Vaudeville

Vaudeville and the 20s

 Constance Semponis

Imagine this: You’ve just finished a physically exhausting performance (maybe as an acrobat on roller skates or an escape artist like Harry Houdini) and can’t wait to have some rest. You go to the nearest speakeasy and buy a drink, of which you think your manager paid for only to later find out that the money was coming out of your salary the entire time. You already make such a slim amount! Then you saunter up to the boarding house you’re staying at which is infested with all kinds of vermin, to take a shower (no soap because their are no maids to refill products and the owner of the boarding house is looking for some herself), only to find two strangers performing an act in your room that has nothing to do with Vaudeville. So now not only do you have to find somewhere else to sleep, eat, and relax but you also don’t have your belongings because someone stole your suitcase! To top it off, you perform tomorrow.

Such was the life of the traveling Vaudevillian. “Quite a number of the managers operated boarding houses in conjunction with their theatres. These varied from fair to frightful, but the whole business was so take-it-or-leave-it that nobody cared.” (Gilbert, 18)

Vaudeville itself was a reaction to the very scandalous Burlesque, so when it started it still had remnants of it’s parent performance. “The vaudeville we of this generation knew was sired by Tony Pastor who first played to a “double audience” (men and women) when he opened his Fourteenth Street house in Tammany Hall, NY, October 24, 1881. It was the first “clean” vaudeville show in America and to its bill, as Fred Stone used to say, a child could take his parents.” (Gilbert ,8) Some of the early shows consisted of very sexual themes (according to Gilbert, one show had men follow a woman behind a haystack, later coming out from behind it with an expression of what had just happened). But the audience was changing, and thanks to Pastor’s “clean” approach, he was able to give Vaudeville a whole new meaning. 

Although Pastor was an important aspect to Vaudeville, the man credited as being the “Father of American Vaudeville” is none other than Benjamin Franklin Keith. “Keith's triumph as a showman lay chiefly in his ability to bridge the gulf between notions of "high" and "low" entertainments that grew increasingly wider in the years following the Civil War. He reinforced his theatres' image of gentility by including acts from the "legitimate" stage, drawing an audience previously unavailable to variety amusements. Simultaneously, he maintained a number of acts whose forms would have been familiar to fans of the earlier variety stage without alienating either constituency. As his partner Edward F. Albee would later write, the programs at Keith's theatres ensured "there is something for everybody." (Trachtenberg)

Of course, the 1920s were anything but clean. Alcohol, sex, and jazz music were just some of the many popular pass times. Speakeasies were popping up all over the place and owned by some of the wildest beings one can imagine. One such person was Texas Guinan, “a boisterous blonde who presided over a whole series of rowdy places (when one was shut down, she simply moved to another). She plied her customers -- whom she wowed with a sassy “Hello, sucker!” (114, The Editors of Time-Life Books). But interestingly enough, past all the boisterousness, these owners were brilliant business people. Texas herself was rumored to have never touched alcohol while working and made up to $700,000 in only ten months (and that’s back in the 20s!).

This period also made another form of entertainment popular, that being the movies. Now major studios were contracting the most popular Vaudeville performers, including William Frawley (although his fame would come later in television as Fred Mertz in ‘I Love Lucy’) and Buster Keaton, who grew up on the Vaudeville stage. "My old man was an eccentric comic and as soon as I could take care of myself at all on my feet, he had slapshoes on me and big baggy pants. And he'd just start doing gags with me and especially kickin' me clean across the stage or taking me by the back of the neck and throwing me. By the time I got up to around seven or eight years old, we were called 'The Roughest Act That Was Ever in the History of the Stage." (Keaton, The International Buster Keaton Society) But today we call that “child abuse”.

Sadly, Hollywood would gain the Vaudeville audience in the 20s and the live entertainment would dwindle. Vaudeville theaters would become movie theaters and the stars would be movie stars. Either way, it never lost it’s legacy and is still known as the longest lasting form of American Entertainment.

References:

www.busterkeaton.com; The International Buster Keaton Society

xroads.virginia.edu: The Incorporation of America; Alan Trachtenberg.

American Vaudeville: It’s Life and Times; Douglas Gilbert

The Jazz Age - The 20s; The Editors of Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia.