ABSTRACT
The duplicitous Count Wolfenstein has his eyes on Amina, but she is betrothed to Rodolphe. The show had a rather unusual origin. Its monumental success was the result of an accident, for the celebrated debut production of The Black Crook started out as two separate entertainments that only came to be combined by a quirk of fate. The title came from one of them: an unoriginal melodrama written by B-list American actor Charles M. Barras. In 1857, Barras had attended a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera The Marksman, and, thinking its story would make a good play, he appropriated it wholesale as a basis for a piece that he claimed as his own. William Winter, theatre critic for the New York Tribune, summarized the evening: “the scenery is magnificent; the drama is rubbish”. Ballet was unfamiliar to most Americans in the mid-nineteenth century.
