Traveling Truck Show
More on the project here: http://travelingtruckshow.org/
Poster printed at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Wisconsin
Circus Ticket and Poster Visual Inspiration
Join our virtual performance as we recreate the ballyhoo, the laughs and tears, and the old-time music that made the traveling medicine show a hit for more than a century. It was family entertainment at its best: comics tickled the funny bone, ventriloquists and contortionists dazzled the mind, string-bands and buckdancers got your foot stompin.
But no med show was complete without smooth-tongued practitioner selling his miracle cures.
Come one and all, great and small on our cybertour of the great Medicine Show. It’s just what the doctor ordered.
Traveling Medicine Shows were popular in 19th century America, especially in the Old West. Here’s a site with a brief intro to medicine shows, with links to more ephemera and discussion: http://www.memoryelixir.com/history.html
Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, 1892
A few random finds for early American traveling show inspiration.
More Vaudeville visual inspiration—-characters, costumes, stage…mostly from Library of Congress archives.
C. E. Kohl and George Middleton opened up several of the first Vaudeville Theaters in Chicago. This show- “Big Fat Girls Hoop Skirt and Crinoline Laughing Show” -would play at their 150 Clark St. location, which opened around 1883.
…a fun resource for all sorts of oddities and theatrical amusements.
