Alice Oates

Born as Alice Merritt in Nashville in Tennessee, she was educated at a Catholic seminary in Kentucky before studying singing in Louisville and New Orleans intending to follow a career in opera.

Aged about 15 she married James A. Oates, the stage-manager at the Adelphi Theater in Nashville under Augusta Dargon, and made her first appearance on the stage in his benefit as Paul in The Pet of the Petticoats.

[8] She produced the first American performance of Alfred Cellier's The Sultan of Mocha in December 1878 at the Bush Street Theater in San Francisco, California,[9] but realising the popularity of H.M.S.

They preferred such works not to be broadly peppered with music hall songs or minstrel sketches, but nevertheless she maintained a decade-long and unbroken popularity with her own audiences west of the Mississippi for many years until the early 1880s when her career began first to waver and then to wilt.

[4] In March 1880 Oates appeared in Giroflé-Girofla at Hooley's Theatre in Chicago[12] while in December 1880 she was in Richard Genée's Fanchette (Der Seekadett) at the Grand Opera House in Cincinnati.

Apart from being the first theatrical manager in America to stage a work by Gilbert and Sullivan - her unauthorised production of Trial by Jury in 1875 - Alice Oates gave early employment to many who went on to become important in American musical theatre, including Evangeline librettist J. Cheever Goodwin who acted in her company and translated French operas bouffes into English for her, and the actress Pauline Hall who later was to find success in Erminie.

Her subsequent series of amorous adventures became a rather embarrassing running newspaper feature[5] until she married Samuel P. Watkins in 1879,[17] who had no connection with the theatrical profession but who after became her business manager.

[5] Alice Oates died in January 1887[14] aged 37 at the home of her father-in-law in Philadelphia after catching a cold in a damp dressing room in a theatre in Saint Paul, Minnesota.