Starting with snow white

Snow White
transformations within the theatrical field of staged productions. 
But to understand how 
Snow White 
was revised and adapted for the stage, one 
must also recognize changes occurring within the theatrical space itself in the United 
States, during the early twentieth century. Thomas H. Dickinson refers to these as having 
produced 
The Insurgent Theatre
, wherein there was “an implied conviction on the part of 
the workers that the things of the old theatre must be destroyed and a new theatre be built 
up in its stead” (10). Dickinson further details this transformation: “When one speaks of 
the theatre he no longer refers only to play or actor or even production. The term now 
covers all the technical, professional, artistic and social connections of a great edifice of 
public amusement” (10). As a result of the theatre being understood as a much more 
complex system, individuals undertook to revise the theatre for various “purposes” (21).
Dickinson offers a host of these:
To make money. 
To serve society by giving good plays. 

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To serve society by giving plays cheaply. 
To teach something. 
To produce plays as artistically as possible. 
Simply to do something in the theatre. (21) 
The idea of a “children’s theatre” or, alternately, a space for the “use of the dramatic 
faculties in education”
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spoke to at least one, if not more than one of these (124).
Moreover, reflecting the second category particularly, the educational possibilities which 
the fairy tale had opened in Europe during the nineteenth century could here be extended, 
and so they were. Dickinson recalls that “In 1902 there was established by the 
educational Alliance of New York City a department of dramatic activity […] The 
purposes of this work were the utilization of the dramatic faculties in the education of 
young people particularly of foreign races” (125). He then goes on to recognize how this 
work prompted “two movements in children’s dramatics” including “The Children’s 
Educational Theatre” and the “Educational Dramatic League” (Dickinson 125). Such 
venues provided an environment for the earliest American departures from the European 
Snow White 
tradition, and not merely because these versions initially spoke to child 
audiences, but more pointedly because they reflected the rise of various individual 
interests, as well as those of broader audiences. 
Even as changes effected in the venue of production promoted the success of the 
tale in this space, so too did the tale itself. Eric Smoodin gestures toward the swift rise in 
popularity of 
Snow White
from the start of the twentieth century and also to the 
“importance of the story to the lives of children,” when Marguerite Merington initially 
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Dickinson distinguishes between these two types of spaces. The “children’s theatre,” he asserts, “raises 
questions of entertainment and art and its values that are presumably absolute,” where the dramatic space 
for education “question[s] […] mental development and its values are relative” (124). 

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brought the tale to them in 1910 (
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
19). Merington 
herself testified to children’s eagerness to engage with the tale. “The [Hebrew 
Educational] theatre was crowded every night,” she notes, adding that children of the 
audience would interact with, “shriek,” or shout to the actors at surprising or suspenseful 
moments of the staged action (“when the Queen tossed the poisoned apple to Snow-
White,” for instance) (“Should We Have Amusements” SM3). Winthrop Ames’ revised 
staged production appeared two years later New York City, after which the staged 
production moved on to Boston in 1914, and (“either Ames’ or Merington’s or someone 
else’s”) appeared in Connecticut in 1915 (