Step Right Up Ladies and Gentlemen...
It developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary burlesque. Vaudeville became one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America defining an entertainment era. Each evening's bill of performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts.
Types of acts included (among others) musicians (both classical and popular), dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, female and male impersonators, acrobats, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and short movies.
Table of Contents
History
Etymology
The origin of the term is obscure, but is often explained as being derived from the expression "voix de ville", or "voice of the city". Another plausible etymology finds origins in the French Vau de Vire, a valley in Normandy noted for its style of satirical songs with topical themes.Problematically, the term "vaudeville," itself, referring specifically to North American variety entertainment, came into common usage after 1871 with the formation of "Sargent's Great Vaudeville Company" of Louisville, Kentucky, and had little if anything to do with the "vaudeville" of the French theatre. Variety showman, M.B. Leavitt claimed the word originated from the French "vaux de ville" ("worth of the city, or worthy of the city's patronage"), but in all likelihood, as Albert McLean suggests, the name was merely selected "for its vagueness, its faint, but harmless exoticism, and perhaps its connotation of gentility." Leavitt's and Sargent's shows differed little from the coarser material presented in earlier itinerant entertainments, although their use of the term to provide a veneer of respectability points to an early effort to cater variety amusements to the growing middle class.
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, "variety," 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.
Beginnings
A descendant of variety, (c. 1860s-1881), 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. This more genteel form was known as "Polite Vaudeville."In the years before the Civil war, entertainment existed on a different scale. Certainly, variety theatre existed before 1860. Europeans enjoyed types of variety performances years before anyone even had conceived of the United States. On American soil, as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century, theatre goers could enjoy a performance of Shakespeare, acrobats, singers, presentations of dance, and comedy all in the same evening. As the years progressed, seekers of diversified amusements found an increasing number to choose from.
A handful of circuses regularly toured the country, dime-museums appealed to the curious, amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls often featured "cleaner" presentations of variety entertainment, while saloons, music-halls, and burlesque houses catered to those with a taste for the risqué. In the 1840s, minstrel shows, another type of variety performance, and "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture," grew to enormous popularity and formed as Nick Tosches writes, "the heart of nineteenth-century show business." Medicine shows traveled the countryside offering programs of comedy, music, jugglers and other novelties along with their tonics, salves, and miracle elixirs, while Wild West Shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing frontier complete with trick riding, music, and drama. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America's growing urban hubs.
In the early 1880s, impresario Tony Pastor, a former ringmaster with the circus turned theatre manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in several of his New York City theatres. The usual date given for the "birth" of vaudeville is 24 October 1881, when Pastor famously staged the first bill of self-proclaimed "clean" vaudeville in New York City. Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown, Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated questionable material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.
Popularity
B.F. Keith took the next step starting in Boston, where he built an empire of theatres and brought vaudeville to the people of the United States as well as Canada. Later, E.F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, managed the chain to its greatest success. Circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudeville's greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength, enabling 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.Albee also 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 performances or with the canceling of their contracts. In spite of such threats, performers routinely flouted this censorship, often to the delight of the very audience members whose sensibilities were supposedly endangered.
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 played across multiple strata of economic class and auditorium size. The three most common levels were the "small time" (lower paying contracts for more frequent performances in rougher, often converted theatres), the "medium time" (moderate wages for two performances each day in purpose-built theatres) and the "big time" (possible remuneration of several thousand dollars per week in large, urban theatres largely patronized by the middle and upper-middle classes). As performers rose in renown and established regional and national followings, they worked their way into the less arduous working conditions and better pay of the big time. The capitol of the big time was New York City's Palace Theater (or just "The Palace" in the slang of vaudevillians), built by Martin Beck in 1913 and operated by Keith. Featuring a bill stocked with inventive novelty acts, national celebrities, and acknowledged masters of vaudeville performance (e.g., comedian and trick roper Will Rogers), the Palace provided what many vaudevillians would considered the apotheoses of already remarkable careers.
While the neighborhood character of vaudeville attendance had always promoted a tendency to tailor fare for specific audiences, mature vaudeville grew to feature houses and circuits specifically aimed at certain demographic groups. African American patrons, often segregated into the rear of the second gallery in white-oriented theatres, had their own smaller circuits, as did speakers of Italian and Yiddish. (For a brief discussion of Black vaudeville, see Theater Owners Booking Association.) White-oriented regional circuits, such as New England's "Peanut Circuit," also provided essential training grounds for new artists while allowing established acts to experiment with and polish new material. At its height, vaudeville was rivaled only by churches and public schools among the nation's premiere public gathering places.
Decline
The shift of New York City's Palace Theatre, vaudeville's epicenter, to an exclusively cinema presentation on 16 November 1932 is often considered the death knell of vaudeville. Yet 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.There was no abrupt end to vaudeville, though the form was clearly staggering by the late 1920s.
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. Cinema was first regularly commercially presented in the United States in vaudeville halls; the first public showing of movies projected on a screen took place at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in 1896. Lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions, many early film and old time radio performers, such as W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Edgar Bergen, and Jack Benny, used the prominence they first gained in live variety performance to vault into new media. (In so doing, such performers often exhausted in a few moments of screen time the novelty of an act that might have kept them on tour for several years.) Other vaudevillians who entered in vaudeville's decline, including The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Kate Smith, Bob Hope, Judy Garland, and Rose Marie, used vaudeville only as a launching pad for later careers, leaving live performance before they had ever risen to the meteoric height of national celebrity that had formerly sustained vaudeville's publicity-driven star culture.
