University of Illinois Press has published Thomas Bauman’s book The Pekin: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black-Owned Theater.

Bauman, a professor of musicology at the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music, chronicles the history of one of the United States’ most prestigious cultural institutions in the early twentieth century, focusing on its owner and visionary, political operator, and gambling boss Robert T. Motts. The Pekin was unusual in its time not only for Mott’s philosophy of hiring only African American staff, but also for its success as a refined black-owned enterprise that attracted and gratified a multi-racial clientele.

Known as “The Temple of Music,” The Pekin became in short time a vibrant center for the arts during its heyday, with an all-black stock company of actors, an acting school, and an accomplished orchestra. Bauman shows that though its success as an entertainment venue was relatively short-lived, The Pekin exercised a lasting influence on both intra- and inter-racial theater.

Bauman became aware of the Pekin’s existence while pursuing studies of cultural formations in early twentieth-century Chicago at the Newberry Library in the early 1990s. Absent any sustained scholarly interest in the theater, he began piecing together its history and social and cultural significance from primary source materials that shed illuminating but indirect light on its owner, its performers, and its repertoire of new musical comedies written, composed, and staged in-house — sometimes at a pace of a new three-act show every two or three weeks.

Thomas Bauman specializes in African-American studies, opera, film music, and Mozart. He is a recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, the ACLS Grant-in-Aid, a Pew Foundation Grant, and an Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowship (Harvard University). He is the author of North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge University Press, 1985), W. A. Mozart's Die Entführung au demSerail (Cambridge University Press, 1987), and The Pekin: America’s First Black Theater (University if Illinois Press, in press). He has contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (Oxford University Press, 1993), and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (Macmillan, 1992).