More about the Performances

At the Theater

I went to the Central Library downtown again the other day, and in the Grosvenor Room, where local history lives, I found a great newspaper article about Salvatore Rizzo and his marionette theater on Dante Place. It was written in October of 1905. This was a year or two after Salvatore Rizzo had applied for and received a license from the city for his theater. I'm still looking for a copy of that - I'd love to put it on the blog!  

This is what the article looks like - it's a long one, and densely printed, so I'll paraphrase the most interesting bits. But anyone who feels interested in reading the whole thing can go downtown and see it in the Scrapbook Collection in the Grosvenor Room - it's in the scrapbook titled 'Theaters and Convention Halls in Buffalo', volume 1. The librarians there are wonderfully helpful!

The theater was an unused storefront. According to the article it was 75 feet long, and 25 feet wide, and it could seat about 200 people. The seats, which were straight backed wooden benches, were usually filled each night with men and boys who had paid 5 cents (in 1905) for admission. Sam Rizzo (grandson of Salvatore) told me that his grandmother had a little shop of her own next door, where she sold homemade cookies and cakes and other Italian delicacies, and she sold her lemonade and baked treats at the marionette performances. 

The show began with an overture by a four piece orchestra, which sat in a small pit in front of the stage. Then Salvatore himself would sit on the edge of the stage and give, from memory, an hour long synopsis of all that had led up to the evening's performance. The article states, "He holds the attention of his audience to a man. Vocal inflections, gestures, and facial expressions; all are perfect, and he draws the applause, the murmur of disapproval, or the laugh of his hearers at will."

The shows were from 8 to 10 in the evening, every evening. The second hour belonged to the marionettes. One man was required for each speaking puppet; Sam Rizzo told me there were usually two or three men on hand to do the shows, with minor characters being handled by small boys. Sam has a wonderful story of being allowed once to be one of these boys when he was about eight years old - his character was a monk. He remembers the puppet's robe accidentally getting caught on a nail during the performance. The robe was nearly torn from the marionette; luckily, the audience thought it was part of the show and laughed uproariously. 

Salvatore handled the marionettes with amazing skill. "While one hand is working the doll, the other member is employed in handling a book out of which he manufactures the lines used by all the characters on the stage." The book was written in text form, not as a play, which means that Salvatore had to reduce the text to set speeches for each character, on the spot, as the play progressed. Challenging work, indeed! In this photo, you can see the book in Salvatore's hand as he works the puppet. (In an actual performance, Salvatore would have been behind the backdrop.)

This is what the reporter wrote about Salvatore, "The genius who presides over these wooden actors is an Italian who speaks very little English. Professional and amateur performers could spend a very profitable evening listening to this man."

In my next post I'll write more about the stage and the stories; stay tuned! And, as always, I love to hear from my readers.

Salvatore Rizzo's Descendants

In Person!!

Through this blog I've received a chance I never thought I would have - to actually meet some of the family of Salvatore Rizzo! Here's how it happened:

One day recently, a man named Sam Rizzo was talking to his nephew Dan Rizzo. Sam was telling Dan all about his grandfather who had a little marionette theater in the old days. It was in the Italian neighborhood called 'the Hooks', down on Buffalo's waterfront. Sam remembers many things from the time when he was a boy and tells colorful, fascinating stories about those times. And Dan was fascinated, and when he went home, he decided to look online to see if he could find out any more about that marionette theater. A Google search turned up this blog. He then contacted me, and was I excited! 

So that is how I met Sam and Dan Rizzo.

Sam Rizzo

Dan Rizzo

To meet some of Salvatore's family is more than I would have dared hope when I began this blog. In a prior post, there is a picture of Salvatore and one of his sons displaying some of the marionettes behind the Dante Place theater. That son was Anthony, who also had three sons, and three daughters. Anthony's sons were Sam, pictured above, Joseph, and Frank. Dan is the son of Joseph.

I asked Sam if he remembered any of his grandfather's neighbors and friends from Dante Place. Among the names he told me was this one: Scaduto. Here is a drawing made by a newspaper sketch artist in May of 1930.

 There are many more stories to tell about Dante Place and the wonderful marionette theater, but I will close this post with a picture of Salvatore Rizzo taken when he was (maybe) in his thirties.  I think I see a little family resemblance; how about you?

The Stories and Plots

        The scripts for the Sicilian marionette performances came from works of literature and from folktales. Because marionette performances are in the oral tradition as well as part of the visual arts, liberties have been taken over the years with some aspects of the stories. But the main tradition of Sicilian marionette theater are the tales of the legendary Charlemagne and his foremost warriors, the Paladins.

