This is Crash Course Theater, and today we'll be talking about brave heroes, scheming villains, scorching fires, convulsing earthquakes, spooktacular ghosts and grave robbing.

Oh, wait, no, that's just grave robbing.

Yep, today is all about melodrama, the form that body slammed 19th century theater and still dominates entertainment culture.

Today, melodrama is crude.

It's exciting.

It's funny and sad and morally simplistic.

It's endings are satisfying, and the scenery is off the hook.

And, wow, is there a lot of musical accompaniment?

That's the law, literally.

So sit back, grab a meat pie and try to not get hit by any runaway chariots.

Lights Up Melodrama gets going right at the turn of the 19th century, about a decade after the French Revolution and a few decades after the American one.

It borrows from sentimental comedy and bourgeois tragedy, but is way more about showing the audience a good time.

Sometimes that good time includes dogs.

That's right.

There is a whole sub genre of dog melodrama.

What kick starts melodrama?

Well, cities are getting bigger, faster, which creates a newly urbanized working class, and that urbanized working class wants to go to the theater.

And what's more, they want a theater that's not especially literary because they're not especially literate.

What they want is melodrama.

It's not highbrow.

Highbrows at this time mostly stick to closet drama because I guess going out is for the poorest.

Regardless, Melodrama is an incredibly successful and well attended form.

Then and now.

What do you think 90% of Hollywood movies are?

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess they are bourgeois tragedies, but very different sense.

It's significant that melodrama starts in a period between revolutions after the 18th century ones, but before most of the 19th century ones, melodrama has all the emotional fervor of revolutionary art.

But it dulls and contains that fervor with comforting moral sentiments.

Basically, it's a conservative form that feels like a radical one.

It's some sound and fury signifying not much.

As the 19th century playwright Charles Nodia wrote, it reminds people that even here on Earth, virtue is never without recompense.

Crime is never without punishment.

Melodrama begins in France, the father of melodrama and the first to introduce dogs is and I'm sorry about this, Renee Charl Goober depicts a record again.

Very sorry.

Ah, guy who describes himself as having AH, soul in flames, a tender heart off fiery imagination and a proud and independent temperament.

I'm sure his friends were shocked at his melodramatic works anyway.

He was a minor aristocrat who fled during the Revolution, probably because of an anti jacket been play that he wrote After returning.

He starts writing less controversial plays, including The Dog of Montage, a story of a hound who brings suspicion upon his master's murderer and who, at the king's order, fights the killer.

This play makes Goto so mad that he asks to be dismissed from the theatre that stages it, picks a record, may or may not have said that he wrote his plays for those who cannot read, but he definitely pioneered the combination of moral instruction and man verse Dog trial by combat picture.

Of course, plays are eventually exported to England, and melodrama really takes off.

Blame the Lord Chamberlain as you'll remember from our episode on sentimental drama.

The licensing act of 17 37 means that on Lee, two theaters in London are licensed to provide serious drama with 1/3 in the summer months.

That's not enough theater people want more theater in the easiest way to get around the licensing act and thus stage more performance is to put on alternatives to spoken drama alternatives like operas or musicals.

Or maybe you just take a normal play and stuff it with some incidental music.

That's what people do.

Voila, melodrama.

No license required.

Eventually, melodrama becomes so popular that the licensed theaters basically have no choice but to produce it as well.

Of course, melodrama isn't just a play with music.

I mean literally.

It is.

Mellow is Greek for music and drama from the Greek Drawn is Latin for play.

But melodrama has more to it than that.

These plays tell exciting stories that almost always have a happy ending, where good characters get rewarded and bad characters get punished and all of the dogs get treats for revenge, as the case may be.

There are six stock characters in melodrama.

The mean villain, the sensitive hero, the persecuted heroin, the clown, the faithful friend and the villain's accomplice.

Audiences were encouraged to cheer and boo where appropriate and musical accompaniment helped them out.

The contra bass accompanied the villain.

The trumpet played for the hero, the flute signaled the heroin and the clown got stuck with the bassoon because bassoons are hilarious.

At certain moments, the actors would pause while music played so that audiences could have a moment to appreciate just how exciting the situation Waas and how awesome the actors looked.

These moments called tableau.

We're kind of like the held poses in Kabuki.

Acting in melodrama was exaggerated, designed to appeal to the emotions.

And it had to be.

We're gonna make 3000 distractible people listen.

In an age before microphones, early melodrama often borrowed from Gothic stories and had strong supernatural elements.

Heroes and heroines were often virtuous, working class types, and the villains were Squires and landlords that had to feel pretty good for urban workers, sticking it to the Bronte, a class right there on stage.

