Vaudeville

Much of the structure and many of the bits in Complete History of America (abridged) derive inspiration from the American form of entertainment known as “vaudeville.”  While vaudeville affected American culture most widely between 1870s and the 1920s (coincidentally the very era that the playwrights slight in the play!), its various styles of comedy continued well after the 1920s to infuse the new technologies of the radio and television.

 

For some links on vaudeville, see:

http://www.vaudeville.org/index_files/Page1676.htm

 

http://www.nypl.org/press/2005/vaudeville.cfm

 

http://www.virtualvaudeville.com/

 

http://www.lycos.com/info/vaudeville--theaters.html

 

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/vshtml/vsintro.html

Vaudeville Records

Note:  Material below appearing in this font reflects “emphasis added.”

Edited from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

Vaudeville is a style of multi-act theatre which flourished in North America from the 1880s through the 1920s. An evening's schedule of performances (or "bill") could run the gamut from acrobats to mathematicians, from song-and-dance duos to trick high divers. Indeed, the scope of the presentations was unique in the history of American live performance: music, comedy, athletic feats, magic, animal acts, opera, Shakespeare, banjo, acrobatics, gymnastics and lectures by celebrities and intellectuals.

A bill usually began with a "dumb act" (e.g., acrobats, trick bicyclists), allowing late arriving patrons to find seats without interrupting important dialogue, peaked in the penultimate spot with the "headliner" (the biggest draw on the bill and focus of that week's publicity effort), and might conclude with a "chaser," an act sufficiently good to feature but dull enough to chase the audience from the theatre, an important role in houses that offered continuously revolving performances.

History

Etymology

The origin of the term is obscure, but is often explained as a corruption of the expression "voix de ville", or "voice of the city". Another plausible etymology makes it a corruption of the French Vau de Vire, a valley in Normandy noted for style of songs with topical themes. Though "vaudeville" had been used in the United States as early as the 1830s, most variety theatres adopted the term in the late 1880s and early 1890s for two reasons. First, seeking middle class patrons, they wished to distance themselves from the earlier rowdy, working-class variety halls. Second, the French or pseudo-French term lent an air of sophistication, and perhaps made the institution seem more consistent with the Progressive Era's interests in education and self-betterment. Some, however, preferred the earlier term to what manager Tony Pastor called its "sissy and Frenchified" successor. Thus one often finds records of vaudeville being marketed as "variety" well into the twentieth-century.

Evolution

Though often confused with variety, its generically distinct predecessor (c. 1860s-1881), mature vaudeville distinguished itself from the earlier form by its mixed-gender audience, usually alcohol-free halls, and often slavish devotion to inculcating favor among members of the middle class.

The form gradually evolved from the concert saloon and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The usual date given for the "birth" of vaudeville, however, rests at October 24, 1881, the night upon which variety performer and theatre owner Tony Pastor, in his effort to lure women into the male-dominated variety hall, famously staged the first bill of self-proclaimed "clean" vaudeville in New York City.

Popularity

Vaudeville's popularity grew in step with the rise of industry and the growth of North American cities during this period, and declined with the advent of cinema and radio. After the incorporation of women into the audience, vaudeville's greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength was its development of the circuit, a chain of allied vaudeville houses that remedied the chaos of the single theatre booking system by contracting acts for regional and national engagement that could span from a few weeks to two years. Benjamin Franklin Keith founded the most important circuit of theatres in vaudeville history. Later, E.F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, managed the chain to its greatest success.

Albee also gave national prominence to vaudeville's trumpeting of "polite" entertainment, a commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts who violated this ethos (e.g., using the word "hell") were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the week's remaining bills. It is worth noting, however, that performers routinely flouted such censorship, often to the delight of the very audience members whose sensibilities were supposedly endangered.

The most striking examples of Gilded Age theatre architecture invariably rose from the largess of big time vaudeville magnates. Though classic vaudeville reached a zenith of capitalization and sophistication in urban areas dominated by national chains and commodious theatres, small-time vaudeville included countless more intimate and locally-controlled houses. Small-time houses were often converted saloons, rough hewn theatres or multi-purpose halls, together catering to a wide range of clientele, though many small towns had purpose-built theaters. African American audiences had their own smaller circuits, as did speakers of Italian and Yiddish. By the late 1890s, vaudeville had large circuits, small and/or large houses in almost every sizable location, standardized booking, broad pools of skilled acts, and a loyal national following. At its height, vaudeville was rivaled only by churches and public schools among the nation's premiere public gathering places.

Typical provincial venue on the circuit: "The Opera" in Kirksville, Missouri

Typical provincial venue on the circuit: "The Opera" in Kirksville, Missouri

Decline

There was no abrupt end to vaudeville. The continued growth of the lower-priced cinema in the early 1910s dealt the heaviest blow to vaudeville, just as the advent of free broadcast television was later to diminish the cultural and economic strength of the cinema (ironically, cinema was first regularly commercially presented in the United States in vaudeville halls). By the late 1920s, even the hardiest within the vaudeville industry realized the form was in decline; the perceptive understood the condition to be terminal. With the introduction of talking pictures in 1926, studios such as Warner Bros. and Fox Film featured many vaudeville acts, both headliners and lesser-known acts, in series of short films. These films gradually replaced the live entertainment that had been commonplace in theatres with the showing of a film. A theatre owner could rent a film for a small fee and play it over and over again, whereas he had previously been forced to pay much more for live entertainers. The 1930s, with standardized film distribution and talking pictures, only confirmed the end of the genre. By 1930, the vast majority of theatres had been wired for sound and none of the major studios were producing silent pictures. For a time, the most luxurious theatres continued to offer live entertainment but the majority of theatres were forced by the Depression to economize. The shift of New York City's Palace Theatre, vaudeville's center, to an exclusively cinema presentation in 1932 is often noted as vaudeville's moment of death, but like the attempts to tie its birth to Pastor's first clean bill, no single event may be accurately considered as anything more than reflective of its gradual withering. Though talk of its resurrection was heard throughout the 1930s and after, the demise of the supporting apparatus of the circuits and the inescapably higher cost of live performance made any large scale renewal of vaudeville unrealistic.

