Buckley's Serenaders
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Buckley's Serenaders was an American blackface minstrel troupe, headed by James Buckley. They were one of the two most popular companies from the mid-1850s to the 1860s (the other being the Christy and Wood Minstrels). The Buckleys were well known for their burlesques of popular operas. Some of these were Cinderella, La Sonnambula, and Don(e) Juan; or, A Ghost on a High horse (Don Giovanni). Another popular act involved Bishop Buckley's trained horse, Mazeppa. G. Swaine Buckley was another member of the company.
In 1853, they leased a New York City theatre at 539 Broadway, a hall they called Buckley's Opera House, the Ethiopian Opera House, and the American Opera House. In 1856, they moved to 585 Broadway. By 1857, they were spending as much as six months there between tours. They also gave regular Sunday-evening concerts in whiteface at this location.
However, like other minstrel companies, the Buckleys toured extensively. Upon their return to New York after a late 1857 tour, they published this advertisement:
- Although we look ragged and black are our faces.
- As free and as fair as the best we are found;
- And our hearts are as white as those in fine places,
- Although we're poor niggers dat travel around.[1]
Charles Dickens wrote of the Buckleys during an 1861 trip to the United States:
Wilkie and I . . . went to the Buckley's last night. They do the most preposterous things, in the way of Violin Solos, Deeply Sentimental Songs, and Lucrezia Borgia music, sung by a majestic female in black velvet and jewels with a blackened face! All that part of it, is intolerably bad. But the real Nigger things are very good; and there is one man—the tambourine—who attempts to do things with chairs, in remembrance of an acrobat he has seen, which is the most genuinely ludicrous thing of its kind, I ever beheld. Nor have I ever seen so good a presentation as his, of the real Negro.[2]
The Buckleys closed the Opera House when the Concert Hall Act of 1862 forbade the sale of alcohol in theatres.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Quoted in Lawrence 96.
- ^ 2 January 1861. Letter from Charles Dickens to Georgina Hogarth. Reprinted in Dickens 359. Emphasis in original.
[edit] References
- Dickens, Charles. (1997). The Letters of Charles Dickens. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Henderson, Mary C. (2004). The City and the Theatre. New York: Back Stage Books.
- Lawrence, Vera Brodsky (1995). Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong. Volume II: Reverberations, 1850-1856. The University of Chigcago Press.
- Lawrence, Vera Brodsky (1999). Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong. Volume III: Repercussions, 1857-1862. The University of Chicago Press.
- Tompkins, Eugene (1908). The History of the Boston Theatre, 1854-1901. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
