Boulevard theater

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The boulevard theater is a private-sector theater form that emerged in Paris at the end of the 18th century and can refer to a type of venue as well as to a theater genre. In German usage, the term boulevard theater is used today for Schwänke in the area of ​​small theater. However, it originally comprised all private-sector theater forms with genres such as the crime and adventure play, the majority of which have now passed to the cinema.

history

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the term boulevard theater Century more venues or institutions than a specific theater genre . It is related to urbanization and the emancipation of bourgeois forms of entertainment: In contrast to the wooden stalls at the annual markets, the boulevard theaters had solid, stone-built, representative, but mostly privately run houses. In a narrower sense, the “boulevard theaters” originally meant the four adjacent buildings Cirque Olympique , Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques , Théâtre de la Gaîté and Théâtre des Funambules on Paris' Boulevard du Temple .

Until the second half of the 19th century, the Boulevard du Temple was the entertainment district of the largest continental European city, Paris . Large private stages such as the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique (1769), which were dedicated to melodrama and pantomime , often in mixed forms with concert or circus performances, were built there. They replaced the venues of the Parisian fairground theater . The Napoleonic theater decree of 1807 designated the boulevard theaters as secondary and required them to specialize in certain genres. - Other European cities like Vienna (with the Vienna suburban theaters ) and Berlin (with the Königsstädtisches Theater ) joined this development.

Today's meaning

The “typical” genre of the boulevard theater is now called a boulevard play . The “serious” side of the boulevard theater, that is, the adventure and crime plays, is often no longer present today because it has been almost completely taken over by film and television. In today's parlance, the term tabloid is mostly understood as a crude comedy , burlesque or swank .

In more recent times, the term boulevard theater is often associated with a later stage in theater history, i.e. no longer with the large boulevard theaters and their lavish, circus-like productions, but with the smaller music halls or singing arcades that emerged in the second half of the 19th century and the vaudevilles and farces that have been performed there since the Second Empire . In Paris it was the smaller entertainment theaters that survived the redesign of the boulevards by Georges-Eugène Haussmann , such as the Folies Concertantes (1851) or were newly built there.

In French, “boulevard theater” does not have the negative touch that it has in German and can relate to contemporary theater within a respectable framework.

literature

  • McCormick, John: Popular Theaters on Nineteenth-Century France, London / New York: Routledge 1993.