"All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and it's masterpiece, free man."

The Theater serves to Educate and Entertain, and additionally in the Italian Community to gain Recognition, satisfy Emotional Needs,  provide a Support System, facilitate Social Intercourse, celebrate Holidays and benefit Social Causes,
commemorating Italian Milestones in history, providing a forum for Socializing, salving Homesickness, refreshing Remembrances of Home, to hear Italian spoken, as well as their own regional dialects, the concern for Social Justice, assisting in  Americanization and Assimilation.

Anyone who considers themselves knowledgeable about Italian American theater must be familiar with the giants of that era: Lorenzo Da Ponte, Fausto (Dominico) Malzone, Concetta Arcamone, Antonio Maiori, Pasquale Rapone,  Francesco Ricciardi, Eduardo Migliaccio «Farfariello», «Piddu Macca», Guglielmo Ricciardi,  Antonietta Pisanelli Alessandro, Giovanni De Rosalia, «Nofrio», Rocco De Russo, Clemente and Sandrino Giglio, Gilda Mignonette,  Riccardo Cordiferro, Francesca Gaudio, and Salvatore Abbamonte.

Other important contributors included: Ilario Papandrea, Alberto Campobasso, Gennaro Cardenia (father of Vincent Gardenia), Francesco De Cesare, Gino Caimi, Giuseppe Sterni, Ettore Mainardi, Rosario Romeo, Emma Alba Gloria, Angelo Gloria, Attilio and Olga Barbato.

The Demise of the Italian Theater was largely due to that same Americanization/ Assimilation, plus WWII (Don't speak the Enemy's Language), Enemy Alien Restrictions, and the final blow, Loss of Italian Food Advertisers.

An excerpt of an article, excerpted from an encyclopedic book to be published can hardly do justice, but this can do wonders to tickle one's interest in Italian American ShowBiz. Part of our Heritage that played a far greater importance than any of us realize.

ITALIAN -AMERICAN THEATER
Emelise Aleandri
Artistic Director
«Frizzi & Lazzi», NYC

S a g g i
Altreitalie #28
Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli

The artists of the early Italian-American theatre had to resort to their wits to keep themselves and the theatre alive.

Italian-American theatre begins in New York City. In 1805 the first Italian-American playwright, Lorenzo Da Ponte (famous as Mozart’s librettist), staging Vittorio Alfieri’s play Mirra in 1808. He also wrote short plays in Italian performed in his home by his American students at Columbia University.

But the first significant amateur phase of this vital ethnic theatre truly emerged when the waves of Italian immigrants began pouring into this country in the 1870’s, bringing both the performers and audiences necessary for theatrical entertainments.

The greatest concentration of Italians was in New York City. The 1900 census showed that over 225,000 Italians lived within New York City’s boundaries alone.
That was at the time greater than the population of Rome.

The average immigrant was a male, ex-agricultural worker from the south of Italy, unskilled, uneducated and unattached, discriminated against by the mainstream of American society, and often exploited as an underpaid laborer, sometimes even by his own countrymen. He was either unmarried or had a family in Italy which he came here to support.

All these factors contributed to creating an original theatrical expression, the Italian-American immigrant theatre of New York City. Its audiences were the displaced men and women of Italy, and they were hungry for entertainment, recognition, a support system and social intercourse, all emotional needs which the theatres and the nightclubs helped to satisfy.

The Italian immigrant community, located in tenement «Little Italies» throughout the city supported itself through a network of fraternal and benevolent associations that often sponsored dances, concerts and lectures to celebrate holidays and benefit social causes in New York City and in Italy.

Soon amateur theatrical clubs evolved. The earliest amateur prototype was the  Circolo  Filodrammatico Italo-Americano (The Italian-American Amateur Theatre
Club) which mounted the first Italian-American production, the Italian play "Giovanna Marni" on October 17, 1880.

The company performed exclusively to benefit the Italian community in New York and Italy, raising money for worthwhile social causes: cholera epidemics, earthquakes and floods in Italy, funeral and trial expenses, the Italian Home and Hospital, the Columbus Statue fund, holidays commemorating Italian milestones in history, and many, many more.

Under Fausto (Dominico) Malzone’s artistic direction, they were the first and most prolific theatre company of the XIXth century in New York City. Malzone owned the Banca Malzone, a small bank, travel agency and wine shop at 88 Mulberry Street, He provided money changing, postal services, travel services by ship or rail, and
imported Italian wines. Many such banks peppered the Italian colony and assisted illiterate immigrants with letter writing and legal matters. At 88 Mulberry, Fausto installed the last known headquarters of the Circolo Filodrammatico.

