Nice Work If You Can Get It

The mid-nineteenth century saw a seismic transformation take hold of the American stage. Performers working in minstrel shows, opera, circuses, and variety entertainment increasingly came to see themselves not simply as artists, but as workers. As commercial entertainment expanded into a national industry, theatres multiplied, touring companies spread across the country, and show business became a major site of capital growth. What had once been a largely artisanal world of performer-managers evolved into a system driven by profit, professional management, and increasingly precarious labor.

Nice Work If You Can Get It traces the transformation of entertainment in the United States from craft production to industrial enterprise, revealing how that shift changed the conditions and meaning of cultural work. Theatrical labor, performance, and artistic expertise became commodities circulating through expanding networks of agents, managers, and venues. As a result, performers faced increasingly precarious conditions defined by unstable employment, constant travel, long hours, and dependence on powerful intermediaries. In a book replete with colorful personalities and spectacular stories, historian Rachel Miller argues that struggle over the value of cultural labor, and its uneasy position between creativity and wage labor, was central to the development of US capitalism and remains deeply relevant to today’s creative economy.