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David Belasco was born in San Fransisco, California, on July 25,1853. Hisparents had come to California from London in the gold rush. Belasco grew upin San Fransisco and Victoria, British Columbia. His early education in a RomanCatholic monastery influenced his simple mode of dress and helped earn him the nickname Bishop of Broadway. He had some experience as a child actor, and from 1873 to 1879 worked in a number of San Fransisco theaters as everything from call …

…Belasco's whole nature seems to have been perfectly expressed in the "Sensation Melodrama." He was arguably the genre's best practitioner, and heappeared at the tail end of the melodrama tradition, as though it were his destiny to see the style out, and to bring Sensation Melodrama to its perfection and its death by overwhelming excess. Belasco became the epitome of the old-fashioned,bombastic,insensitive, commercial "Old Style" which young American experimentalists were determined to replace.