As a banker Malzone was a respected member of the Italian immigrant community. He also served as honorary Vice-President of the Società Stella d’Italia, of the Società ltaliana dei Barbieri, and of the Società Militare Sant’Arsenio Italo-Americana di Mutuo Soccorso di New York.

Fausto and his theatre company paved the way for the professional Italian immigrant theatre that followed in the XXth century, comprised of a great variety of dramatic forms and entertainments. Immigrant audiences heard the plays of their homeland, if not in Italian, translated into their own Neapolitan, Sicilian or other regional dialects.

Concetta Arcamone was described as «an actress very pleasing in emotional and humorous situations, graceful, touching and poetic, and in the Italian plays of passion and blood her dark face and Southern manner are always adequately expressive».

Concetta Arcamone at one point c. 1919 was managing her husband's Antonio Maiori’s Theatre on the Bowery and signed a contract with Farfariello for his appearance there. Eventually Maiori and Concetta split up and he married the opera singer Itala Dea.

In general the XIXth century phase of Italian-American theatre represents a breaking of ground for the more ambitious, professional endeavors of the XXth century. All in all, the active years after 1900 represent a major transition for this ethnic theatre.

In 1900, the theatre had just begun to emerge from its predominantly amateur phase. By l905, the Italian-American theatre had become firmly rooted in its professional phase which would continue for at least five more decades until its decline.

By far the professionals outnumbered the amateurs during the XXth century, with respect to both performers and performances. But whether amateur or professional, the theatre continued to serve the same functions; entertaining it audiences, educating them to the best literatures of Europe, raising money for worthy causes, perpetuating Italian language and culture, and providing a forum for socializing with other members of the immigrant community.

By 1900 the community had produced the major forces that created the professional theatre of the ensuing decades: Antonio Maiori, who introduced Shakespeare to his immigrant audiences in his southern Italian dialect productions; Francesco Ricciardi who held sway as the Prince of Pulcinellas in the nightclub arena; Eduardo Migliaccio, whose stage name «Farfariello» means «Little Butterfly» and who created the unique art form – the macchietta coloniale, the Italian immigrant character sketch; Guglielmo Ricciardi, who created Italian-Brooklyn and went on to a successful career in the American theatre and cinema; Antonietta Pisanelli Alessandro, who started in New York City, performed in Chicago and then went on to create singlehandedly, the Italian-American theatre of San Francisco; and many, many more.

Many professional liaisons, marriages and business partnerships took place between these major families, creating a strong theatrical network in later years. More often than not, children in these families started their careers early and continued the family theatrical tradition for as long as there was a theatre to nourish them.

Financial problems were an ever present worry for these young companies. Groups appear and, with equal facility, disappear. The theatre companies tried everything to «make a go» of business: and so might go on the road to try new audiences; they would move to smaller or bigger theatres; they would change their fare, from the classics to comedy and vaudeville, or vice versa; bring in stars from Italy.

Efforts to create theatre were constantly in force and constituted an enormous output of energy during the 70 odd years of its existence in New York City. The names of the personalities involved in the theatre in one way or another number in the tens of thousands.

In following the fortunes of the Italian American Theatre we venture outside the New York City limits, up and down the Eastern seaboard to the Midwest and inevitably to California. The abundance of theatrical energy spilled out over the city’s boundaries with the effect that professional New York City companies were bringing professional theatre experiences to Italian immigrants who lived in rural and suburban areas.

Most of the major figures – Antonio Maiori, his comic sidekick Pasquale Rapone, Guglielmo Ricciardi, Giovanni De Rosalia who created the comic halfwit «Nofrio», the itinerant actor and singer Rocco De Russo, Eduardo Migliaccio, Clemente and Sandrino Giglio, to name a few – made excursions out of town, to reach new audiences and get the most mileage out of their productions.

