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Brief History Of Vaudeville
I. The Dumb Act (In Which Your Humble Author Provides An Overview Of Early Vaudeville) In the vaudeville heyday, what we think of as the "curtain raiser" was often called the "dumb act" because it featured dancers, mimes, or acrobats who did not speak. This allowed a noisy entering audience to seat themselves without obscuring any dialogue on stage. And so, if you have made yourself comfortable and are prepared to continue reading, let the curtain raiser commence. There is no exact date about which one can say "That’s the day American vaudeville began," but one contender for such a claim might be October 24, 1881, the day that Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theatre opened its doors to New York audiences. Pastor was determined to provide wholesome family-style entertainment within the sphere of variety shows, which up until that point had appealed to an all-male audience by offering a coarse bill of dancers and bawdy humor. Burlesque, honky-tonk, and minstrel shows were all genres of theatre that rose in popularity throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the idea that there could be a bill of many diverse acts – all of them suitable for family entertainment – was a new one. After the 14th Street Theatre proved a success, other producers followed, notably B. F. Keith and Edward Albee. In 1894, the pair opened the Boston Colonial Theatre, billed as "the first all-vaudeville" house. In 1896, F. F. Proctor introduced the innovative "continuous show." From 9:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night, a continuing bill of variety acts ensured that at any time during the day, a patron could come in and see some good clean American theatre. In fact, "clean" was a big selling point; Keith and Albee instituted a series of fines for any comedians or acts who used "blue" material. Clean, however, is in the eye of the beholder. Despite being considered "inoffensive" by its creators, much of vaudeville’s humor derived from racial stereotypes that hardly seem benign to modern audiences. Sketches featuring the stock characters of the greedy Jew, the lazy Black, the stupid Pole, and so on, seem horrifyingly offensive today. |
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