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Vaudeville

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Image:OBrien and Havel - Joseph Hart Vaudeville.jpg

Vaudeville is a style of variety entertainment predominant in America in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. A similar development in Britain was known as Music Hall. Developing from many sources, including shows in saloons, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, British pantomimes, and other popular entertainments, vaudeville became one of the most popular types of entertainment in America.

It took the form of a series of separate, unrelated acts, each featuring a different type of performance. These could ranges from musicians (both classically trained and popular), dancers, comedians, animal acts, magicians, female and male impersonators, to acrobats, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, blackface minstrels, or even short films.

In the 1880s, under the care of Tony Pastor, vaudeville was cleansed of its obscenity and disrespectability and made wholesome for the general public. This is generally acknowledged as the beginning of American-style vaudeville. B.F. Keith took the next step in Boston, building an empire of theaters and bringing vaudeville to the United States and Canada. Following Keith’s lead, other vaudeville circuits blossomed. Many of these circuits boasted levels of vaudeville, the "small time", the "medium time," and the "Big Time". The Big Time found its home in 1913 at the Palace Theater (or just “The Palace” in the patois of vaudevillians) in New York City, built by Martin Beck and operated by Keith. The Palace featured the best and brightest on its bill and many vaudvillians considered playing it to be the apotheosis of their careers.[citation needed]

The new film industry, later radio and finally the Great Depression in the 1930s led to the closure of vaudeville theaters. The Palace’s conversion to a cinema on 16 November, 1932 is considered the death knell of the art.

Though the form as popular entertainment is dead, vaudeville lives on in American popular culture and entertainment. The language of the vaudevillians has added to the language such colorful terms as "a flop" (an act that does badly) and "the limelight" (from the color of phosphorus lights that were commonly used in theaters of the time). while many of the most common comic techniques of vaudeville entertainers are used in television and on film.

Vaudeville 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 others. In addition, vaudeville introduced many great foreign entertainers to the American audience among them Sir Harry Lauder and Sarah Bernhardt.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Etymology

The origin of the term is obscure, but is often considered a corruption of the expression "voix de ville", or "voice of the city". Another plausible etymology is that it is 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 disassociate themselves with images of the rowdy, working-class variety halls. Second, the term was redolent of European sophistication, helping to lend the American genre a patina of "class" that protected it from public censure while inserting it within the cultural vale of the Progressive Era's interests in education and self-betterment.

Some, however, resisted the nomenclatural shift from "variety" to "vaudeville" because of what they saw as the attendant pretense, preferring the earlier term to what manager Tony Pastor called its "sissy and Frenchified" successor. Thus, confusingly enough, one often finds records of vaudeville being marketed as "variety" well into the twentieth-century.[citation needed]

[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 emerging middle class.

Most scholars view vaudeville as the result of a slow evolutionary process that required several para-theatrical developments, such as the rise of the middle class. The form therefore 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 variety performer and theatre owner Tony Pastor, trying to lure women into the male-dominated variety hall, famously staged the first bill of self-proclaimed "clean" vaudeville in New York City. [1]

[edit] Popularity

Image:Hurly-Burly Extravaganza.jpg

Vaudeville's popularity grew in step with the rise of industry and the growth of North American cities. 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 foiled 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, grandfather of the 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 that could be consumed by men, women and children, giving offense to no party. Acts who violated this ethos (e.g., using the word "hell") were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the week's remaining bills, although performers routinely flouted such censorship, often to the delight of the audience.[citation needed]

The most striking examples of Gilded Age theatre architecture rose from the largess of vaudeville magnates, insistent that these houses embody the pinnacle of high class. And while classic vaudeville reached a zenith of capitalization and sophistication in urban areas dominated by national chains and commodious theatres, small-time vaudeville included countless scores of 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. African American audiences had their own smaller circuits, as did speakers of Italian and Yiddish.

By the late 1890s, vaudeville thus found itself in the enviable position of having large circuits, small and/or large houses in almost every decent sized location, standardized booking, broad pools of skilled acts, and a loyal national following. At its height, vaudeville was rivaled by only churches and public schools as the nation's premiere public gathering place.

[edit] Decline

There was no abrupt end to vaudeville. The continued growth of the lower-priced cinema in the early 1910s dealt the most striking blow to vaudeville, just as the advent of free broadcast television would later shrink the cultural and economic strength of the cinema. (Ironically, cinema was first regularly commercially presented in the United States in vaudeville halls.)

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 in theatres that had been commonplace with the showing of a film. A theatre owner could pay a small fee for the rent of the film and play it over and over again, whereas he had previously been forced to pay much more for live entertainers.

The 1930s, graced with standardized film distribution and talking pictures, and cursed by the economic ravages of the Great Depression, 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 no single event marks its demise. The demise of the supporting apparatus of the circuits and the inescapably higher cost of live performance made any resurrection attempts of vaudeville impossible.

[edit] After the fall

From newspaper promotional for vaudeville character actor Charles E. Grapewin
From newspaper promotional for vaudeville character actor Charles E. Grapewin

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 careers. And many simply retired from performance.

Vaudeville, both in methods and ruling aesthetic, did not simply perish, but resounded throughout the succeeding media of film, radio and television. The screwball comedies of the 1930s should be viewed as heirs of vaudeville's aesthetic. In form, the television variety show owes 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 are frequently labeled as "New Vaudevillians". [2]

[edit] Related forms

[edit] Notable performers

Artists famous for prominent appearances on Vaudeville include:

[edit] Notes

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[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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