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Chinatown musical comedy songs, 1892-96
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Title: Chinese and Chinatown musical comedy songs of the 1890s
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(Sheet music) Songs from Hoyt's A Trip to Chinatown. As performed at Madison Square Theatre, New York. Words by Charles Hoyt. Music by Percy Gaunt (NY, 1892) Original pictorial wrappers. 13pp.; and Chin Chin Chinaman, Song from the Japanese Musical Play, The Geisha. Words by Harry Greenbank, Music by Sidney Jones (London, 1896) Original wrappers, 7 pp..
Hoyt's musical play was the first of a "spate of Chinatown plays" of the 1890s which became a "venue to depict Chinese immigrants on the stage focusing on a whole community as opposed to one comedic character on the frontier", laundries and opium dens being the "popular settings" for reinforcing stereotypes of "vice-ridden slums" which were "a threat to American life." The British song was a variation, taken from a musical comedy in which the main characters, somewhat romanticized Japanese, contrasted with a ridiculous pidgin-English-speaking "Chinaman", Asian counterpart to the Negro "Coons" who were the stock comic figures of the same musical decade in America.
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