Shakespeare, Tap Dance & Jim Crow at America's Largest Theatre

—46-48 Bowery —

"The 3000-seat Bowery Theatre opened here in 1826 as America's largest theatre. The first gaslit theatre, its massive stage used fire and water effects, and held horses for battle scenes.
Its Roman temple exterior hoped to lure the genteel elite, but its pit and upper tiers were soon filled by the area's working class, who flocked to see Shakespeare, melodrama, comedy and song. Walt Whitman fondly remembered presidents being seated beside mechanics and tradesmen.
Legendary appearances included Junius Brutus Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Dan Rice, Buffalo Bill, Edwin Forrest, James O'Neill, Emma Goldman, Lola Montez, magician J.H. Anderson and Bertha Kalich as Hamlet. In 1827, Madame Francisque Hutin scandalized Americans with their first glimpse of ballet.
African American William Henry Lane - the King of all Dancers - electrified audiences with a fusion of the African American shuffle and the Irish jig, worked out from challenge dances in the Five Points ghetto. In addition to appearances by Black performers, and many productions of the anti-slavery play, Uncle Tom's Cabin, this theatre also launched T.D. Rice's phenomenally successful "Jump Jim Crow" act, which mimicked Southern Black song and dance. Rice's Jim Crow inspired the institution of blackface minstrel troupes,



and became the namesake for the oppressive racial segregation laws after the Civil War.
Opening in 1826 with the aptly-titled The Road to Ruin, this "unluckiest of theaters," burned six times, but survived 103 years by catering to changing demographics - Germans, Jews, Irish, Italians and Chinese. It closed for good in 1929.
- Mick Moloney and Lenwood Sloan, authors of Two Roads Diverged: Africans and Irish Americans and the Rise of American Popular Culture

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