Una pandilla de truhanes y un cándido público: el negocio de los espectáculos teatrales, Buenos Aires, 1920

Abstract

During the 1920s, theatrical performance was at its peak in Buenos Aires: almost 40 theaters on Corrientes street and its neighbourhoods displayed short plays of different kinds. Audience was huge: average sales reached around 8 million tickets per year. Daily press and weekly magazines commented, criticized, and publicized plays. Such theatrical performances took place in a profoundly changing society. In particular, this was a time when a mass consumer market was constituted. Both contemporary critics and historians of theatre denounced the commercial feature of the porteño theatre during the 1920s. This article proposes to look at the theatrical business in relation to the constitution of a consumer market for performance arts in the context of Buenos Aires of the 1920s. In order to do that, it engages in dialogue with recent scholarship on the evolution of consumption in Argentina and focuses on the strategies developed by theatrical entrepreneurs to succeed in a competitive setting and to attract the attention of mass audiences.

Keywords

• Buenos Aires
• Theatrical performance
• consume
• theatrical entrepreneurs
• market