University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations May 2018 Turn of the Century British Musical Comedy in an American Performance Library Victoria Peters University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Music Commons, and the Theatre History Commons Recommended Citation Peters, Victoria, "Turn of the Century British Musical Comedy in an American Performance Library" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 1896. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1896 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. TURN OF THE CENTURY BRITISH MUSICAL COMEDY IN AN AMERICAN PERFORMANCE LIBRARY by Victoria Peters A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Music at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2018 ABSTRACT TURN OF THE CENTURY BRITISH MUSICAL COMEDY AND THIER USE IN AN AMERICAN PERFORMANCE LIBRARY by Victoria Peters The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2018 Under the Supervision of Professor Gillian Rodger The genre label 'musical comedy' gained its stride in the 1920s, but the term emerged as early as the 1870s. These early musical comedies are often overlooked in the historical discussion of musical theater, due to a lack of integration between the storyline and musical numbers. With the help of the Tams-Witmark collection, housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mills Music Library, this paper examines how two of these early musical comedies, composed by England’s Ivan Caryll and Sidney Jones, were exported and used by touring theater companies in The United States.