These are the stories of only a few of these many early impresarios. In the field of dramatic prose theatre, Giovanni De Rosalia was a very well known figure. Born in Sicily in 1864, and became a professional actor with major companies in Italy, one of them La Compagnia Cavaliere Scandurra, before coming to New York sometime
before 1903. His story begins with performances in Othello, and Oreste  on the minuscule stage of the Villa Mascolo Concert Hall at 207 Canal Street in 1903.
The newspaper La follia published an ad for the Villa Mascolo, boasting: «Unico locale spaziosissimo», actually measured 26' x  60’ :)

De Rosalia played dramatic and comic roles, some in the Sicilian dialect, then writing, directing and performing independently, then as an impresario and director of his own full-fledged professional theatre company, La Compagnia Comico-Drammatica Giovanni De Rosalia, with a schedule of almost daily performances until November 1904.

In October of 1905, De Rosalia was acting and directing with his own company again, this time at the New Star Casino, then briefly went into partnership with the Perez Picciotto Company as La Nuova Compagnia Filodrammatica De Rosalia-Perez-Picciotto.

A great number of plays were mounted by De Rosalia and his company, both serious and comic in nature. Among authors were the Italians: Vittorio Alfieri, Luigi Camoletti, Felice Cavallotti, Carlo Roti, Paolo Giacometti, Stefano Interdonato, Eduardo Scarpetta, Carlo de Dottori, Giovanna Marni and E. Minichino; the French, D’Aubigny and Emile Zola; and William Shakespeare.

Among the Italian-American writers produced there was, of course, Eduardo Migliaccio (Farfariello), who created his own macchiette while with De Rosalia at the Villa Napoli. However, the Sicilian macchietta, «Piddu Macca», although performed by Migliaccio, was actually written by De Rosalia and Filippo Dato.

De Rosalia teamed up with Paolo Cremonesi in 1907 and later continued independently to produce serious plays and comedies, including plays by Riccardo
Cordiferro, his friend. The actress Francesca Gaudio became his wife and worked in his company also.

At some point De Rosalia decided to abandon the Italian prose theatre, as did Maiori, and turn his energies to comedy. So it seems, De Rosalia tired of the lack of financial support from the Italian community for his serious dramatic efforts, decided to form a Sicilian dialect theatre to cater to the great numbers of Sicilian immigrants in New York City.

Nofrio, the half-wit comic character created by De Rosalia, made him very popular and the name became synonymous with De Rosalia’s identity, as Farfariello had become identified with Migliaccio. Nofrio, a Sicilian immigrant hick with a knack for getting himself in difficult situations.

An air of schizophrenia surrounds the memory of Giovanni De Rosalia. On the one hand he was an educated, intelligent teacher, actor, writer and director who appreciated the classic theatre of Italy and Shakespeare. But he was forced, on the other hand, to perform as a clown, in order to survive in the theatre and because of his limited financial and critical success in the dramatic arena. When he acted Nofrio, did he really want to be doing Othello, his favorite role and the dramatic role with which most later commentators associate him. He seems to have been pulled in two directions. Giovanni De Rosalia died in February 1935.

One of the great female performers and producers was Antonietta Pisanelli
who was born in Naples in 1869. Emigrating to New York City, she worked
with the early amateur società filodrammatiche. Antonietta sang Neapolitan folk songs and duets with Farfariello.

She worked outside New York as an actress, singer and dancer on the Italian-
American stages of Philadelphia, New Haven and other cities, including Chicago. By November, 1904, in Union, Illinois, she had become the proprietor of Margherita Hall. With the deaths of her mother, then her husband and youngest child, Antonietta and her young son sought a new life in California.

By the spring of 1905, Mrs. Pisanelli had commenced producing theatre at Apollo Hall in San Francisco. Then she turned Berglieri Hall into a caffè concerto which she ran as actress, director, producer, dancer, and singer called the Circolo Famigliare Pisanelli, San Francisco’s first professional Italian-American theatre.

It served as a place for socializing and entertaining and became integral to the Italian Community of North Beach. She brought in companies from the East: Pasquale Rapone, Francesco de Cesare, Antonio Maori and Eduardo Migliaccio to other theatres she later ran in San Francisco: the Iris, the Beach, the Bijou, the Washington Square, the Liberty, the Teatro Alessandro Eden.

She also toured with her company before retiring from theatrical production by 1925.

One effect of this theatrical migration was to inspire the formation of amateur
theatrical groups in other cities. During the XIXth century several amateur groups existed in New Jersey, Boston, and Philadelphia. By the early XXth century there were over 80 amateur groups scattered throughout small and large cities all over the United States.

Some were professional. But many follow the pattern already established by amateur clubs in New York: they form either for the sole joy of performing theatre, or to raise money for worth social causes. And they are often associated with some religious, fraternal or educational organization.

