Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet and Boston Musical Theater

Rating:
Summary: A lively and fascinating true tale
Review: Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet And Boston Musical Theater by Anne Alison Barnet (writer, researcher, public speaker, and the great-grandaughter of Robert Barnet) is the biographical story of a remarkable man and which will bring him out of an undeserved obscurity by documenting his singular accomplishments and contributions to the history of American musical theatre. Robert Barnet (1853-1933) was a successful sugar merchant who wrote and directed incredibly popular musical theatricals for the First Corps of Cadets, a volunteer militia of young, upper-class Boston businessmen seeking money for an armory to use in defense against feared immigrant revolts or riots. In a tradition reminiscent of Shakespeare, men played all the roles, and Barnet himself was known to take upon the role of Queen Isabella of Spain in "1492", his most famous work. Black-and-white photographs, a wealth of information from scrapbooks and family memorabilia, extensive research and more follow Barnet's spectacular successes, and eventual enduring failures, when he moved in 1908 to New York City but was unable to adapt his talents to people's changing tastes in musical entertainment. A lively and fascinating true tale.


Rating:
Summary: Fascinating missing pieces in show biz picture puzzle
Review: EXTRAVAGANZA KING: Robert Barnet and the Boston Musical Theatre
by Anne Alison Barnet (2004, Northeastern University Press, Boston, MA ISBN 1-55553-611-5)
In the 1890s and the 1900s, Robert Barnet brought together Boston Brahmins, Bankers, Bohemians and Billy Dalton to create a series of successful extravaganzas featuring young men of fine families cavorting in female drag to the benefit of Boston’s own First Corps of Cadets and their ambitions for an Armory. Designed by one of their own, the architect William Gibbons Preston, they built, show by show and wall by wall, “a rusticated granite fortress with a six story head-house, a two-hundred-foot long drill hall, and fortress like details: triple doors to defend against mob attack, a drawbridge and a light well that looked like a moat.” The fear of the day was not Islamists, communists, anarchists but immigrants—-especially Irish Catholics.
The author, Ms. Alison Barnet, is the great granddaughter of Robert Barnet, the man whose annual extravaganzas raised the money to complete the bastion of Boston’s Back Bay where, in its quirky glory, it still stands at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Arlington Street. Ms. Barnet writes with elegance and subtle humor. Unlike run-of the-mill biographies of family members, she writes neither to exalt nor vilify. She is removed in time, circumstance and relation from her subject and takes us along as she pieces together the story of a man who was bound to Boston but would have succeeded on Broadway. A number of his shows were staged on Broadway: Excelsior, Jr., Jack and the Beanstalk, Three Little Lambs, Miss Pocahontas, My Lady, Up to Date, Miss Simplicity, The Show Girl or the Magic Cap, 1492 and Tabasco, but even the shows that went no further than Boston were covered by the New York drama critics.
Too often the history of show business and the stage is confined to the goings-on in New York City. Boston was home to the Fox-Howard clan, the birthplace of vaudeville and the stage for all manner of presentations from lecture series to dime store curio museums to classic and contemporary drama. Extravaganza King fills in missing pieces about the history of the American stage, and its appeal should extend well beyond city limits.
The cast members for Mr. Barnet’s extravaganzas were cadets, veterans of Harvard College’s Hasty Pudding shows rather than armed conflicts. Occasionally a ‘ringer’ made his way into the cast. One was Billy Dalton, a young man who liked to dress as a girl and entertain the two-fisted patrons of Butte, Montana’s dance halls. His father banished Billy to Boston, which it must be allowed was not much of a punishment. He entered dancing school where he soon shined, and he was hired to perform in several of Barnet’s extravaganzas. Young master Dalton, encouraged by reviews and applause, changed his name to Julian Eltinge in 1903, went to Manhattan to play musical comedy and vaudeville as a female impersonator and eventually had a Broadway theatre named for him.
Ms. Barnet brings various Boston amateurs and professionals back for a final bow, and traces her great grandfather’s arc of success and eventual decline through the 1910s into 20 years of obscurity.
By sketching the plots and production numbers of various Barnet shows and tracing their incubation and production, Ms Barnet She fills a void that statistics cannot. This is a wryly told and useful book for theatre buffs.


Rating:
Summary: very entertaining!
Review: This is a funny book about an almost forgotten form of entertainment. It's hard to imagine the current governor of Massachusetts attending live entertainment featuring men dressed as women, but that's what happened more than 100 years ago. Nor is it typical to associate the Victorian era with men dressed in drag. In addition to being a readable and amusing account of theatrical events, Barnet's book is a terrific look at the people and places of Boston's past.

Rating:
Summary: very entertaining!
Review: This isn't a topic I would normally be interested in but Ms Barnet writes so engagingly that I couldn't put the book down until I'd read the whole thing. The story of her great-grandfather is like a visit to another time and place. A very interesting time and place. And I loved the way the author's own humor kept shining through the narrative.

Rating:
Summary: I couldn't put it down
Review: This isn't a topic I would normally be interested in but Ms Barnet writes so engagingly that I couldn't put the book down until I'd read the whole thing. The story of her great-grandfather is like a visit to another time and place. A very interesting time and place. And I loved the way the author's own humor kept shining through the narrative.