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Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940

2010; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 102; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mon.2010.0025

1934-2810

Alan Lareau,

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940 Alan Lareau Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940. By John Koegel. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. 620 pages + 90 b/w illustrations + 1 CD. $80.00. A "forgotten stepchild," John Koegel calls the German-speaking theater in America, long overlooked by historians (9). His hefty documentation focuses on New York as a case study—its locales, performers, and writers as a mirror of the development and demise of the immigrant stage. Koegel's book is really three studies merged into one, admittedly not seamlessly. The first third offers a chronology of the German-American theater scene in New York, overviewing troupes, repertoires, and performance venues of opera, operetta, and spoken theater in the German language. Adolf Neuendorff's Germania Theater (1872-1883) stands out as a prominent and relatively long-lived undertaking among the various German-language operetta theaters, ethnic music halls, and beer gardens of the late 19th century. This tale of the rise of German-American theater is framed by a closing story of decline in the final chapter: the scene faltered in the First World War, faded in the 20s and 30s, and perished by 1940. Despite attempts to cross borders into modern media, the German-language immigrant theater did not successfully grow into the musical film as the Yiddish theater did (most famously in Yidl mitn Fidl). The second section of the book focuses on German-language performers and their characterizations. Koegel collects biographies of forgotten actors such as singer Max Lube (1842-1903), comedian Emil Berla (1852-1852), operetta star Georgine Januschowsky (1850-1914), and the singing actress and theatrical director Mathilde Cottrelly (1851-1933) and showcases their diversity and enduring popularity, while also noting how fragmentary our knowledge of these figures is. A short overview of the "Dutch" act in the popular theater and variety hall (as well as humorous poetry) suggests the language play and comic portrayals of ethnic groups that made these now-forgotten performers so beloved in their day, though it seems that these routines are more often hackneyed and condescending caricatures of cultural outsiders—"blundering arrivistes trying to be a part of polite society" (189)—than insightful, sympathetic engagement with the difficult experiences of cultural negotiation on the part of German-speaking immigrants. The real meat of the story is the third section, which recounts the rise and fall of the immigrant stage through the person of Adolf Philipp (1864-1934), the most successful German-American theatrical impresario in multiple roles as composer, author, director, and producer. His pioneering and most enduring musical farce was Der Corner Grocer aus der Avenue A (1893), a musical Volksstück patterned on German and Austrian models but integrating contemporary themes and an amusing mish-mash of languages to reflect the cultural struggles of immigrants in the new world. Though a contemporary critic belittled it as "a puppet comedy with some local slang expressions plastered on it" (218), it served as a model for many subsequent productions. Philipp himself "claimed only to be interested in cash, not glory," but Koegel argues that he was a master craftsman whose work effectively reflected the "spirit of the times" (360). These comedies are characterized by a nostalgic, even conservative undertone reveling in Heimat and Volksmusik sentiment, and despite its apparent topicality, this cross-cultural theater appears to offer relatively little critical engagement with deeper problems of urban modernity and cultural change. Even when playing [End Page 621] with gender and ethnic character types—Philipp was Jewish, and he also caricatures New York Jews—the portrayals are superficial and stereotyped, humorous rather than analytical. Perhaps the most amusing aspect of Philipp's story is his return to Germany from 1903 to 1907, when he opened a German-American theater in Berlin, offering adaptations of his New York shows and new fantasies of transatlantic cultural encounters, including Übern großen Teich and Im wilden Westen (which featured a cowboy orchestra). He also turned to Broadway with English-language works, adaptations of his German-American pieces as well as a successful original musical Adele (1913). A bitter controversy arose over his play...