Farce‐Comedy

Farce‐Comedy. This genre of prototypical musical comedies was first introduced with Patchwork (1875), a piece by Nate Salsbury (1846–1902), with which he toured with some small success for several years. However, it was the popularity of Salsbury's sequel, The Brook (1879), which established the vogue for the type and led to a rash of imitators. These pieces could hardly be said to have a plot. Rather, they placed four or five performers in a situation—in the case of The Brook, a picnic—and let them offer songs, dances, and other turns all tied together with the simplest dialogue. The tremendous and sudden rage for farce‐comedy inevitably led writers and producers to expand them, enlarging the once tiny casts and complicating the originally elementary story lines. Some early successes of the type include Our Goblins (1880), Dreams; or, Fun in a Photographic Gallery (1880), and Greenroom Fun (1882). The names of early farce‐comedy troupes were entertainments in themselves, running to Salsbury's Troubadours, Rice's Surprise Party, and Edouin's Sparks. Within a decade these plays had ineluctably evolved into full‐fledged musical comedy. The term persisted well into the 1890s, when many of Charles Hoyt's plays were offered as farce‐comedies.