Edward E. Rice

Edward Everett Rice (December 21, 1847 – November 16, 1924) was an American musical theatre composer, book writer, and producer whose work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries placed him among the pioneering figures of the American musical stage. He was born in Brighton, Massachusetts, to Edmund Rice and Martha A. Rice, née Fletcher. His father, who had accumulated wealth through the wholesale meat business, provided his sons with a superior education. Two of Rice's brothers served in the U.S. Civil War, and his first cousin Edmund Rice became a brigadier general and Medal of Honor recipient. Rice was a direct descendant of Edmund Rice, an English immigrant to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Rice's musical training began at age eight, when his father arranged private tuition for him. After a year of lessons, he had not learned to read music but demonstrated a natural ability to improvise and play by ear. His father later offered to send him to Europe for further musical study, but the prominent Boston organist B. J. Lang discouraged the plan, advising that the world had more need of songs than sonatas. Rice never acquired the ability to read sheet music, and his method of composition throughout his career involved playing tunes on the piano and dictating them to a scribe, offering suggestions for orchestration as he went. Before entering the theatre, he worked in printing and publishing, managed a newspaper for a period, and later served as amanuensis to James Alexander, the Boston agent for the Cunard Steamship Company. He was also a member of Boston's Papyrus Club.

Two accounts exist of how Rice came to write for the musical stage. In one, he and collaborator J. Cheever Goodwin attended a Lydia Thompson production of the burlesque Oxygen, by Farnie and Reece, and concluded they could produce something better themselves. In another version, Rice was inspired by an English production of The Black Crook to pursue the creation of an American musical. Whatever the catalyst, Rice and Goodwin produced Evangeline; or, The Belle of Acadia in 1874, a musical burlesque drawn from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Evangeline. The production became the first American work billed as a musical comedy and established Rice as a significant force in the emerging form. Evangeline remained among his credited Broadway works alongside Adonis and 'Round New York in 80 Minutes.

Over the course of his career, Rice composed music for more than eighteen Broadway productions, including Hiawatha and Summer Nights, both of which toured the country. His biggest commercial success was Adonis in 1894, which starred Henry Dixey, one of the most popular performers of the era. In 1893 he produced the burlesque extravaganza 1492 Up to Date in New York City. As a producer, Rice was instrumental in introducing several performers to prominent stages, among them Pauline Hall, Lillian Russell, and Fay Templeton. In 1898 he booked Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, with music by Will Marion Cook and lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar, making it one of the earliest musicals created by African American writers with an African American cast and the first such production to appear at the prestigious Casino Theatre on Broadway. Rice's final Broadway production came in 1904 with a revival of the British musical Mr. Wix of Wickham, which featured new songs by Jerome Kern.

Rice married Clara E. Rich, daughter of Isaac E. Rich, in 1869. The couple had three children: a daughter, Carrie B. Rice, born in 1870, and twin sons, Aubrey L. Rice and Anthony D. Rice, both born in 1876. Rice died in New York City on November 16, 1924, at the age of 76.