1. Antonio Pastor was an American impresario, variety performer and theatre owner who became one of the founding forces behind American vaudeville in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century.
20 Facts About Tony Pastor
1. 2.
Tony Pastor was sometimes referred to as the "Dean of Vaudeville".
3.
Tony Pastor's family was reputed by contemporaries to be "of gypsy blood".
4.
Tony Pastor met his future wife, Cornelia Buckley, who was from New Haven, Connecticut, after he came to New York.
5.
Tony Pastor had a taste for entertaining when he was young, producing his own plays in the basement of his family's home.
6.
In 1846, Tony Pastor embarked on a career in show business.
7.
Tony Pastor became a celebrated singing clown at a time when circus performances typically concluded with a variety revue.
8.
Tony Pastor established himself as a popular singer and songwriter during a four-year run at Robert Butler's American Music Hall, a variety theater located at 444 Broadway in what is called Soho, but was then the heart of the lower Manhattan theater district.
9.
Tony Pastor published "songsters", books of his lyrics which were sung to popular tunes.
10.
Tony Pastor sang for the Union cause throughout the Civil War, then started his own variety show which went on tour for around five months before settling in New York City.
11.
Tony Pastor was popular with the nearly all-male variety theater audiences; however, he knew that his ticket sales would double if he attracted a female audience.
12.
In 1874, Tony Pastor moved his company a few blocks to take over Michael Bennett Leavitt's former theater at 585 Broadway.
13.
The theater district was moving uptown to Union Square and in 1881 Tony Pastor took a lease on the former Germania Theatre on 14th Street in the same building that housed Tammany Hall.
14.
Tony Pastor alternated his theater's presentations between operettas and family-oriented variety shows, creating what became known as vaudeville.
15.
Tony Pastor wanted to capture a mass audience by bringing family entertainment to the middle class.
16.
Tony Pastor did not sell liquor in his theatre and required a level of decency to his performances which encouraged women and families to attend.
17.
Tony Pastor died in Elmhurst, Queens County, New York, on August 26,1908, and was interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.
18.
Tony Pastor was 71, and though greatly mourned at his death as one of the last gentlemen of the early vaudeville halls, the medium had passed him by with the advent of the vaudeville circuit in the 1880s.
19.
Tony Pastor had remained a local showman in an epoch that increasingly came to be dominated by regional and national chains.
20.
Tony Pastor's afterpieces became popular from 1865 to 1875, and because of its popularity, the afterpieces became a staple in Tony Pastor's shows.