Vaudeville in America. In this country the term “vaudeville” has almost never had the same connotation as it had in the original French. Instead, it was borrowed rather late to indicate an entertainment consisting of short, variegated acts, some musical, some comic, all offered on the same bill. Small olios (another term for this sort of entertainment) appeared early in American stage history, usually as divertissements on the extended bills offered in the late 18th and the first half of the 19th century even in the best legitimate theatres. Nonetheless, most see the real seeds of modern vaudeville in the “free concert saloons,” “free‐and‐easies,” and Western “honky‐tonks” that sprang up in the years just before the Civil War. To lure customers (almost exclusively male, except for prostitutes), these establishments provided a series of acts whose tilt, both in its comedy and lyrics and in the presentation of its occasional dancing, was rough and often salacious. In the 1870s and 1880s attempts were made to clean up the nature of the bills so as to attract a more widespread, higher class audience. Although several impresarios apparently began to incorporate such changes at about the same time, the most famous was Tony Pastor, who was hailed as the leader in the field and whose vaudeville house in New York was considered to offer the pinnacle in such entertainment. Like others, he banned the sale of intoxicating drinks, discouraged rowdiness, and removed any performer whose act was in any way offensive. About the same time, the term “vaudeville” began replacing the term “variety,” which had been accepted for several decades. (A similar transition was occurring concurrently in the British equivalent, the music hall.) The heyday of American vaudeville was the first quarter of the 20th century. The huge national circuit established by B. F. Keith and E. F. Albee was paramount in the field. Keith, like Pastor before him, carefully guarded the morals of his patrons, while his partner Albee established an often vicious near monopoly that frequently played havoc with competition and imposed salary and other dictates on performers. Other notable managers included Alexander Pantages, S. Z. Poli, F. F. Proctor, and Martin Beck. Beck built the Palace Theatre in New York, which quickly became two‐a‐day's most prestigious auditorium. Historian Don B. Wilmeth has noted that “at its height, ten people attended a vaudeville show to every one who patronized other forms of entertainment; as many as ten to twenty thousand vaudeville acts were competing for bookings.” For many people, vaudeville indicated modes of dress and established certain canons of behavior. Thus, while managers insisted on removing offensive acts, certain religious and racial stereotypes were allowed to persist since they were not perceived as truly offensive. Yet for all its tremendous popularity and despite the enormous salaries paid headliners, vaudeville was never to have quite the cachet that attached to the legitimate stage. As a result, many performers used variety merely as a stepping stone. Lillian Russell and Harrigan and Hart were among the earliest to leave the field to find even greater glory in the theatre. The loose structure of many musical comedies of the period allowed artists who were essentially vaudevillians to find occasional homes there. May Irwin, Marie Cahill, Blanche Ring, and, to a lesser extent, Eva Tanguay were all vaudeville headliners who found a welcome in book musicals. George M. Cohan moved from vaudeville to exceptional success on Broadway. The growth of the even more loosely structured revue proved a further lure. But traffic was not all one way. With the coming of his children, a leading musical comedy star, Eddie Foy, left book shows to create one of the greatest acts in two‐a‐day, Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys. Other legitimate stars used vaudeville to fill in between shows, while the genre afforded a haven for many fading stars who found the road receptive and loyal after more fickle Broadway audiences had lost interest in them. A few notable vaudevillians, such as Harry Lauder, never ventured afield. The coming of radio and then sound films, both major family entertainments, precipitated the demise of two‐a‐day. Most historians generally mark the showing of feature films at the Palace in 1932 as the end of traditional vaudeville, although it persisted, especially as Tab Shows were presented along with feature films throughout the 1930s in some large cities. Attempts to revive big‐time vaudeville at the Palace in the 1950s failed.

Vaudeville, the most popular form of American theatrical entertainment between 1900 and 1920.Typically a series of variety acts ranging from trained animals, sports heroes, and exotic dancers to magicians, blackface comics, and shortened versions of full dramas, vaudeville played before elite and poor spectators, at sumptuous and austere theaters, in small towns and major cities. Its entertainments helped “Americanize” immigrant populations, instructed rural folks in city ways, and taught middle‐class consumers the latest fashions in clothes, humor, and songs. A significant commercial force in the modernization of American culture, vaudeville also perpetuated and intensified racist practices and beliefs.

Despite its modernizing influence, vaudeville began in an attempt to capture a middle‐class Victorian audience for variety theater in the 1870s and '80s. For respectable Victorians after 1870, variety shows—typically presented in “concert saloons” and featuring dancing girls for working‐class spectators—were taboo. To attract female shoppers and office workers, the variety impresario and songwriter Tony Pastor offered family entertainment and banned alcohol and tobacco from his New York theater in the 1880s. The businessmen B.F. Keith and Edward F. Albee improved on Pastor's formula by running their shows continuously from midmorning until midnight. By 1900, these two moguls had monopolized vaudeville in the East through their theater ownership (more than four hundred by 1920) and booking practices. In the West, the Orpheum circuit cooperated with the Keith‐Albee monopoly to control “Big Time” vaudeville nationally. Similar booking circuits dominated “Small Time” vaudeville, which played at lower prices in hundreds of theaters to mostly working‐class spectators.

But while Keith and Albee advertised the moral purity of their shows, they and other vaudeville promoters appealed to their spectators' desire for sensual and irreverent entertainment that undercut Victorian sentimentality and respectability. The vaudeville stage featured ragtime, slapstick comedy, suggestive dancing, and comic and acrobatic routines that challenged conventional gender roles. It also manufactured ethnic stereotypes—“the Mick” (Irish), “the Dutch” (German), and “the Heb” (Jewish) among them—that softened as these immigrant groups gained in social status and economic success. By 1920, Big Time Vaudeville had boosted hundreds of formerly working‐class performers, including Eva Tanguay, W.C. Fields, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, and Will Rogers, to wealth and stardom. Like the minstrel show before it, however, vaudeville constructed “whiteness” so as to degrade African Americans. Blacks were segregated in the worst seats (if admitted at all) and denigrated on stage as knife‐wielding or watermelon‐eating “coons.” The African American comic Bert Williams, who had to “black up” to portray a convincing Negro for white audiences, recognized that his comic effects depended on his character's humiliation.

In competition with musical comedy, burlesque houses, nightclubs, and especially the movies, vaudeville declined in the 1920s. By mid‐decade, nearly all vaudeville theaters were “combination” houses, interspersing films with live entertainment. The 1932 closing of The Palace, the New York hub of the Keith‐Albee empire, marked the symbolic end of American vaudeville. As many big time performers shifted to film and radio in the 1930s, small time vaudeville struggled on through the decade before it, too, faded away.
See also Gilded Age; Immigration; Leisure; Minstrelsy; Music: Popular Music; Musical Theater; Popular Culture; Progressive Era; Race and Ethnicity; Racism; Twenties, The; Urbanization; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

Charles W. Stein, ed., American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries, 1984.
Robert W. Snyder , The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, 1989.

Bruce McConachie

VAUDEVILLE

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.

MinaCarson

See alsoBurlesque .

Vaudeville Theatre, London, in the Strand. Built in 1870 for David James (1839–93) and two other actors, it held over 1,000, opening with Andrew Halliday's comedy For Love or Money. It had its first success in 1871 with Albery's Two Roses, which introduced Henry Irving to London audiences, and in 1875 H. J. Byron's Our Boys, in which James appeared, began a four-year run. In 1884 the theatre scored another success with Henry Arthur Jones's Saints and Sinners. In 1891 it reopened after reconstruction, its seating capacity reduced to 740 on four tiers, with Jerome K. Jerome's comedy Woodbarrow Farm, and later in the year came the first performances in England (at matinées only) of Ibsen's Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler, both with Elizabeth Robins. The Gatti brothers bought the theatre in 1892 and from 1900 to 1906 Seymour Hicks and his wife Ellaline Terriss appeared in a series of long runs under the direction of Charles Frohman, Hicks's popular Christmas entertainment Blue-bell in Fairyland being first seen in 1901. Among other successes were Barrie's Quality Street (1902) and several musical comedies including The Belle of Mayfair (1906). Charles Hawtrey then appeared in a series of comedies, and in 1915 the theatre became the home of Charlot's revues, which continued until 1925, when the theatre again closed for rebuilding, though retaining its original façade. It reopened in 1926, continuing mainly with revues until 1937, its seating capacity having been reduced to 659 on three tiers. In 1938 Robert Morley's Goodness, How Sad! was a hit. Wartime productions included Esther McCracken's No Medals (1944), which ran for two years. In 1947 William Douglas Home enjoyed two good runs with Now Barabbas … and The Chiltern Hundreds, the latter with A. E. Matthews. The 1950s were dominated by the record-breaking musical by Dorothy Reynolds and Julian Slade, Salad Days, which ran from 1954 to 1960. Ronald Millar's The Bride Comes Back (1960), Wesker's Chips with Everything (1962), and Joyce Rayburn's The Man Most Likely to … (1968) also did well. In 1970 the theatre changed hands and was extensively refurbished, its first outstanding success after reopening being the farce Move Over, Mrs Markham by John Chapman and Ray Cooney. In 1977 Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced began a long run, and notable later productions were Frayn's Benefactors (1984) and Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind (1986) and Henceforward … (1988).

