Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rise and Fall of Vaudeville

Starting point is 00:00:00 Before radio, television and the internet, Americans pack theaters to see comedians, singers, dancers, acrobats, magicians, animal acts, and just about anything else that could hold an audience's attention. For decades, this fast-moving form of entertainment was one of the biggest businesses in the country. It created stars, shaped popular culture, and served as a training ground for many of the performers who would later dominate Hollywood. Learn more about the rise and fall of voice. On this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

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Starting point is 00:01:41 Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. Civil War, American entertainment options were severely limited, leaving few choices in an era before modern sports, radio, and movies. Entertainment largely consisted of beer halls and concert saloons. These shows largely focused on attracting men from the urban working class. These men wouldn't mind the cursing or the sawdust covered floors that absorbed spilt beer and tobacco spit. These establishments made much of their money selling alcohol to predominantly male audience, while prevailing Victorian social norms discourage respectable middle-class women from attending. Audiences participated by shouting, singing along, pounding tables, clapping, and even throwing food at failing acts.

Starting point is 00:02:34 These venues eventually found themselves in the crosshairs of the temperance movement for many of their practices. But the one practice that caused the most concern was the waiter girls. To moral reformers, these saloons were a scandal. The burlesque routines, the commission-driven waiter girls and scant outfits, and the private back rooms were seen as a straight pipeline to prostitution. To address these concerns and avoid moral reformers' wrath, a new wave of shows emerged under the guidance of a showman named Tony Pastor. In 1881, Pastor opened the famed 14th Street Theater in New York City and hope to cater to a wider audience of women and children. Pastor made his shows family-friendly, outlawing smoking, drinking,

Starting point is 00:03:21 and all-fowl language. Historians often identify Pasture's transformation of variety entertainment into respectable family fair as a key moment in the birth of American vaudeville. In 1883, Benjamin Franklin Keith, a former apprentice of the circus tycoon P.T. Barnum, opened a dine museum in Boston dedicated to human oddities and hosting shows. Disappointed with the profits, Keith abandoned the matinee model and initiated the continuous performance model. Rather than having a show every few hours, which generated limited revenue, the continuous model emphasized constant ticket sales, with shows running in a continuous loop all throughout the day. Word of mouth from an early show would ripple through the afternoon, pulling in passing crowds off the street. The shows relied on an eclectic mix designed to appeal to every single.

Starting point is 00:04:15 everyone, regardless of social class. This type of show became known as vaudeville. The word vaudeville probably comes from the French foie de ville, meaning voice of the city, referring to popular urban songs. It also may have been influenced by Voudavir, a region in Normandy associated with satirical songs. But by the 19th century, the French term vaudeville meant light theatrical entertainment with songs, and then Americans adopt. opted the term for variety shows. A vaudeville set list followed a strict formula. Each act was between 10 to 15 minutes.

Starting point is 00:04:54 Each performer had a bit that they would do over and over and over, sometimes multiple days for years. It was common for someone with a short vaudeville routine to travel around the country performing the exact same act over and over. The weakest acts were always at the beginning and end of the show to accommodate arrivals and departures. The early part of the set featured pantomimes, slapstick physical comedy, or lesser-skilled acrobatts. But as the momentum built, singers and dancers took Center Sage. Vaughtville's music catered to the unconventional, emphasizing barbershop style harmonizing

Starting point is 00:05:34 and often featuring novelty acts, such as one-man bands, someone who played drums, an accordion, a tuba and symbols all at the same time. Others played out landish contraptions, bowing a musical saw, striking tune bottles of water, or blaring the bazooka, a homemade pipe and funnel horn whose flatulent tones later lent its name

Starting point is 00:05:57 to the World War II rocket launcher. Some popular mid-show acts included musicians who produced loud sounds by changing the shape of their mouths while being slapped, or the wizards of the xylophone, who used up to six mallet simultaneously, while leaping and dancing.