Of course, not all amateur groups outside New York City owed their existence to the example set by traveling professionals. The great numbers of new immigrants alone would have inevitably resulted in the emergence of new theatre clubs. But what is certain is that major performers from the city came in contact with actors outside and often used them in their productions, thereby creating temporary marriages between companies.

It is conceivable that New York’s ready access to the latest printed scripts, songs and sheet music found their way to other cities via the traveling companies, thereby increasing the repertory of local amateur clubs.

New York City’s Italian-American theatrical consciousness was important in providing a support system in the difficult and incomplete process of assimilation.

In the XIXth century, the stated aim of the Italian-American theatre was to delight
and instruct. These two concepts continue to be important after 1900 but to
them we can add a third: the concern for social justice.

First and foremost, audiences came to the theatre expecting to be entertained.
The hardworking laborers came to the theatre to escape the harsh reality of their lives, to be dazzled by the glamour of the costumes and the beauty of the performers, to be reminded of home by hearing familiar folk songs, ballads and operatic arias, to hear Italian spoken, as well as their own regional dialects, to laugh at the antics of their own regional stock character from the Commedia dell’Arte tradition, to be stirred by the patriotic sentiments and grandeur of the historical dramas, to be moved by the emotions played out in the melodramas, and to be reassured by the well-ordered universe depicted therein.

The average audience, we can safely say, was quite dispassionate, or at best ambivalent, about whether a production was educational or socially relevant.

These concerns instead were voiced by the writers and directors. When Paolo Cremonesi and Giovanni Flecchia formed a company to perform for Hoboken’s Italian immigrants, they called the group «The Club for Instruction and Entertainment» and also «The Study and Work Club». Salvatore Abbamonte called his group «The Club of young studious Italians» whose stated purpose, was the propagation of Italian culture overseas, as well as entertainment.

Intentionally or unintentionally, Italian-American theatre did play an educational
role in the life of the immigrant. The history, literature and culture of Italy were paraded across the stages of Little Italy. Furthermore, equally accessible was Shakespeare in dialect to Italian immigrant audiences. The gentle, humorous satire of Eduardo Migliaccio provided another type of education. Farfariello, the character he created, was a comic stock character, a caratterista, in the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte, only this character, instead of originating in Naples or Bologna or Calabria or any other Italian region, was a product of New York City’s immigrant community and spoke a curious, new regional dialect, I call Italo-Americanese.

Farfariello was the typical newly arrived immigrant, the bewildered greenhorn, trying to make his way in a strange and inhospitable country. Education was an incidental byproduct of Migliaccio’s macchiette or characterizations. «Pasquale Passaguai» showed the immigrant how to avoid being duped by thieves, while his parody of «Il Presidente della Società» cured many community leaders of their habit of wearing pretentious military uniforms at public functions.

Eduardo Migliaccio was one of the most popular entertainers of the Italian-American music hall arena. Born in l882 in Salerno and attended the Institute of Fine Arts in Naples. In 1897 he emigrated to the United States and worked in the Banca Sandolo in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, writing letters to Italy for the bank’s clients, illiterate Italian-American laborers. He relocated to New York City where he secured a similar position at the bank of Don Pasquale Avallone. In l900, and began a stage career playing small roles in the Shakespearean productions of the Antonio Maiori Company. He also sang at the intermissions in the Sicilian marionette theatre. But the arena in which he produced his greatest work, created a singular new art form and enjoyed enormous popular success, was the Italian-American music hall, or caffè concerto.

Migliaccio launched his career in the Caffè Concerto Pennacchio at 109 Mulberry
Street in l900, singing the latest Neapolitan hits with a contract of four dollars a week. In this hall, later called the Villa Vittorio Emmanuele [sic] III, he performed the song «Femmene-Fe» every night, from which the name Farfariello, in the refrain, was derived. This became his signatory stage name with which his identity became indelibly associated and which carries the double meaning of «Little Butterfly» and womanizer.

Farfariello performed the Neapolitan comedy skit called a macchietta, a musical sketch combining sung verses and spoken prose passages. Farfariello’s original creation was the macchietta coloniale, or colonial skit, meaning the Italian immigrant community skit. In this type of skit he impersonated and satirized community figures recognizable to his audiences, comprising the entire panoply of Italian immigrant society.

These photographs of Italian-American life demonstrated the bewilderment of the
Italian immigrant in a foreign country. They earned their creator the title «King of Impersonators». Migliaccio spoke the newly evolving language of the Italian-American community, a linguistic soup of Italian, English, American slang and various dialect mutations. He performed a dozen routines in a half-hour set with quick costume changes. By the time of his death in l946 he had five or six hundred. Many were recorded by the Victor Company in l9l6.

Farfariello was well known to communities along the East coast but he also toured to Chicago and California in l9l9. He formed his own operetta company and developed his art form into longer genres, one act and full length plays. During the heyday of Italian radio, he performed on many radio programs. In l936 he toured Italy and he was knighted a «Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Corona» by King Victor Emanuel in l940. He died in Brooklyn of cancer March 27, l946. Migliaccio’s creations in particular
and the immigrant theatre in general helped ease the tensions and anxieties of living in a foreign country, and indirectly helped the immigrant in the process of assimilation.

Another celebrated star to emerge from the caffè concerto arena was Gilda Mignonette (1886-1953), considered one of the world’s greatest interpreters of
Neapolitan songs. She was born in Naples and had a singing and recording career
there as an interpreter of Piedigrotta songs. She first emigrated to the US in 1926. She met with immediate success and was noted for her wonderful voice and spectacular costumes.

She became known as «La Carusiana» (recalling the power of the great operatic tenor, Caruso), «The Queen of the Italian Songs». Brooklyn was the venue for her most popular performances, followed once by the crowds carrying her through the streets. Mae West was a fan.

In the dramatic prose theatre, the task of education was imposed on it by its more educated and literate observers and participants. It was not long before the literati of the day imposed yet another role on the immigrant theatre – that of propaganda. The actor Salvatore Abbamonte told of «red» evenings of theatre which included radical speakers, revolutionary songs, plays on social topics. He claimed that, for love of the theatre, he too had become a revolutionary.

His play, Senza lavoro (Unemployed), deals with a contemporary social problem of the time. Theatre groups identified themselves by names reflecting their political leanings. On the Italian-American stages, immigrant audiences were confronted with contemporary social concerns, among them the exploitation of laborers by American bosses and Italian padroni, the miserable living conditions of crowded tenement slums, corruption and social injustice. At the turn of the century the left wing journalist Riccardo Cordiferro began writing what would become a formidable list of
social protest plays. Even the regular professional theatres would sometimes
put on productions of plays they described as «social dramas».

Riccardo Cordiferro, poet, lyricist, journalist, editor, satirist, lecturer and political activist was born Alessandro Sisca in 1875 in San Pietro in the province of Cosenza. In 1886 Alessandro entered the Franciscan seminary San Raffaele a Materdei in Naples, but left the religious life for a career in letters. In Naples, his early poetry was published under the pen name of Riccardo Cordiferro (which means «heart of
iron»).

In 1892 he emigrated to Pittsburgh, and later settled permanently in New York City. In January 1893, he founded a weekly literary newspaper, La follia. The paper was widely read in New York City, and by the literati of the Italian colonies in the major cities of the East. His literary articles, editorials and political commentary usually expounded socialist doctrine.

The professional theatre company, the Maiori-Rapone-Ricciardi troupe, mounted many of Cordiferro’s plays in the XIXth century, and encased in the structure of domestic melodrama, it examines the dishonesty of some Italian-American bankers and its tragic effects on the newly arrived immigrant.

However significant these plays might have been, however satisfying their enactment may have been to the more educated members of the audience, they never achieved the popularity of the comedies, the variety shows and the classics of the European theatre. In the theatre at least, Cordiferro was no match for Farfariello, in terms of popularity and exposure. But in the years that follow the class struggle became more desperate and the voice of reform more insistent, all of which was reflected in the theatre.

The progress realized by the Italian-American theatre of the XXth century was outstanding.

First, the theatre made a notable transition from an essentially amateur status to its predominantly professional phase; secondly, the time saw an enormous output of activity and the participation of thousands of theatre artists; third, theatre proliferated within Italian-American communities outside New York City, as far as California, partially as a result of traveling professional and amateur companies from New York City; fourth, a distinctly Italian-American language and literature developed; fifth, the theatre was responsible in part for the evolution and celebration of a uniquely Italian-American identity; finally, this new identity contributed, in the characterization of Farfariello, a new comic stock character or caratterista in the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte.

By 1905 despite the vagaries of artistic life, the Italian-American theatre had persistently, obstinately, devotedly and lovingly «arrived».