        Charlemagne was King Charles I, an eighth century King and the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled over much of Western Europe. His driving motivation was the unification and Christianization of all those he ruled. To do this, much warfare was required and he was noted for his ruthlessness. His rule did not extend to the region now known as Sicily, though his armies did battle in parts of Italy. But that has nothing to do with why tales of Charlemagne became a staple of Sicilian marionette theater.

        In 1516, an Italian named Ludovico Ariosto published an epic called Orlando Furioso, which roughly translates to the madness of Roland, or the frenzy of Roland. It was a continuation of Orlando Innamoroto, or Roland in love, which had been written earlier by his countryman, Matteo Boirardo.  Both works took the Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) as a basis and inspiration. Roland was the nephew of Charlemagne, and the Song of Roland is the oldest surviving major work of French literature.

        Orlando Furioso is not a work of historical accuracy. It takes great liberty with geographic locations and introduces fantastic monsters and sorcerers and a creature called a hippogriff, which was a horse with wings and the head of an eagle. It had talons instead of forelegs. But the human characters are the same as those in the Song of Roland, and there are similarities in the plots.

Although this illustration from Orlando Furioso looks like Batman riding an eagle, it actually shows a warrior named Ruggiero riding a hippogriff through a mythical landscape.

These Italian epics, based on the earlier French epic, became the basis for nineteenth century Sicilian marionette theater. Why? Perhaps the violent history of Sicily plays a role. Sicily has been ruled by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Normans, Germans, and French, according to an article by Buffalonian Angelo Coniglio, found in a back issue issue of Per Niente newsletter. The history of Sicily is one of battle, where the skills of the warrior are prized along with the qualities of bravery and loyalty. This may have made it easy for the Sicilians to relate to the tales of the fighting Paladins.

Another factor is that at the time that the marionette theaters were growing in popularity, the ruling powers were becoming uneasy about crowds gathering among their subjects. Marionette performances featuring satires or contemporary political themes would have been particularly discouraged. But the tales of Charlemagne and the paladins satisfied both the Sicilian taste for drama and adventure and the ruling class requirement of 'safe' subjects.

A Source for Information

   

    I thought you might be interested in seeing where I found so much of this information about Salvatore Rizzo and his marionette theater. These scrapbooks were a Works Progress Administration project during the 1930s. Clerical workers who were out of work were paid by the government to sift through the library's collection of old newspapers, find and sort articles, and paste them into scrapbooks. There are about 200 of these scrapbooks in the collection and they are a tremendous resource for anyone curious about Buffalo life in years past. To see them, just go to the Central Branch at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, and enter the Grosvenor Room. That is the room with local history resources of all kinds. You will see the shelves of scrapbooks on your left as soon as you walk in the door. Be prepared to be swept away. There are scrapbooks about Buffalo's Foreign Population, Buffalo Homes, Buffalo Streets, Industry, Churches, even Buffalo Trees!

The Theater on Dante Place

     
           In this post I'd like to share what I have learned so far about Salvatore Rizzo's theater on Dante Place. For the sake of coherence, I'm going to refer to the street as Dante Place, even though it was named Canal Street at an earlier point in time.
        I found an interesting article in one of the scrapbooks held at the Central Library in downtown Buffalo. It was dated April 5, 1908 and appeared in the Express newspaper.

                                                                                                                                Courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

        Crystal Beach was a popular amusement park across the border in Canada, known to generations of Western New Yorkers, especially Buffalonians. To get there, many boarded the Canadiana, which docked not too far from Rizzo's waterfront theater in Buffalo. The author of the article above describes how to get to the marionette theater: 

"Turn into Dante Place on the right as you leave the Commercial Street bridge, then walk a little way along this street with its huddled domesticity and teeming shops and fruit stands, past crates of fowls and strings of onions, past doorways filled with children and easy-going men and women who carry on the Italian tradition of life in the open."

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/map_item.pl?data=/gmd380/g3804/g3804b/pm005430.sid&style=gmd&itemLink=D?gmd:2:./temp/~ammem_8vnc::&title=Buffalo,+Erie+Co.,+N.Y.+

             The old drawing above shows part of the Buffalo waterfront in 1902 At the upper left you can see a street running horizontally from left to right; it is labelled 'Canat' - it is supposed to say 'Canal.' This is the street that became Dante Place. If you follow this street heading to the right, you will see that it crosses Evans. One block further you see where LeCouteulx Street meets Canal Street, and that is roughly where Salvatore Rizzo's storefront theater was.

