The series aims to represent all the major genres and styles of musical theater of the century, from ballad opera through melodrama, plays with incidental music, parlor entertainments, pastiche, temperance shows, ethnic theater, minstrelsy, and operetta, to grand opera. This series of sixteen volumes provides for the first time ever a comprehensive set of works from a full century of musical theater in the United States of America. The two works in this volume seemingly have little in common. They reflect the society in which they were created in quite different ways. Il Pesceballo is an intelligent and subtle parody of operatic conventions, closer to the tradition of literary burlesque. Ten Nights in a Bar-Room is a play with interpolated song, a theatrical vehicle for moral evangelizing. The first, by America’s first great ballad scholar, remained practically unknown and unperformed; the second, by a forgotten actor/playwright, became legendary and widely embedded in the American cultural heritage. Yet both share at least two important features. One is their incorporation of easily recognized music. The works are also related through the purposes for which they were completed and performed.
