Music+and+Theater+in+the+City

Music and Theater Forms of popular entertainment that developed in the cities were in response to the large potential markets there. Many ethnic communities maintained their own theaters, in which immigrants listened to the music of their homelands and heard comedians making light of their experiences in the New World. Italian theaters often drew on the traditions of Italian opera to create sentimental musical events. The Yiddish theater built on the experiences of American Jews and was the training ground for a remarkable group of musicians and playwrights who later went on to play a major role in mainstream, English speaking theater. Urban theaters also introduced one of the most distinctively American entertainment forms: the musical comedy, which evolved graduall from the comic operettas of European theater. George M. Cohan, an Irish vaudeville entertainer, became the first great creator of musical comedies in the early twentieth century; in the process of creating his many shows, he wrote a series of patriotic songs such as "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Over There," and "You're a Grand Old Flag" that remained popular many decades later. Irving Berlin, a veteran of the Yiddish theater, wrote more than 1,000 songs for the musical theater, including such popular songs as "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "God Bless Amercia." Vaudeville was a form of theater adapted from the French models, it was the most popular urban form of entertainment in the first decades of the twentieth century. Even saloons and small community theaters could afford to offer their customers vaudeville, which consisted of a variety of acts:musicians, comedians, magicians, jugglers, etc. It was, at least in the beggining, inexpensive to produce. As the economic potential of vaudeville grew, some promoters most prominently Florenz Ziegfeld of New York staged much more elaborate spectacles. Vaudeville was also one of the few entertainment media open to black performers. They brought to it elements of the minstrel shows they had earlier developed for black audiences in the late nineteenth century.