                  The writer goes on to describe how every seat in the little theater is filled nightly, and all the wall space taken too. There is the clash of swords and shields, and shouts of 'brava' from the all-male crowd, as the marionettes act out the stories of Charlemagne and his courageous knights. I like the part from the article above where the writer tells how Rizzo let him look behind stage, where rows and rows of marionettes "are hung aloft like so many Bluebeard victims." Salvatore Rizzo had over 75 marionettes, which gives one an idea of how intricate were the stories he told with them.

                  The most commonly given reason I found to explain why there were no women or girls at these performances was that there was often 'rough language' from the audience. That is a plausible explanation, but another factor is the Italian culture operating at that time and place. Little Italy in Buffalo, like the other Little Italy places across the country, was full of very recent immigrants whose traditions had not been worn away by life in the new world. Women did not go out and socialize in the evenings the way men did. According to a study by Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, a woman did not leave her home unchaperoned at that time, and husbands and fathers dominated family affairs. The marionette shows, with their emphasis on courage, honor, chivalry, and loyalty may have helped shape the Sicilian male's self-image.

                    Women weren't entirely absent from the theater, though. Salvatore Rizzo's wife made the little cakes and the lemonade that she sold at the shows. If any of my readers remember hearing about the theater or the marionettes, I'd love to hear from you! 

                    

Buffalo's Little Italy

Express, May 4, 1902                                                                                courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

       
         These young boys in Buffalo's Little Italy could very well have been among those who frequented Salvatore Rizzo's marionette theater. The brave marionettes in the performances who were always ready to do battle and fight for honor could surely have inspired these poses. Does anyone recognize any of the boys in this great photo?

          The Italian born population in Buffalo increased from 6,000 to 16,000 between 1900 and 1920. Italians represented 10% of Buffalo's foreign born population. They tended to settle near others from their village or town, thus there were four or five areas in Buffalo with heavily Italian populations. This blog is concerned with the Italians who settled in the waterfront area near Canal Street (later named Dante Place). Many of them were from the region around Palermo in Sicily. When people write of Buffalo's Little Italy, this is the area they are usually referring to.

          Family was of supreme importance here. Marriage was for life - so said the Catholic Church and so they believed. Family honor was taken seriously, and social life was intertwined with family life. Many of those who immigrated here were formerly agricultural workers in Sicily, most were illiterate, and usually they faced the challenge of a new language along with trying to find employment.

           St. Anthony of Padua Church played a large role in family and social life. It was the only Catholic church in the neighborhood until Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church was built in 1906. That church no longer exists; it was razed in the name of urban development in 1949. St. Anthony's is still here - it stands at 160 Court Street in downtown Buffalo.  Social clubs met at the church, along with labor unions when they came to exist. It was the place to celebrate births and marriages, and where funerals were held. There were parades and festivities to celebrate saint's days.

          Education was important to the newly arrived immigrants. I have read that it was the ambition of every family to have a doctor, a lawyer, and a priest. The public school in the neighborhood was School #2.

                                                                                                                            1910 Photo by Lewis Hines; Library of Congress

     How about it - are there any PS #2 alumni reading this?

Pupi Fratelli Napoli

        Since I obviously can't show one of Salvatore Rizzo's marionette performances, I have found one on You Tube from Sicily. I have read that there were three distinct marionette traditions in Italy: from Palermo and Catania in Sicily, and from Naples. The marionettes from these regions are distinguished by size and by style of manipulation, whether from the top or from the sides. These are the Napoli brothers from Catania, descendants of Don Gaetano Napoli, who opened his theater in in Italy in 1921. Salvatore Rizzo had been operating his American theater on Dante Place for almost twenty five years by then!

The marionettes that Salvatore Rizzo owned and used look similar in size to the ones we see here.
   
        Rizzo's shows were probably not as elaborate as this one. There are at four strong men performing here; if you watch them instead of the marionettes, you will see them wiping sweat from their brows, and note that they are all pretty muscular! Rizzo would have had his sons helping, and would have spoken all of the lines himself. I have not been able to find out whether he had music or not, but I did find an article from the newspaper that described the excitement at Rizzo's performances that was created during battle scenes. Rizzo would stamp his feet on the hollow boards behind the stage during the clash, the same as these Napoli brothers do. The audience would shout for their hero, and there would be the sound of clanging shields and swords. All of Rizzo's shows were in Italian as tradition dictated. Even non-Italian speakers (of whom there were none in Rizzo's theater) can get caught up in the excitement of a Sicilian marionette performance, as you can see.
       For those with shorter attention spans or less patience, the excitement of battle starts at 4:26 :)

The newspaper article from Buffalo also notes that the marionettes usually needed repairs after each performance!

       Has anyone been to Italy and seen one of these performances in person? I'd love to hear from you!