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Vaudeville

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For the town in France, see Vaudeville, Meurthe-et-Moselle.
Poster for a vaudeville act "O'Brien & Havel"

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, feats of athleticism, magic, animal acts, opera, Shakespeare, banjo, acrobatics and gymnastics, and lectures by celebrities and intellectuals of every scale.

A bill usually began with a minor act (e.g., acrobats, trick bicyclists), allowing late arriving audience members to find their 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 considered admirable enough 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 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 dissasociate themselves with images of the earlier rowdy, working class variety halls. Second, the term, redolent of European sophistication, helped 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.

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 (e.g., the rise of the middle class) prior to its own maturation. 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 upon which variety performer and theatre owner Tony Pastor, hard in the midst of his seemingly interminable 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

"Hurly-Burly Extravaganza and Refined Vaudeville"

Vaudeville's popularity grew in step with the rise of industry and the growth of North American cities during this period, and declined as its audience more heavily patronized 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 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 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 that could be consumed by men, women and children, giving offense to no party. Those acts who violated various dicta supporting 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 presumed respectability had demanded the rather Orwellian style of the vaudeville house manager in the first place.)

The most striking examples of Gilded Age theatre architecture invariably rose from the largess of big time vaudeville magnates, insistent that these houses of juggling dogs and yodelers embody the very pinnacle of high class. As well, 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 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.

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). By the late 1920s, even the hardiest within vaudeville understood the form to be in financial and popular decline; the precient 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 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 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 good-hearted conversations about its resurrection were had throughout the 1930s, the demise of the supporting apparatus of the circuits and the inescapably higher cost of live performance made any resurrection attempts of vaudeville impossible.

After the fall

File:Character comedian charles e. grapewin.gif
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.

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, reflections 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".

Noted vaudeville performers

See also

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