The style became more domestic in the 18 twenties and 18 thirties, when there was a craze for true crime melodramas, and there were all sorts of mellow sub genres to dog melodramas, of course, but also equestrian dramas, with horses running on treadmills and nautical dramas and battle dramas and a whole sub genre devoted to grave digging.

We're that far away from the late Roman theater.

We are not, though there is less nudity and people don't actually die on stage on purpose.

Melodrama became even more spectacular with playwrights, tryingto outdo one another to create sensation scenes, moments of plot and stagecraft that would leave the audience gasping.

This is when you get avalanches and erupting volcanoes and exploding steamboats.

Melodrama was an opportunity for set designers to really strut their stuff and plays called for ruined castles, desolate mountains, frothing waterfalls, prisons, caverns, tombs, tombs, Iorek Tombs.

But here's a funny thing about melodrama.

Even though the plays are wildly unrealistic, they're actually a precursor to realism.

Melodrama demanded an unprecedented level of authenticity from its set designers because audiences wanted the place to look is really is possible, even if the stuff that was happening was, well, melodramatic.

So they built and used all kinds of flats and treadmills and revolves just in case the play called for a rail crash or a chariot race, and this raised the bar for productions of serious drama to also the play's themselves dared to show all kinds of people in all kinds of situations because they were written quickly and often mirrored riel, life scandals and contemporary novels.

They tended to be highly topical.

Yes, they were undergirded by Christian morality and had to end happily.

But these were some of the first place to take on racism, sexism, crime and urban poverty.

The genre's M V.

P is an Irishman named Dionysius Bussi Co.

Who churned out melodrama after melodrama and sensation after Sensation, the exploding riverboat.

That was him, Lucy Coe wrote quickly, and he wrote Topic Lee.

His plays are witty and sentimental and totally spectacular, and he was a savvy businessman.

He franchised his plays, rewriting the poor of New York as the poor of London and the poor of Paris.

But he didn't want other people doing any rewriting, and his lawsuit helped inform the international copyright agreement of 18 86 because he wanted to make sure he got his royalties.

Did this stop him from stealing from other playwrights, though it did not music, Oh eventually landed in America.

So we'll be seeing him again in our next episode.

But we're gonna take a sneak peek at American theater now, exploring one of the most popular and iconic melodramas of the 19th century, Augustine dailies.

18 67.

Play under the Gaslight daily was a successful theater manager and one of theaters first directors.

Remember all of those cartoons where they tie some lady to the tracks.

Justus, the train is coming that starts here.

Take it away.

Lovely and pure.

Laura Courtland is engaged to the dashing Captain Ray Trafford, but turns out Laura is adopted.

And was it one time a child pickpocket?

Instead of being like Hey, cool back story, Captain Trafford is like maybe I need a wife who's not a daughter of obscurity and crime.

Laura runs away from home and ends up supporting herself by hand coloring photographs.

She's brave and good, so she manages.

But her birth parents bike criminal Judas, a drunk find her bike drags her to the court, though it's not really clear why.

And the judge agrees that she acknowledged bike as her father.

Then bike tries to kidnap Laura and take her to oh, no New Jersey but snarky, a goodhearted one armed Civil War veteran foils bikes, plans bike retaliates by tying snarky to the train tracks.

But Laura hacks for way out of a nearby railway shed, which is conveniently full of axes and rescues.

Snore, Justin.

Good gender reversal, Snarky says.

And these are the women who ain't toe have a vote.

The two of them go off to stop bike from murdering Laura's snooty adopted sister, Pearl.

And in the last scene, we find out that Hey, Laura was switched at birth with Pearl.

So she really is a lady.

And now she and Captain Trafford the guy who ran out on her when he thought she was poor, could get married.

Oh, and old Judas falls off a horse and dies, and bike is forced to emigrate.

The end.

Thank you, thought bubble.

America is bananas, huh?

And maybe Laura should just choose herself or good old snarky.

But either way, this passes for a happy ending and underneath all the sensationalism of the play, and obviously there's a lot of it.

There is some realism.

Most of the settings here are really from Delmonico's famous restaurant in Manhattan to central courts to Hudson River Pier.

It's sort of a travel guide toe 18 67 New York, but it also reveals the anxieties of 18 67 New Yorkers.

They're worried about money they're worried about class.

They're worried about how close the criminal world was, too polite society and how living in a big city means that all sorts of people gotta just jostle up against each other.

And clearly they're also worried about trains.

Thanks for watching.

Try to not let any cow catchers hit you on the way out.

We're going to stay in America for the next episode when we explore how this great big nation got a theater in the first place.

Take that, Puritans and also Canada beat us to it.

But did Canada have a theatrical riot that killed more than 20 people and injured 100?

More?

No, that one is all ours.

Typical.

Until then, curtain Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS.

Digital studios head over to their channel to check out some of their shows like Brain Craft.

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