A Middleman’s Process: Booking and Managing Musical Theater Venues in Montreal from the 1880s to the First World War

Abstract

This article focuses on the way musical theater venues in Montreal were booked and managed during the continental integration of North American theater industries from the 1880s to the First World War. It investigates how local theater owners and managers cooperated with representatives of U.S.-American circuits and booking agencies that provided the shows. They had to find ways to reconcile the fragmented audiences in the bilingual city with the increasingly standardized theatrical offers available. A closer look at different kinds of mediating actors and organizations and at the range and mechanisms of the supply networks explains why those relations often did not remain anchored in a particular venue over a longer period. The profiles of theaters in Montreal shifted frequently when an especially dynamic phase of social and cultural specialization in the urban sphere overlapped with growing trans-regional rivalries between competing theatrical circuits.