Boston Athenæum Theater Database
The Boston Athenæum Theater Database is a guide to the theater programs and playbill collection at the Boston Athenæum. More than 90% of the material represented in the database consists of playbills or portions of playbills from about 45 Boston theaters, many of which no longer exist. The bulk of the playbill collection dates from circa 1860 to 1900, an especially vibrant period in the city’s theater history when Boston was a theatrical beacon drawing to its stages some of the world’s finest actors.
The Boston Athenæum's collection of Boston theater playbills includes many examples from more enduring 19th century playhouses such as the Colonial and the Boston Theatre, but also programs from lesser known and short-lived theaters such as Whitman's Continental Theatre and the Toy Theatre. A description and guide to these important artifacts of Boston's cultural life spanning the years from the 1840s to the early twentieth century is therefore of paramount importance both for facilitating research into the collections as well as highlighting the unique character of the Athenæum's collection.
Theater critic Francis H. Jenks donated many of the Boston Athenæum's scrapbooks containing theater, opera and concert programs as well as related ephemera. With additional gifts from Isabella Batchelder, Cora Swann and other generous donors, the Athenæum soon had a small, but choice collection of theater programs and ephemera dating from the 1840s to about 1940. As many of the scrapbooks donated by Jenks became brittle and dirty with age, some were dismantled and the programs incorporated in the Francis H. Jenks Collection, which is not included in the theater program database but has a guide of its own listing the boxed programs by theater name.
Read about the collection and the history of Boston theaters present in the collection
Bibliography and links
- Each theater program in the collection has at least two records in the database; one for each of the first two actors listed in the program. Each record includes actor name, theater name, play title and date of performance.
- The database is not case sensitive.
- More than one field can be searched at the same time.
- Wild card * can be used in all search fields.
- For vaudeville performances, search by actor name(s) in the play field only.
- Searching for a specific actor: Enter last name and first into appropriate field. If search yields too few results, search only by the last name. Often, actors are listed in the playbill by last name only. Wild card (*) may be used but is not necessary as a truncation device.
- Searching for a theater: Remember that Boston theaters spell the word “theater” as “theatre”. Do not include article “the” in searches.
- Searching for a specific play: With the exception of foreign language titles, leave out all articles (“the”, “an”, “a”) and punctuation. If search result is unsatisfactory, try spelling out numbers and dates.
- Searching by date: Dates are displayed like this: 11/3/1889, 2/6/1870, 10/28/1902. The wild card (*) is useful for searching the database by date when one or more fields are unknown. For instance, if a year, 1889, is known, it can be searched by entering */1889. A search for a specific date, Feb. 4, without a year: “2/4/ * “. A search for playbills from March of 1901: 3/*/01
Comments or Questions? The Boston Athenæum welcomes any comments or queries regarding the Theater Database or Boston theater histories. Please direct comments to Reference: reference@bostonathenaeum.org
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