against conventional historical narratives and the ways in which history has been told in the past.

By Mabel Rowland's public accounting, the Institute of the Woman's Theatre helped hundreds of so-called stagestruck girls realize their ambitions by providing a safety net for the pitfalls of the commercial theatre. The organization, officially established in 1926 and in operation until roughly 1930, was said to have begun years earlier, “the outgrowth of a group which was formed in 1910 and used to meet in the Fitzgerald Building.” As president, Rowland—a press agent, well-known comedic monologist, and all-around theatre factotum—was supported by society women and a cadre of famous female writers and performers, including Florence Reed, who served as Vice President, and charter members Julia Arthur, Irene Castle, Rachel Crothers, Helen Hayes, Violet Heming, Elsie Janis, Anita Loos, Mary Pickford, and Mary Shaw, plus about a dozen more. At the time of its official founding, the institute announced that it would undertake three activities. First, it sought to establish a professional Broadway theatre as exclusively a women's operation, employing female playwrights, designers, directors, managers, producers, box-office staff, and so forth: “The only men who will be connected with the enterprise … are the actors and stagehands.” Second and third, the institute would give “aid and advice to girls from out of town who think they have something to offer the theater, read scripts and give opinions thereon, and in other ways labor in behalf of the feminine side of the stage.” The institute's goal of a theatre in tandem with discovering talented women looked to create a meaningful shift in women's inclusion and power within commercial theatre.

I am grateful to the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, for allowing me free access to Morning Exercises and to the archives housed at the school. I would also like to thank the many current and former teachers and students who took the time to answer my questions, especially Andy Kaplan and John Holabird. I also thank Eric Martin, Christine Harris, and the anonymous readers at Theatre Survey for their patient editorial work.

When I first approached my colleague Jody Enders about the possibility of doing a special issue of Theatre Survey during her tenure as Associate Editor, I had no idea that she would translate my offer into a major event in the journal's history. We at Theatre Survey have long been blessed with a steady stream of excellent scholarship from theatre historians around the world, but seldom have we been able to amass, in a single issue, as prestigious a collection of scholars as those whose work grace the pages of our November issue. I am grateful to each and every one of them for their contributions. But I am especially grateful to Jody Enders for her (nothing short of) magical ability to recruit so many prominent voices in our profession and to place them in a dialogue about the future of theatre history in this new millennium. She well deserves our acknowledgment and admiration for the amazing work that she had done here, and I am delighted to have the occasion of this special issue of Theatre Survey to express my deep appreciation of the work that she has been doing for the journal since she became Associate Editor almost two years ago. Soon Jody's tenure as Editor will begin, and as you read the collection of essays she has compiled for this issue, I suspect your thoughts will concur with my own about what this transition in Editors means: while the future of theatre history in the new millennium may be subject to debate, the future of Theatre Survey looks very promising indeed.

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

Having secured production rights to Joaquin Miller's The Danites; or, The Heart of the Sierras, actor-manager Arthur McKee Rankin presented it in the United States, Canada, and the British Isles during the years 1877–1881. Rankin's method of operation typified an important phase of a period Alfred Bernheim refers to as “the industrial revolution in the theatre.” In this phase the dominance of the combination system over the stock company evolved. Although the combination system was firmly established by the early 1870's, it was not until the end of the 1870's that disbandment of nearly all remaining provincial stock companies signaled the close of a theatrical era — the end of isolation and local independence — and stimulated a momentous increase in the number of combination companies on the road.

One would today be hard-pressed to recall any other period since the mid-nineteen-twenties when such widespread concern among theatre practitioners has been devoted to planning of buildings primarily intended to house-performed legitimate drama. The government-supported reconstruction boom in German language countries, the conduct of three major international conferences on theatre building in the past three years, tangible progress on New York's Lincoln Center, and the Ford Foundation's widely-publicized support of theoretical planning for an Ideal Theatre-all these events are likely to overshadow for the moment efforts of those planners of the 'twenties who were forced by an economic and political untimeliness to “cast their anchor(s) far into the sea of fantasy and distant possibilities,” sadly realizing that little opportunity for innovation could exist at the time.