Immigration statistics throughout the first quarter of the XXth century reveal a steady flow of new immigrant arrivals from which emerged eager new audiences.

The major impresarios were still actively engaged on production for the better part of these years: Maiori, Francesco Ricciardi, De Rosalia, Cremonesi, Enrico Costantini, Migliaccio, Ragazzino, De Russo, the Marrone brothers, Imperato, Silvio Minciotti, Esther Cunico, Clemente and Sandrino Giglio.

Their ranks were enlarged and infused with the energies of new recruits and
entrepreneurs, among them: Ilario Papandrea, Alberto Campobasso, Gennaro
Cardenia (father of Vincent Gardenia), Francesco De Cesare, Gino Caimi, Giuseppe Sterni, Ettore Mainardi, Rosario Romeo, Emma Alba Gloria, Angelo Gloria, Attilio and Olga Barbato, and a host of amateur clubs as well.

Throughout the 30’s (despite the depression) and early 40’s, radio gave the theatre a boost. Italian food companies determined that Italian language programming was an excellent advertising vehicle. Every day had numerous hours of programming on an alphabet soup of radio stations.

In the theatre and on the Italian radio shows, Emma Alba Barbato Gloria (1893-1956) Emma Alba (related to the famous Alba Bakery family of Bensonhurst) was born at Caltigirone in Catania in 1893. The child of a professor father, she acted with the Giovanni Grasso and Marcellini companies. At the age of 18 she married actor Ernesto Barbato and toured in his traveling theatre company.

In 1924, under contract to the Rosario Romeo company, they emigrated to the US. After her first marriage failed, director, actor and writer Angelo Gloria hired Emma Alba to star in his productions, then married her and together they became the leading actors of their own company, which also included her two children, Attilio and Olga Barbato. In 1934 the Donna Billonia radio program featured Emma as Donna Billonia.

Emma as Donna Vicenza played opposite Angelo Gloria and renamed his troupe the Donna Vicenza Company after the radio program. After Angelo Gloria’s death, Attilio Barbato managed the company.

Olga Barbato was born in Sciacca, Agrigento Province, Sicily. She was fond of saying how she started acting on the stage «in the womb» since her mother, actress Emma Alba, while pregnant with Olga, was performing in their traveling theatre company. At the age of four, Olga debuted on the stage.

In Italy she was called the «Italian Shirley Temple». With her father’s company,
she toured Italy, Africa, Tripoli and Tunis, Olga spoke several dialects including Sicilian and Neapolitan.

Eventually though, advertisers realized that their Italian-American market needed no advertising and the funding source dried up.

Then during World War II when many Italians who were not naturalized were interned, including journalists and broadcasters, signs went up in public places warning: «Don’t Speak the Enemy’s Language». Italian radio felt the blow. But the old radio shows were prerecorded and preserved on records almost 1 1/2 feet in diameter.

After Emma’s death in 1956, Olga played the Donna Vicenza records as guest announcer on radio programs in Tampa, Clearwater, Sarasota and Miami, Florida.

She crossed over into the American arena with a 1971 commercial as the face for Aunt Millie’s Tomato Sauce and as the voice of AT&T. After the death of her brother Attilio, and seeing the demise of this last great impresario, she pronounced dramatically in the documentary Teatro: «The curtain is down and the theatre is finished».

The Italian immigrant community needed a theatre, and the Italian-American theatre needed an immigrant population to exist. The Italian-American theatre gradually began to see dwindling audiences. Furthermore, as the second and third generations of Italian-Americans became acculturated, they turned to the new and readily available popular forms of entertainment: radio, the movies, and eventually television.

Giglio, into the 40’s and Cardenia into the 50’s were two of the last holdouts. Some, like Guglielmo Ricciardi long ago, managed to cross over into American spheres.

But the Italian-American Theatre is virtually non-existent today. The Italian Actors’ Union still exists, conducts meetings, and functions minimally as a liaison for visiting Italian professional entertainers.

Even if large numbers of Italian speaking immigrants were suddenly to materialize, our modern technological age has manufactured other diversions which assure that a popular immigrant theatre is now impossible.

In the New York metropolitan area, Frizzi & Lazzi, the Olde Time Italian-American Music and Theatre Company revives some of the material created a century ago.

But in general, if Italian-Americans today speak the lines of an Italian play on a stage, they are probably college students studying the language of their grand parents, in the tradition started by Lorenzo Da Ponte at Columbia University in 1808.