Vaudeville
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- For the town in France, see Vaudeville, Meurthe-et-Moselle.
- For the record label, see Vaudeville Records
Vaudeville is a style of variety entertainment predominant in America in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. Developing from many sources, including shows in saloons, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, British pantomimes, and other popular forms of entertainment, vaudeville became one of the most popular types of entertainment in America. Vaudeville took the form of a series of separate, unrelated acts each featuring a different types of performance. These performances could ranges from musicians (both classical and popular), dancers, comedians, animal acts, magicians, female and male impersonators, to acrobats, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, or even short films.
In the 1880s, under the care of impresario Tony Pastor, vaudeville was cleansed of its obscenity and disrespectability making it wholesome for the general public. This is generally acknowledged as the beginning of American-style vaudeville. B.F. Keith took the next step starting in Boston, as he built an empire of theatres and brought vaudeville to the people of the United States as well as Canada. Following Keith’s lead, other vaudeville circuits blossomed. Many of these circuits boasted levels of vaudeville, the three most common levels were the “small time”, the “medium time,” and the “Big Time,” which consisted of those performers who were considered the best and most famous. The Big Time found its home in 1913 at New York City's Palace Theater (or just “The Palace” in the patois of vaudevillians), built by Martin Beck and operated by Keith. The Palace featured the best and brightest on its bill and many vaudvillians would consider playing there to be the apotheosis of their careers.
The opening of the Palace marked the beginning of the gradual decline of vaudeville’s popularity. Even though vaudeville and the Palace were wildly successful, the new film industry, later radio and finally the Great Depression led to the closure of vaudeville theaters. The Palace’s conversion to a cinema on 16 November 1932 is considered the final death knell of the art vaudeville. Some attempts to revive it occurred, but these were never successful.
Though the form as popular entertainment is dead, vaudeville lives on in American popular culture and entertainment. The slang of the vaudevillians has added to the English language such colorful terms as “a flop” (an act that does badly) and “the limelight”. Many of the most common techniques and gags of vaudeville entertainers are still seen on television and on film. In addition, vaudeville has provided generations of American entertainers including George M. Cohan, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mae West, Fanny Brice, and W.C. Fields, among many others. Certainly, vaudeville also introduced many great foreign entertainers to the American audience among them Sir Harry Lauder and Sarah Bernhardt.
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[edit] History
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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Popularity
Vaudeville's popularity grew in step with the rise of industry and the growth of North American cities during this time, 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 grow 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 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 theatres. 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Post-Vaudeville
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, Bob Hope, 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.
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 and, of course, The Ed Sullivan Show. Even today, performers such as Bill Irwin, a Macarthur Fellow and Tony Award-winning actor, are frequently lauded as "New Vaudevillians".
[edit] Related forms
- Concert saloon
- Variety hall
- Chautauqua
- Revue
- Cabaret
- Burlesque
- Music hall
- "Borscht Belt"
- Nightclub
- 21st Century Vaudeville
[edit] New Vaudevillians
- The Quiddlers: Comedic Pantomime
- Michel Lauzière: Visual Comedy and Music
- Rudy Coby: Magician
- Stevie Star: Regurgitator
- Mr. Methane: Professional Flatulist
- Daniel Nimmo: A one-man show, cabaret performer and theatre producer
- Vaudeville a la Mode: A 21st Century version of vaudeville using the internet started in 2007 hosted by local artists in Oakland, California
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Vaudeville a la Mode
- Legends of Vaudeville
- American Vaudeville Museum
- Virtual Vaudeville
- Glossary of Vaudeville Slang
- Listen to the Song "Will It Play In Peoria"
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – J. Willis Sayre Photographs 9,856 images collected by drama critic and theatre promoter J. Willis Sayre. They consist of autographed portraits of actors, vaudeville performers, movie stills, singers, dancers, musicians, comedians and acrobats representing American theatre history primarily from the 1890s and onward.
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – Prior and Norris Troupe Photographs 230 Photographs and ephemera relating to the career of Pat Prior and Effie Norris documenting their life on the road while performing on the American vaudeville circuits around the turn of the century, 1886-1915.
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – 19th Century Actors Photographs Cartes-de-visite studio portraits of entertainers, actors, singers, comedians and theatre managers who were involved with or performed on the American stage in the mid- to late 1800s.
