page_title: Alice Oates
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Alice Oates / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Alice Oates (1849-1887) scanned from an obituary of 1887
context_page_description: Alice Oates was an actress, theatre manager and pioneer of American musical theatre who took opéra bouffe in English to all corners of America. She produced the first performance of a work by Gilbert and Sullivan in America with her unauthorised Trial by Jury in 1875, the first American production of The Sultan of Mocha and an early performance of H.M.S. Pinafore.
context_section_description: Apart from being the first theatrical manager in America to stage a work by Gilbert and Sullivan - her unauthorised production of Trial by Jury in 1875 - Alice Oates gave early employment to many who went on to become important in American musical theatre, including Evangeline librettist J. Cheever Goodwin who acted in her company and translated French operas bouffes into English for her, and the actress Pauline Hall who later was to find success in Erminie. She employed a number of well-known performers of the English musical stage including Alfred William Maflin and produced an original comic opera Mignonette by Blanche Reeves and Jesse Williams which played at Ford's Grand Opera House in Baltimore in October 1874. After the death of her husband in 1871 she married her agent, Tracy W Titus in 1872, but they separated in 1875 and divorced later that year. Her subsequent series of amorous adventures became a rather embarrassing running newspaper feature until she married Samuel P. Watkins in 1879, who had no connection with the theatrical profession but who after became her business manager.
  A contemporary summed up her appeal in her heyday: ‘She offers a kind of compromise between the downright deviltry of Aimée and the mild indelicacy of other opéra-bouffe artists. Never insipid, never outrageous, she gravitates nicely between high opera and low comedy, never approaching close enough to either to attract largely’.
  Alice Oates died in January 1887 aged 37 at the home of her father-in-law in Philadelphia after catching a cold in a damp dressing room in a theatre in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
caption: Portrait of Oates from an 1887 obituary
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