Circus Man

Monday, August 25, 2014

Andy McDonald was a showman.  He made his living as an Ahnepee storekeeper for a few years but show business was his true calling.  Local newspaper advertisements list Andy, in 1870, in the Ahnepee Dramatic Club, acting in plays at the Opera House.  As the troupe manager, Andy often performed on stage as one of his favorite characters.  

Andrew McDonald had big dreams.  He left home and the Ahnepee stage and moved to Chicago.  Andy McDonald ran away to join the circus. 

One of Andrew’s earliest forays into the world of the circus was a job as traveling agent for “Yankee” Robinson’s midwest circus.  Fayette Loadwick “Yankee” Robinson’s circus had a forty horse “Golden Swan Chariot”.  Robinson rode astride a speckled horse carrying a gold-headed cane in a mile long procession.  Robinson’s circus had a camel and a small elephant that showed “great agility” and some twenty cages in its menagerie.  During the circus season, in Chicago, huge crowds would fill the circus tents on the Lake Shore at Randolf Street. 

In the 1870s, the circus was by far the most popular form of entertainment in America.  “P. T.”  Phineas Taylor Barnum and James Anthony Bailey, ringmaster, were the best known names in the circus world.  Barnum was actually a museum owner and never owned a circus of his own.  He worked with many co-owners and marketed and produced the most popular circuses. 

Barnum was persuaded by a man named Dan Costello to use Barnum’s name for Costello’s circus.  Costello (or Castello) had earned a reputation as a dancing clown and was at one time a partner of Yankee Robinson.  Barnum and Costello formed a traveling combination show that was part museum, part animal exhibition, and part human oddities show (later known as the sideshow).  Andy McDonald became assistant manager of Barnum and Costello’s Great Combination Show.   

In 1871, the “Green Bay Advocate” newspaper mentioned that Andrew McDonald had been hired to travel in advance of Barnum’s Great Show.  He was to make arrangements for its advertising and movement.

     

As the advance man, Andy McDonald would come to town before the circus to distribute billboards and other advertising, to hang banners, and to publicize the show.  He would check on contracts, arrange for feed for the circus animals, and confirm all of the other details of running an involved operation like a circus. 

In addition to promoting the circuses, Andrew managed his own act.  An article from 1879 described the exciting races Andy McDonald held at the state fair in Minnesota.  Andrew ran Roman chariots.  As a charioteer, he had two chariots drawn by four black and four white horses described as Kentucky racers.  A lady drove one of the spirited teams and a man the other.  The horses were so wild that they could not be driven on ordinary roads.  Several men had to hold them until they were brought on the track and the drivers were placed in the chariots.  The horses ran a half-mile dash in 57 seconds. 

Andy was a circus man through the 1870s and 1880s.  He eventually left the demanding life of the circus.  In June of 1900, at age 64, then a carriage blacksmith, Andy lived with Addie, his wife of 31 years, in Chicago.  He died in 1903.

Both Robinson and Costello’s circuses went belly up as did so many others.  Barnum joined Bailey’s Great Show which ultimately merged with Ringling Bros. of Baraboo, Wisconsin to form the most enduring circus of the 20th century--Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus.  

Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Long before The Lion King, Wicked, and Miss Saigon came to Northeast Wisconsin stages, the Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe brought way off Broadway theatrical performances to Algoma and Kewaunee.

In 1870, a group of local young people formed a dramatic club to perform at the Ahnepee Opera House on the corner of Washington Avenue and Madison Street.  In Kewaunee, they performed at the Bohemian Hall, the meeting place where local Czechs held athletic competitions and dramatic plays.    

Farce and Comedy were the favored genres of the Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe.  In fact, the more buffoonery, the more improbable the plot could be, and the more exaggerated the characters were, the better.

On the programme for their first show were The Secret or Hole in the Wall,  That Wonderful Baby, and A Barber Shop in an Uproar.  According to a local newspaper, the dramatic club association performed “in a manner that reflects credit upon the industry as well as the good taste and ingenuity of its members”.

One of their most highly touted performances was a play called The Toodles.    Written in 1848, the story is about Timothy Toodle, a lovable, easy-going guy with a wacky wife.  She has a penchant for buying useless junk.  Shopping at auctions, she purchases foolish things for which she believes she will find a use.  For instance, she buys a doorplate with the name Thompson on it.  She says if they ever have a daughter who marries a man named Thompson who spells his name with a ‘p’, the doorplate will come in handy.  Her husband, Timothy Toodle, wants to end the wasteful spending so he attends an auction and brings home a coffin, in case his wife dies before him.   

December 28, 1870 newspaper ad for Ahnepee Dramatic Troupe

Theatre goers were told to “Look Out For Fun” in one newspaper advertisement for these shows.  Doors opened at 6:30 p.m. at the hall.  For the admission of 25 to 50 cents, (children half price) they could expect to see a programme such as this:  First, The Toodles after which the entire company would appear in The Maypole Dance, concluding with Funny Thomas.  The ads promised “Dancing after performance, as usual”.   After one holiday show, a Christmas gift was presented to each child under age 12 and a prize was awarded to the Handsomest Lady (Mrs. C. L. Fellows) and the Homeliest Man (Mark McCormick).  Sometimes the show included sleight of hand magic tricks.


Often the troupe manager, Andy McDonald, would appear as one of his favorite characters in an Irish comedy called Barney, the Baron.  First performed in New York in 1850 under the title Fortune’s Whims, in this play, Barney O’Toole, a poor Irish tinker--an itinerant traveler who roams Ireland--becomes a baron when he wins a German castle in a lottery.

The Troupe’s success surpassed their wildest expectations.  The hall was often crowded and it was reported that roars of laughter were conclusive evidence that their “equals had never before been seen…” in the area.    

There was a dark, not-so-funny side to their comic theatre.  Among the plays performed was what they described as an irresistible Ethiopian and Egyptian farce called The Virginia Mummy.   This play, written in 1835, remained popular into the second half of the century and came late to Ahnepee theatre in 1870, after the Civil War.  In the play, a scientist named Dr. Galen bans Captain Rifle, a soldier, from courting Galen’s young ward, Lucy.  When Rifle sees a newspaper ad that Galen has posted for a mummy, the soldier hires a black hotel waiter named Ginger Blue to be dressed as a mummy decoy.  Rifle pretends to be the mummy’s Egyptian owner so they can get into Dr. Galen's house so Rifle can court Lucy, the ward.  While Rifle and Lucy are offstage together, Ginger Blue is center stage with his masks and disguises.  He is left to rely on his wiles to figure a way out, jumping in and out of a box throughout the play.  By making the mummy a white man in blackface who is left to finagle his way out of the situation, the author created a farcical, under the thumb Jim Crow character.  This wasn’t the only such play the Troupe performed.   Especially degrading to black women, Oh! Hush!, written in 1833, featured the blackface wench.  Male actors played black women in drag.      

Essentially, many of these plays were comments on social hierarchy presented wryly as comedy.  Perhaps after all this time, some things haven’t truly changed in theater.