Theater: Vaudeville

THEATER: VAUDEVILLE

The Heyday of Vaudeville

The first two decades of the twentieth century were the heyday of vaudeville, a theatrical form that included performances such as music, dance, light drama, comedy, juggling, magic acts, animal acts. Vaudeville theaters featured several performances a day: in big-time vaudeville performers were expected to present their acts only twice a day, but small-time theaters offered as many as six shows a day. Some performers were lucky enough to get long-term employment in the same theater, but most spent considerable time touring, visiting the thousands of vaudeville theaters in towns all across the country.

The Theaters

In addition to Keith-Albee and the Shuberts, new powers in vaudeville during the 1910s included Marcus Loew and William Fox, whose theaters, like many vaudeville houses of the day, showcased the new feature-length movies as well as live acts. Though some major American vaudeville theaters were outside New York City—such as the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco and the American Music Hall in Chicago—Manhattan was home to the greatest number, including Koster and Bial's, Proctor's, Keith's, and Tony Pastor's. The five-thousand-seat Hippodrome in New York City, built in 1905 for $2 million, was the only truly spectacular theater in Manhattan at the start of the 1910s, but New York soon had other ornate new theaters, including the Palace, which opened in 1913, and the Strand, completed in 1914. The Palace became the most prestigious vaudeville theater. Playing the Palace was proof of making it big.

The Performers

Only a few dozen of the as many as ten thousand vaudeville acts became nationally famous. Eva Tanguay's suggestive performances in white tights (especially her Salome dance and her song "I Don't Care") earned her $10,000 a year. Other performers used vaudeville—an entertainment form that not only tolerated but encouraged novelty—as a place to try out their acts and get noticed by play and movie producers. Among them were Charlie Chaplin; Jack Haley, who before becoming a popular movie actor played the Palace as half of a song-and-dance comedy team with Charley Crafts; Milton Berle, who was part of a child act; Jack Benny, who as a teenager played the violin with a piano-playing partner named Woods; comedian George Burns; Walter Huston, who had a comedy act with his second wife, Bayonne Whipple; Jimmy Cagney, who at age fourteen was hired as a member of a chorus line of boys dressed as girls; and five teenage brothers named Marks, who soon became the Marx Brothers.

Burlesque

Closely related to vaudeville was burlesque, a theatrical form that included comedy acts as well as scantily clad female dancers. Comedians who got their start in burlesque include W. C. Fields (with a juggling act), Will Rogers (with a rope-twirling act), Ed Wynn, Joe E. Brown, Eddie Cantor, Buster Keaton, Al Jolson, Jimmy Durante, and Bert Lahr. Thanks to talents such as these, and the various charms of the featured women dancers (who in that era sang racy songs but did not strip), the mid 1910s were the high point for ticket sales at burlesque theaters. According to the theater trade publication Variety, attendance at burlesque theaters increased by nearly 400 percent between 1900 and 1916. Some shows were "cleaner" than others, and a few made a somewhat successful effort to attract female audience members, especially during the war. One of the most "upscale" burlesque houses, the Columbia Theatre in New York City, reserved its front row for politicians and other well-connected patrons, who paid $1.50 a seat—a higher ticket price than at most big-time vaudeville theaters.

OPENING NIGHT AT THE
STRAND, 1914

Dsigned and managed by Samuel F. "Roxy" Rothapfel, the Strand Theater in New York City was the grandest of the many fancy vaudeville theaters built during the 1910s to showcase feature films. On its opening night, 1 April 1914, patrons were greeted by uniformed ushers who escorted them through the ornate lobby to cushioned seats inside the theater, which was built to resemble a temple and topped by a lighted dome. The opening-night audience saw quite a show—not just a movie but a wide variety of entertainment typical of the upscale vaudeville theaters of the day. After playing the national anthem, the orchestra performed Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody NO. 2, Next the audience enjoyed a newsreel, a travel-documentary film, the performance of a quartet from the Verdi opera Rigoletto, and a Keystone Comedy film. Then came the main event: a nine-reel movie, The Spoilers. The next morning a New York Times critic wrote that the experience "was very much like going to a Presidential reception, a first night at the opera or the opening of the horse show."

Source:

Robert C. Allen, Vaudeville and Film 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction (New York: Arno, 1980).

Race and Ethnicity in the Spotlight

Of all the forms of popular entertainment in the 1910s, vaudeville and burlesque were probably the most tolerant of ethnic diversity. Many shows included African Americans and ethnic performers alongside white, native-born performers. While some ethnic theaters thrived apart from the vaudeville circuit, ethnic humor—especially Irish and Yiddish—was a regular feature in burlesque; Fanny Brice took her Yiddish musical-comedy act from burlesque to the Ziegfeld Follies. African Americans not only played but succeeded in vaudeville: comedian Bert Williams moved to the Ziegfeld Follies, while the song-and-dance team Buck and Bubbles (Ford Lee Washington and John Sublett) played the Palace. All three men, however, were expected to perform wearing burnt-cork black-face makeup—so that audience members, at least theoretically, would not be able to tell that they were really black. In addition to these performers who desegregated mainstream vaudeville stages, hundreds of others—including singers Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters—performed on the Negro Vaudeville Circuit, with stops that included the Booker T. Washington Theater in Saint Louis and the Lincoln Theater in Harlem, where they were seen by mixed-race audiences.

Sources:

Robert C. Alien, Vaudeville and Film 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction (New York: Arno, 1980);

Bill Smith, The Vaudevillians (New York: Macmillan, 1976);

Irving Zeidman, The American Burlesque Show (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967).