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Vaudeville
3 articles on Vaudeville
Vaudeville, African Americans In
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1838 Includes: BibliographyA distinctly American form of entertainment, vaudeville had its origins in several sources. The most direct progenitor was the variety show performed in saloon music halls involving singers, dance acts, and comedy sketches. The saloon theaters were usually rowdy and all-male; they featured audience interaction with hissing, stamping of feet, and shouting. A new generation of promoters cleaned up the variety act to sell it to a middle-class audience by the early 1880s. Tony Pastor's New Fourteenth Street Theater, which opened in New York City in 1881, was an early attempt to take the variety acts out of concert saloons and into a more respectable middle-class environment. It was, however, Benjamin Franklin Keithof Boston who revolutionized vaudeville with family-oriented content that consisted of variety shows minus the ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 670the 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 ...
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Source: International Encyclopedia of Dance
[This entry is limited to discussion of vaudeville in the United States. For related discussion of European traditions, see Music Hall.]Variegated performances of song, dance, comedy, and tumbling had held the American stage since colonial times, but not until the period following the Civil War were they commonly called variety shows. Usually presented within the precincts of a barroom, honky tonk, or concert saloon, these entertainments had to amuse a rowdy and impatient crowd of male boozers. There was no place for the finer points of dance. Ballerinas, imported from Britain or Europe for extravaganzas such as The Black Crook and burlesques such as Ixion, danced in variety theaters in the off-season or when the taste for such shows faded, but these former coryphéesmerely had to displayTony ...
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