the press and Tibbits increasingly began to widen. It was a third upstart newspaper, The Daily Reporter, which defended Jackson's management. The only paper that survived was the one that tied its loyalty to the historic opera house. Tibbits Opera House continued to host many of the same types of programming as under previous eras of management, while also bringing new variety to the stage as well. Theatre genres included melodramas, pastoral plays, Irish dramas, combination plays, farce and scenic attractions with Charles Hoyt and Clyde Fitch being the most popular playwrights. The farces tended to focus more on comic specialties rather than a developed plot. Regarding one such farce, At the French Ball, a reviewer quipped, "…The play is one of those kind of creations that one enjoys when he has had a good dinner and has nothing else to do but to gaze and laugh, and feel as Frenchy as possible." Another feature of comedy in this era is that it increasingly included elements of vaudeville with it becoming increasingly "difficult to distinguish between pure comedy and variety entertainments." Famous melodramas during the period included The Convict's Daughter and Was She to Blame. The number of Uncle Tom's Cabin companies, whose shows had apparently evolved into farce and comedy from the original serious tenor of the story, declined during this period. But taking the place of Uncle Tom's Cabin was the oft repeated Faust, an opera which stressed scenery and electrical effects. The comic opera Wang featured one of the more absurd stunts performed on the Tibbits stage with a beer-drinking elephant that downed a four-gallon glass of brew. All in all, 376 plays were performed on the Tibbits stage in the decade from 1894 to 1904 alone, a large increase from the Barton S. Tibbits era. Musical performances continued to be popular as well with such groups as the "Chicago Marine Band", "the Mexican Troubadours", the "Boston Ladies Symphony Orchestra", and the very famous "Sousa Band" featuring John Philip Sousa, which performed twice in 1897 and in 1900. One musician, whose performance was inconvenienced by the failed shipment of his luggage and noisy child in the audience stormed off the stage. The Weekly Courier noted, "He deliberately put his fiddle under his arm and left the stage like a crusty old curmudgeon." 1898 even featured an open-air concert from the Tibbits balcony, which was part of the