Post-Vaudeville

From newspaper promotional for vaudeville character actor Charles E. Grapewin

From newspaper promotional for vaudeville character actor Charles E. Grapewin

Some in the industry blamed cinema's drain of talent from the vaudeville circuits for the medium's demise. Lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions, many early film and radio performers, such as W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny and The Three Stooges, used the prominence they first gained in live variety performance to vault out of the medium. Largely, however, vaudeville's performers scattered to the winds. Many later appeared in the Catskill resorts that constituted the "Borscht Belt". Some performers whose eclectic styles did not conform as well to the greater intimacy of the screen, like Bert Lahr, continued to fashion careers out of combining live performance, radio and film roles. Other vaudevillians who entered in its decline, including The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Kate Smith, Judy Garland, and Rose Marie used vaudeville as a launching pad for their own careers. And many simply retired from performance and entered the workaday world of the middle class, that group that vaudeville, more than anything else, had helped to articulate and entertain.

As the genre declined, most performers left the theater; here the kid hoofer Ray Wollbrinck, once called "the cleverest buckdancer on the vaudeville stage"

As the genre declined, most performers left the theater; here the kid hoofer Ray Wollbrinck, once called "the cleverest buckdancer on the vaudeville stage"

Yet vaudeville, both in its methods and ruling aesthetic, did not simply perish, but rather resounded throughout the succeeding media of film, radio and television. Certainly, the screwball comedies of the 1930s, those exquisite reflections of the all too brief moment of cinematic equipoise between dialogue and physicality, should be viewed as heirs of vaudeville's aesthetic. In form, the television variety show owed much to vaudeville, riding the multi-act format to success in shows such as "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar. Even today, performers such as Bill Irwin, a Macarthur Fellow and Tony Award-winning actor, are frequently lauded as "New Vaudevillians".

Related forms

Notable vaudeville performers

See also

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaudeville"

Categories: Vaudeville | American culture | Entertainment in the United States | Theatrical genres | Variety entertainment

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

vaudeville

Light entertainment popular in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It consisted of 10–15 unrelated acts featuring magicians, acrobats, comedians, trained animals, singers, and dancers. The form developed from the coarse variety shows held in beer halls for a primarily male audience. Tony Pastor established a successful “clean variety show” at his New York City theatre in 1881 and influenced other managers to follow suit. By 1900 chains of vaudeville theatres around the country included Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit, of which New York's Palace Theatre was the most famous (1913–32). Among the many entertainers who began in vaudeville were Mae West, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, Milton Berle, and Bob Hope. See also music hall and variety theatre.

For more information on vaudeville, visit Britannica.com.

 

Encyclopedia of American History

Back to Top

Library > Reference > Encyclopedia of American History

Vaudeville

Vaudeville flourished as a form of variety theater from the 1880s to the late 1930s, when it succumbed to competing forms of popular entertainment, particularly "talking" pictures. Recent historians have portrayed vaudeville as a place of struggle over class, race, and gender relations and identities in industrial America. Vaudeville also saw the application of consolidation and franchise techniques to the organization of popular entertainment. Benjamin Franklin Keith may have been the first American entrepreneur to use the term vaudeville, adapted from the French vaux-de-vire, referring to popular songs from the French province of Normandy (the valleys of Vire), or from voix de ville (voices of the town).

Keith is also credited with refining the vaudeville format. He and a partner opened a "dime museum" in Boston in 1883, and then expanded their operations to include singers and animal acts. By the mid-1890s, Keith and his subsequent partner, Edward Albee, owned vaudeville theaters in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Providence. According to Keith, vaudeville differed from variety shows, burlesque, minstrel shows, and sideshows in its intentional appeal to "higher" cultural tastes and audiences that included women and children. The Keith vision of genteel popular entertainment resonated with Progressive Era acculturation anxieties, racialist ideologies, and campaigns to sanitize and organize American cities.

Although performers and audiences may have been disciplined to a bourgeois cultural standard on the "big-time" Keith and later Orpheum circuits (the western circuit that merged with the Keith enterprise in 1927), the "small-time" vaudeville theaters nourished their own local audiences, often working class, immigrant, or African American, and their own kinds of humor. While there was an all-black circuit, managed by the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), from the beginning African American performers also appeared in white-owned vaudeville (which blacks called "white time"). The Whitman Sisters maintained a popular African American vaudeville company that included Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. In a brutally racist society, African American performers and audiences found ways to resist segregation on stage and in the theaters.

When vaudeville's popularity began to fade in the 1920s, some of its stars carried vaudeville forms into the new media of radio, nightclub entertainment, films, and later, television. These included George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Sarah Bernhardt, Eubie Blake, Sammy Davis Jr., W. C. Fields, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Phil Silvers, and Ethel Waters.

Bibliography

George-Graves, Nadine. The Royalty of Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900–1940. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Kibler, M. Alison. Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Slide, Anthony. The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.