A Middleman’s Process. Booking and Managing Musical Theater Venues in Montreal from the 1880s to the First World War

Abstract

This article focuses on the way musical theater venues in Montreal were booked and managed during the continental integration of North American theater industries from the 1880s to the First World War. It investigates how local theater owners and managers cooperated with representatives of U.S.-American circuits and booking agencies that provided the shows. They had to find ways to reconcile the fragmented audiences in the bilingual city with the increasingly standardized theatrical offers available. A closer look at different kinds of mediating actors and organizations and at the range and mechanisms of the supply networks explains why those relations often did not remain anchored in a particular venue over a longer period. The profiles of theaters in Montreal shifted frequently when an especially dynamic phase of social and cultural specialization in the urban sphere overlapped with growing trans-regional rivalries between competing theatrical circuits.

Biographical Note

Antje Dietze (SFB 1199, Leipzig University Germany)

Antje Dietze studied cultural studies in Leipzig and Paris, earning her PhD in 2012 from Leipzig University for a work on the role of cultural organizations and artistic practice during the post-socialist transition in Germany. As part of her current research she spent 2014/15 as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) P.R.I.M.E. research fellow at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Montreal (Canada). Her research interests include entertainment and the arts, cultural industries, and cultural change within the study of culture and transnational history, focusing particularly on Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.