Victorian burlesque
[6] In these pieces, comedy stemmed from the incongruity and absurdity of the grand classical subjects, with realistic historical dress and settings, being juxtaposed with the everyday modern activities portrayed by the actors.
[8] The English style of burlesque was successfully launched in New York in the 1840s by the manager and comedian William Mitchell, who had opened his Olympic Theatre in December 1839.
Like the London prototypes, his burlesques included characters with nonsensical names such as Wunsuponatyme and The King of Neverminditsnamia, and made fun of all kinds of music currently being presented in the city.
[12] W. S. Gilbert wrote five opera burlesques early in his career, beginning with Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack (1866), the most successful of which was Robert the Devil (1868).
An 1859 burlesque of Romeo and Juliet contained 23 musical numbers, some from opera, such as the serenade from Don Pasquale, and some from traditional airs and popular songs of the day including "Buffalo Gals", and "Nix my Dolly".
[4] For example, in Faust up to Date (1888), a couplet reads: According to Grove, although "an almost indispensable element of burlesque was the display of attractive women dressed in tights, often in travesty roles ... the plays themselves did not normally tend to indecency.
Aristophanes, Rabelais, Geo Cruikshank, the authors of the Rejected Addresses, John Leech, Planché were all in their respective lines professors of true burlesque.
[24] These reversals allowed viewers to distance themselves from the morality of the play, focusing more on joy and entertainment than catharsis, a definitive shift away from neoclassical ideas.
Victorian culture, according to Buszek in 2012, viewed paid female performance as being closely associated with prostitution, "a profession in which most women in the theatre dabbled, if not took on as a primary source of income".
[26] In the 1860s and 1870s, burlesques were often one-act pieces running less than an hour and using pastiches and parodies of popular songs, opera arias and other music that the audience would readily recognize.
Early Gaiety burlesques included Robert the Devil (1868, by Gilbert), The Bohemian G-yurl and the Unapproachable Pole (1877), Blue Beard (1882), Ariel (1883, by F. C. Burnand) and Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed (1883).
Beginning in the 1880s, when comedian-writer Fred Leslie joined the Gaiety, composers like Meyer Lutz and Osmond Carr contributed original music to the burlesques, which were extended to a full-length two- or three-act format.
They often included Leslie's libretti, written under his pseudonym, "A. C. Torr",[30] and were usually given an original score by Lutz: Little Jack Sheppard (1885), Monte Cristo Jr. (1886), Pretty Esmeralda (1887), Frankenstein, or The Vampire's Victim (1887),[31] Mazeppa and Faust up to Date (1888).
