Boston Ideal Opera Company

The Boston Ideal Opera Company, later The Bostonians, was a comic opera acting company based in Boston from 1878 through 1905.[1]

1899 poster for The Bostonians

History

Effie Hinckley Ober (1843–1927) started the group to perform an "ideal" production of H.M.S. Pinafore in Boston. The company first performed Pinafore in November 1878 on a boat in a lake in Boston's Oakland Park. It was a success, and the company continued.[2] It engaged well-regarded concert singers and opened on 14 April 1879 at the 3,000-seat Boston Theatre. The critics agreed that the company fulfilled its goal of presenting an "ideal" production. The Boston Journal reported that the audience was "wrought up by the entertainment to a point of absolute approval".[3] The company went on to become one of the most successful touring companies in America.[3]

When the top actors later took over the group around 1887, it became "The Bostonians."

H. C. Barnabee - "admiral", ca. 1879. Cabinet Card Collection, Boston Public Library

Actors in the group included Henry Clay Barnabee,[4][5] Jessie Bartlett Davis, Mena Cleary, W. H. MacDonald, Eugene Cowles, Tom Karl, Marie Stone-MacDonald,[6] Geraldine Ulmar and Alice Nielsen. Other actors in the group for spells included Camille D'Arville, Bertha Waltzinger, Myron W. Whitney.[1][7] and Kirke La Shelle.

Selected productions

References
  1. Bordman, Gerald & Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, p. 87 (3d ed 2004)
  2. Emerson, Brad. "The Pinafore Sails Down East", New York Social Diary, January 25, 2011
  3. Kanthor, Harold. "H.M.S. Pinafore and the Theater Season in Boston 1878–1879", Journal of Popular Culture, Spring 1991, vol. 24, no. 4, Platinum Periodicals, p. 119
  4. (17 December 1917). Henry Clay Barnabee Dies in his 85th Year, The New York Times
  5. Reminiscences of Henry Clay Barnabee, The Scrap Book (1907)
  6. A Hundred Years of Music in America, p. 234 (1889, 1900)
  7. (29 August 1903). A Quarter Century of Existence, Town Talk
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