Summer stock!

""Summer stock" The phrase brings to mind barns, moonlit nights, Judy Garland, boulevard comedies, musty smells, and maybe even mustier performances. Summer stock is a uniquely American phenomenon - theatre performed in bucolic settings during the vacation season. Though thought of as being light entertainment for a summer's evening, the earliest form of summer stock actually involved America's most important playwright: In the early years of the twentieth century, the Provincetown Wharf Theatre on Cape Cod presented the work of a little-known playwright named Eugene O'Neill. While some might consider the Wharf Theatre a "little theatre" or an "art theatre," the fact that it was situated in a beach community and operated during the high tourist season makes it the forerunner of what we now know as summer stock. Given the Wharf Theatre's productions of O'Neill, we can thank the summer stock tradition for giving the United States its first truly distinctive dramatic voice." "As the middle class grew and paid vacations became the norm, people enjoying the beaches or mountains looked for a way to enrich their minds in the evening so that they didn't feel too guilty about playing in the sun all day long. This summertime entertainment grew up and prospered in the America of the 1920s and '30s in places like Westport, Connecticut and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, throughout New England, and down the East Coast. In Summer Stock! Marti LoMonaco writes the history of summer stock theatre from its earliest beginnings through to its high seasons, featuring luminaries like Helen Hayes, Hume Cronyn, Tallulah Bankhead, Ethel Barrymore, Jean Stapleton, and others. She chronicles its transformation to a circuit of theatres in the 1950s, highlighted by the work of John Kenley, and its near-demise in the late '60s and early '70s. Anyone who has ever thrilled to a production of "Funny Girl" in the wilds of Massachusetts or an evening of "Everyone Loves Opal" in Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, or one of hundreds of other places will love Summer Stock! It's a theatrical Valentine to bygone and balmy summer nights."--BOOK JACKET.