Very much a man of his times, Belasco clearly embodied the characteristics of the country that molded his youth. His methods of staging profoundly influenced the conventions of theatre in the first part of this century.
Throughout the nineteenth century, theatre in America was almost completely a commercial enterprise controlled first by transplanted English theatre managers and later by starring actors and actresses. To exercise any control in the theatre one had to be an actor, a manager, and a playwright, and quite a number attempted this combination of careers. Of the major figures in American theatre during the third quarter of the nineteenth century--John Brougham, Dion Boucicault, and Augustin Daly--all were innovative men of the theatre as well as playwrights. Yet none was more successful in becoming a complete man of the theatre that turn-of-the-century America admired than David Belasco: actor, playwright, stage manager, director, producer, and theatre owner.
The world into which Belasco was born, in San Francisco, 25 July 1853, erupted with the stuff of melodrama that he was to create so successfully for New York audiences. In The Girl of the Golden West (1905), for example, he idealized the California of his youth, presenting people he had known, incidents that he had seen, and the picturesque quality of gold-rush California as it haunted his memory through the years.
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