"The book is an impeccable piece of research, full and accurate. It gives a comprehensive view of the American (and Canadian and Australian) stage for a period of over 50 years. It documents life on tour, in stock and combination companies, in vaudeville and even in the nascent movie industry. It is a saga of art versus commerce and of the shifting sands of public taste. It is a treasure trove of minutiae, filled with details on unknown plays and vanished theatres, and on the actors who performed those plays, and the managers who owned those theatres. Above all the book is a testament to McKee Rankin and to the members of his companies, especially his wife Kitty and his protegè Nance, who were some of the brightest stars of the American theatre......"
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing ArtsSpecialty sales
His heart near to breaking, McKee dismissed all ambition for the stage, which had seemed to make life meaningful, and prepared to accept a safe career in whatever walk of life his father decided upon. Colonel Rankin, remembering his own runaway youth as a cabin boy, would have had some sympathy and admiration for his son, but Mary Rankin’s fears for her son’s future and her strong disapproval of the acting profession ruled him. They returned to the Rankin homestead, where a worried Mary Rankin tried to console McKee with the argument that his parents had saved him from a demeaning vocation, which would have ostracized him from decent society. Prevailing wisdom regarded an actor’s chance of success as extremely unlikely and the certainty of a miserable life unquestioned. Just prior to McKee’s arrival in Rochester, a reporter for the Rochester paper wrote: “Few, very few, attain the degree of eminence which renders them independent of its mortifications and its trials...while the many toil through a long life of thankless servitude, and at last drop into an unhonored grave, the blighted victims of a ‘hope deferred.’”
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Bernarda Rojas Valenzuela
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