vaudeville , originally a light song, derived from the drinking and love songs formerly attributed to Olivier Basselin and called Vau, or Vaux, de Vire. Similar to the English music hall , American vaudeville was a live entertainment consisting of unrelated songs, dances, acrobatic and magic acts, and humorous skits and sketches by a variety of performers and acts, each on stage for about five minutes. From humble origins in barrooms and "museums," vaudeville became the dominant attraction in American popular entertainment, playing in hundreds of theaters throughout the United States. It flourished from 1881, when Tony Pastor gave the first "big time" vaudeville show in New York City, until 1932, when its greatest center, New York's Palace Theatre, abandoned live shows and became a movie theater. Such headliners as George M. Cohan , Harry Houdini , Eva Tanguay, W. C. Fields , Fay Templeton, Will Rogers , Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor , Jimmy Durante, Irene Franklin, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope , Jack Benny , Edgar Bergen, and the Marx Brothers began their careers playing the vaudeville circuits. Beginning in the 1890s there also was an invigorating influx of performers from England and France who were a major influence on the growing sophistication and high quality of vaudeville. The popularity of radio and motion pictures caused vaudeville's decline, and many established performers moved into the new media. Television, however, brought about a revival of vaudeville-style revues.

Bibliography: See C. W. Stein, ed., American Vaudeville As Seen by Its Contemporaries (1984); S. Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams in American Vaudeville, 1865-1932 (1984); A. Slide, ed., Selected Vaudeville Criticism (1988); Trav S. D., No Applause—Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous (2005).

VAUDEVILLE

Vaudeville, a light, comical theatrical entertainment, flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. Its success, like that of organized baseball, was caused by the greater amounts of leisure time and money that industrialization afforded people. The word vaudeville is derived from an old French term for a satirical song, vaudevire, which is a reference to the Vire valley of France, where the songs originated. In the United States vaudeville acts performed variety shows, using music, comedy, dance, acrobatics, magic, puppets, and even trained animals. This form of stage entertainment was based on popular acts that could be seen in British music halls and bar rooms during the nineteenth century.

Vaudeville had made its way to the United States in the 1870s, when acts were performed in theaters in New York, Chicago, and other cities. Two early entrepreneurs in the entertainment form were American theater managers Benjamin Keith (1846–1914) and Edward Albee (1857–1930), who opened the Bijou Theatre in Boston in 1885. Eventually they operated almost four hundred theaters, including New York City's Palace Theater, the gem in the Keith-Albee crown. Troupes traveled the circuit of nearly one thousand theaters around the country. As many as two million U.S. citizens a day flocked to the shows to see headliners such as comedians Eddie Cantor (1892–1964) and W.C. Fields (1880–1946), singer Eva Tanguay (1878–1947), and French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). Programs combined a variety of music, theater, and comedy to appeal to a wide audience. Scriptwriters attracted immigrant audiences by using ethnic humor, exaggerating dialects, and joking about the difficulties of daily immigrant life in the United States.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the country. In the 1930s, just as New York opened the doors of its famous Radio City Music Hall, which was intended to be a theater for vaudeville, the entertainment form began a quick decline. Motion pictures, radio, and, later, television took its place; numerous vaudeville performers parlayed their success into these new media. Among those entertainers who had their origins in vaudeville acts were Rudolph Valentino, Cary Grant, Mae West, Jack Benny, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Will Rogers, and Al Jolsen.

See also: Amusement Parks, Baseball

during the first two decades of the twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the country.

vaudeville (Fr., either from vaux de vire or voix de ville).
1. In late 16th cent., song with amorous words as sung in the valleys (vaux) near Vire or catches sung in the streets of towns.

2.   In 18th cent., the term came to mean a song with different verses sung in turn by different singers, and this meaning was incorporated into operatic terminology, e.g. a ‘vaudeville finale’, as in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

3.   In 19th cent., meant short comedies interspersed with popular songs, as in Fr. revues.

4.   In late 19th and 20th cents., a synonym for a variety show or mus.-hall, particularly in USA.

vaude·ville / ˈvôd(ə)ˌvil; -vəl/ • n. a type of entertainment popular chiefly in the U.S. in the early 20th century, featuring a mixture of specialty acts such as burlesque comedy and song and dance. ∎  a stage play on a trivial theme with interspersed songs. ∎ archaic a satirical or topical song with a refrain. DERIVATIVES: vaude·vil·lian / ˌvôd(ə)ˈvilyən; -ˈvilēən/ adj. & n.

vaudeville light popular song XVIII; light stage performance with songs XIX. — F. vaudeville †typical song or play, theatrical piece with rhymes, alt. of vaudevire, f. Vau de Vire ‘valley of Vire’, name of a region of Calvados, Normandy, the songs of which had a vogue in XV.

vaudeville US equivalent of the British music hall variety entertainment. Its rise and fall followed the same pattern as its European counterpart, having its heyday in the late 19th century and eventually succumbing to the cinema's popularity.

vaudeville, a light popular song or a stage performance of a light and amusing character interspersed with songs, from vau de vire, in full chanson du Vau de Vire, a song of the Valley of the Vire (in Calvados, Normandy).

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