TINTYPES A Musical (Revue) in Two Acts, 13 Scenes. Conceived by Mary Kyte, Mel Marvin and Gary Pearle. Orchestrations and vocal arrangements by John McKinney. Originally produced in New York Off-Broadway 17 April 1980 at the Theater at St. Peter's Church for 137 performances. Originally produced by the Arena Stage, Washington, D.C. - Opened 23 October 1980 at the John Golden Theatre and closed 11 January 1981 after 93 performances. Total, including Off-Broadway, 230 performances. THE MUSIC OF DREAMS by Steve Lawson THE PEOPLE I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger/A-travellin' through this world of woe, but there's no sickness, toil, or danger/In that fair land to which I go. THE WORLD OF TINTYPES IS THE CURIOUS HALF-CENTURY BETWEEN THE CIVIL WAR AND the Roaring Twenties, one of the most tumultuous eras in American history. Yellow press, Whisky Ring, and conspicuous consumption entered the language, the transcontinental railroad and Carnegie Hall were built, roller-skating became the rage, and such disparate politicians as William Jennings (Cross of Gold) Bryan and Theodore (Bully!) Roosevelt gave Wall Street conservatives heart failure. (Now look! moaned one senator when McKinley's death thrust TR. into the Oval Office. That damned cowboy is President of the United States!) It was a time of explosive growth: America's population doubled in thirty years, and one-third of the leap came from abroad. A million Irish after the potato famine; three million Germans fleeing Bismarck's blood and iron; nine million Jews, Slavs, and Italians between 1900 and World War I. The opening mime of TINTYPES presents a quintessential immigrant, complete with weatherbeaten cap and sack-a kind of Yiddish Charlie Chaplin-and introduces him to a small gallery of American figures. There's a bluff swell who flips the newcomer a coin and later turns into a toothy, bespectacled Roosevelt. An elegant society lady becomes chanteuse Anna Held. A black woman (whose skin color baffles the immigrant) evolves into the upwardlymobile hired girl of the time. And a female drifter metamorphosizes into radical Emma Goldman. Immigrants have a tough time; the gap between the America of their dreams and the reality they faced was often wide. My people do not live in America quipped a bitter Slav in lower Manhattan. They live underneath it In a government run by incompetents who were, in turn, run by tycoons, it's small wonder many were tempted by labor unions, Socialism, or anarchy. On the average workday, Andrew Carnegie's pension was $44,000-and two million children earned 25 cents. (The most beautiful sight we see anywhere, rhapsodized the founder of Coca-Cola, is the child at labor) Early in TINTYPES, the immigrant dozes off at work and successively dreams of a romantic fling to the waltz tempo of a bicycle wheel, the driving beat of a locomotive, and the reckless abandon of a drive in an automobile. Then he wakes up, dreams shattered, to the ominous minor key of factory labor and the plaintive stories of working girls, their only relief found in letters to neighborhood editors. A popular lyric of the day, And all I want is fifty million dollars, pretty well summed things up: what else should the poor think when John D. Rockefeller claimed that God gave him his money? Could the haves and have-nots share anything of the American experience? Taken from the notes accompanying the Original Cast Recording.
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