Vaudeville

By: Bruce McConachie

Source:

 The Oxford Companion to United States History

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.

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