By the late 1920s, almost no vaudeville bill failed to include a healthy selection of cinema. Earlier in the century, many vaudevillians, cognizant of the threat represented by cinema, held out hope that the silent nature of the "flickering shadow sweethearts" would preclude their usurpation of the paramount place in the public's affection. With the introduction of talking pictures in 1926, however, the burgeoning film studios removed what had remained, for many, the chief point in favor of live theatrical performance: spoken dialogue.
Theatre owners discovered that rental costs of films--when held against the price of performers, newly unionized stagehands, booking fees, lighting, orchestra, etc.--vastly increased their profits. Performers tried hanging on for a time in combination shows (often referred to as "vaudefilm") in which, in an inverse of earlier vaudeville, live performances accompanied a cinema-centric performance.
Inevitably, managers further trimmed costs by eliminating more of these comparatively costly live performances. Vaudeville also suffered in the rise of broadcast radio following the greater availability of inexpensive receiver sets later in the decade. Even the hardiest within the vaudeville industry realized the form was in decline; the perceptive understood the condition to be terminal.
The 1930s, with standardized film distribution and talking pictures, only confirmed the end of vaudeville. By 1930, the vast majority of formerly live 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 Great Depression to economize.
Some in the industry blamed cinema's drain of talent from the vaudeville circuits for the medium's demise. Others argued that vaudeville had allowed its performances to become too familiar to its famously loyal, now seemingly fickle audiences.
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.
The Sounds of Vaudeville
SPOTLIGHT
Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937 (Digipak with 72-page booklet)
Amazon Price: $24.99 (as of 12/22/2009)
Used Price: $21.99
Top 10 Reissue of the Year - MOJO Jan 2006
Rare tracks from the heyday of the snake oil vendors. Weird folk and blackface balladry for Harry Smith Anthology addict.
Good For What Ails You is just amazing - expansive, odd, moving, confusing, glorious.
~Greil Marcus - author The Old, Weird America Oct 2005
Avg. Customer Rating: 
The Performers
The Early Years, 1901-1909
Amazon Price: $18.99 (as of 12/22/2009)
Used Price: $41.52
Volume 1 in "The Complete Bert Williams" series, "The Early Years, 1901-1909," compiles 31 of the inimitable comedian's recordings dating back as far as his landmark 1901 sessions, through to his 1906 sessions at which Williams waxed several of his trademark songs. It features the legendary recordings of Williams and Walker and two solos by Walker. The CD is accompanied by a stunningly beautiful 32-page full-color deluxe booklet with extensive notes on Bert Williams' early life and stage career up to 1909, extremely rare graphics, and an essay from 1906 on African Americans in the theatre by Williams' partner, George Walker.
Reader Poll
Further Reading
SPOTLIGHT
Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America, 2 volumes
Amazon Price: $284.57 (as of 12/22/2009)
Whether you start from the beginning and read it straight through, or use to look up an artist you found on a recording, you'll find this book a great resource. It's a tribute to the hard work and passion of the author. Highly recommended!
- Steve Ramm, Anything Phonographic, In The Groove magazine
SPOTLIGHT
New York City Vaudeville (NY) (Images of America)
Amazon Price: $13.59 (as of 12/22/2009)
Used Price: $12.17
New York City Vaudeville provides a unique pictorial record of America's preeminent entertainment medium in the late 1800s through the early 1930s. New York's Palace Theatre served as the flagship for vaudeville, on which stage every vaudevillian aspired to perform. New York City Vaudeville features photographs of some of the greatest names from the Palace Theatre, including Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Anna Held, the Marx Brothers, and Eva Tanguay, as well as legendary African American performers such as Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters, and Bert Williams. Through the photographs and the capsule biographies, the reader is transported back to a time when vaudeville was the people's entertainment, with a new bill of fare each week and an ever-changing number of performers with ever-changing styles of presentation.
SPOTLIGHT
Women Vaudeville Stars: Eighty Biographical Profiles
Amazon Price: $75.00 (as of 12/22/2009)
Used Price: $87.32
Avg. Customer Rating: 
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Links
- Vaudeville!
- Vaudeville! History, Development, and Evolution of Vaudeville Stage from it's roots in variety theater and shows with Vaudeville movies, vaudeville MP3's, ...
- Vaudeville, A History
- American Vaudeville, more so than any other mass entertainment, grew out of the culture of incorporation that defined American life after the Civil War. ...
- American Masters . Vaudeville | PBS
- Vaudeville was made of comedians, singers, plate-spinners, ventriloquists, dancers, musicians, acrobats, animal trainers, and anyone who could keep an ...
- Vaudeville
- History of Vaudeville. ... Vaudeville also tried to bridge a social gap that had divided American audiences ever since the upper and lower classes clashed ...
- Virtual Vaudeville - A Live Performance Simulation System
- Virtual Vaudeville transports you back to the nineteenth century on your PC. Watch a 3D simulation of a complete act by legendary vaudeville comedian Frank ...
- Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920
- Vaudeville and popular entertainment from 1870-1920. Site from the Library of Congress.
- American Vaudeville Museum
- American Vaudeville Museum is dedicated to the preservation of vaudeville, its performers and legacy. AVM is a non-profit that publishes profiles of ...
- Vaudeville: Bob Hope and American Variety (Library of Congress)
- Bob Hope and American Variety: Vaudeville. Bob Hope's first tours in vaudeville were as half of a two-man dancing team. The act appeared in "small time" ...
- Vaudeville and Ragtime Show - Featuring early ragtime and ...
- Site recreates a vaudeville show with authentic audio and video clips of actual Vaudeville performers.
- The Blues, Black Vaudeville, and the Silver Screen, 1912-1930s ...
- Aug 31, 2005 ... The bulk of these selected records feature the period between 1920 and 1929, and describe the sporting events, vaudeville, and films brought ...
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