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

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
A Middleman’s Process : Booking and Managing Musical Theater Venues in Montreal from the 1880s to the First World War
Abstract
This author 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. She investigates how Montreal theater owners and managers cooperated with representatives of U.S.-American circuits and booking agencies that provided the shows. The author points out that they had to find ways to reconcile the fragmented audiences in the bilingual city with the increasingly standardized theatrical offers available. She points out that 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 author concludes that 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.
Publication
Journal of Urban History
Volume
Vol. 47
Date
2020
Language
en
Citation
Dietze, Antje. “A Middleman’s Process : Booking and Managing Musical Theater Venues in Montreal from the 1880s to the First World War.” Journal of Urban History Vol. 47 (2020).
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