Tent show

Tent shows have been an important part of American history since the mid-to-late nineteenth century. In 1927, Don Carle Gillette gave “statistical evidence that the tented drama constituted “a more extensive business than Broadway and all the rest of the legitimate theatre industry put together””. The shows first began “In regions which couldn’t support full-time playhouses”. Men such as Fayette Lodowick, one of the earliest tent show entrepreneurs, would travel around river towns all over the US making money on traveling tent shows. These shows “were utilized for a variety of amusements including medicine shows, moving picture shows, vaudeville shows, circuses, musicals, concert companies, and any number of one-night stand dramatic troupes”. Tent theatre played a critical role in the American entertainment industry. It first grew out of opera houses, which were in almost every major city until the end of the nineteenth century. The opera houses were very poorly ventilated at the time which did not appeal to the audiences. The tents were outdoors and therefor had no problem with overheating or poor ventilation because the winds would provide a nice way of cooling down the audiences. Tent theatre boomed by the 1920s, when the industry for outdoor entertainment was at its peak, and declined shortly after. From the origins of tent shows, to its decline and fall, tent theatre had a major influence on American culture and left a legacy for tent shows everywhere.

Tent theatre received its influence from the original small town opera houses. The golden age of the opera house, “the last thirty years of the 19th century,” along with the rapid expansion of America’s rail transportation network, allowed for performing artists to tour America more easily and efficiently. As the operations developed by touring opera companies improved, canvas theatres began adopting the business methods used by opera houses. These methods were implemented by people such as Roy E. Fox, and Harley Sadler, tent entrepreneurs who had large amounts of “public relations and an unusual (for the time) amount of publicity”. Fox and Sadler always made sure to make the shows as intricate as possible. They studied the seating arrangements, making the theatre space more like a normal playhouse instead of circular like a circus, used platform stages to make the actors more visible, properly ventilated the tents so they could be used year-round, and created optimal lighting for the actors.

Tent shows became very popular when, during the summer months, the opera houses would get so hot that audiences would rather stay home then go and be in the blazing heat of the summer with no ventilation. This is where the tent shows made their way to become forerunners in the entertainment industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tent shows were exceedingly popular in the western part of the United States.

...
Wikipedia