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Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a genre of variety show|variety entertainment prevalent on the theatre|stage in the United States and Canada, from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. It developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrel show|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, animal training|trained animals, Magician (illusion)|magicians, female and male impersonators, acrobats, one-act Play (theatre)|plays or scenes from plays, Sportsperson|athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and short film|movies.

Etymology

The origin of the Terminology|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 language|French ''Vau de Vire River|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."F. Cullen, F. Hackman, D. McNeilly, "Vaudeville History," in ''Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America'', xi-xxxii (London: Routledge, 2007). 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 Upper Manhattan|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

References

External links

- 1913 Book: How to Enter Vaudeville
- Vaudeville Ventriloquists
- Legends of Vaudeville
- American Vaudeville Museum
- Virtual Vaudeville
- Glossary of Vaudeville Slang
- Listen to the Song "Will It Play In Peoria"
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – J. Willis Sayre Photographs
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – Prior and Norris Troupe Photographs
- University of Washington libraries Digital Collections - 19th Century Actors Photogaphs Category:Vaudeville|* Category:French words and phrases Category:American culture Category:Comedy Category:Entertainment in the United States Category:Theatrical genres Category:Variety entertainment simple:Vaudeville

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