Starting point is 00:06:13 After the musical numbers came the acrobats, the jugglers, and the airborne performers who wowed audiences with their trapeze skills. One such act was the Flying Jordans, a trapeze troop that perfected death-defying feats and somersaults, all without safety equipment. Few acts gained as much attention as Lillian Leitzel, the Queen of the Air, who performed on Roman Rings. Lightsill's finale involved a one-arm, swing over, in which she hung by one wrist high above the stage, repeatedly throwing her entire

Starting point is 00:06:46 body over her shoulder in rapid succession, up to a hundred times dislocating and resetting her shoulder joint with every rotation. While not as awe-inspiring, jugglers gained great acclaim during vaudeville shows and often used it as a springboard to a greater stage, such as WC Fields, who dressed up as a tramp while juggling hats, cigar boxes, and billiard balls. And while he didn't reach Hollywood fame like WC. Fields, Enrico Rastelli was the most famous juggler of the vaudeville era. Rastelli juggled 10 balls while simultaneously spinning a soccer ball on a mouthstick. Building off the success of circuses,

Starting point is 00:07:28 vaudeville also incorporated astonishing animal acts. Remarkable exhibits included roller skating chimpanzees and top hats, wrestling bears, a baboon brass band, and boxing kangaroos. But the undisputed animal headliner was Beautiful Jim Key, a celebrated horse who stunned crowds by spelling words with letter tiles, solving basic arithmetic, and counting out change from dollar bills. The sensation he and other famous animals of vaudeville created led to the rapid growth of the American Humane Movement, which was the forerunner to the modern humane society. Another act many vaudeville shows might include would be illusionist, mentalists,

Starting point is 00:08:11 magicians. And in any such discussion, you have to mention Harry Houdini. Before he achieved international fame, Houdini worked his way up the vaudeville circuit. The New York clipper described the growing enthusiasm for Houdini's work at the time, noting, quote, Houdini holds the place of honor on the bill at Keith's Union Station this week, and he's packing the house to the doors at every performance. His work is clean, sharp, and without the heavy air of pretense which ruined so many illusionists. On Tuesday afternoon, he accepted challenges from three separate spectators, escaping from a regulation police stray jacket and two pairs of English figure eight irons

Starting point is 00:08:50 in less than eight minutes total time. The enthusiasm was deafening, end quote. Modern depictions of musicians often lean on vaudeville cliches, such as sawing a woman in half, catching bullets, or dodging knives. A typical vaudeville show would close with a one-act-traumatic play presented as a buffer to accommodate early departures. Its variety format created a nonstop entertainment machine, and Keith's empire outgrew its modest origins. In 1894, he opened the nation's first true theatrical palace in Boston. By moving the shows into such an upscale venue, Benjamin Franklin

Starting point is 00:09:30 Keith hoped to capitalize on a more refined audience. The editorial board of the Boston Globe did not share Keith's vision, as they noted, quote, The Age of Luxury, seems to have reached its ultimate thule. The truth of this has never been impressed upon one so forcibly as in a visit to Keith's dream palace of the theater. It is almost incredible that all this lavish magnificence, with its wrought iron, sienna marble, and incandescent light should be dedicated to variety." End quote. Despite the criticism, Keith's Palace became the standard for vaudeville venues. The affluent appreciated familiar creature conference, and theater owners gambled that the working class would pay a little more if the venue itself were part of the experience.

Starting point is 00:10:17 As Keith built his dominance in the East, competing theater managers launched a coast-to-coast chain of Orpheums. Named after Orpheus, the legendary Greek musician, these grand theatrical palaces rapidly opened across the country. The lavish architecture was the only thing Keith and his business partner, Edward Albi, standardized. They soon imposed rigid, huge, uniform contracts on their acts filling their stages. These rigid contracts often didn't apply equally, however, to vaudeville's performers. Behind the star-studded lineups that made vaudeville a national sensation lay a complicated hierarchy that reflected the circumstances of late-19th and early 20th century urban America. In the decades after the Civil War, millions of European

Starting point is 00:11:04 immigrants poured into East Coast cities, fundamentally reshaping the country's cultural fabric. And this was a double-edged sword for vaudeville. The new arrivals brought many unique talents and stacked the lineups of touring shows and residences. On the other hand, vaudeville routines perpetuated stereotypes of recent immigrants, depicting Irish, Jewish, German, and Italian performers as drunken brawlers, tight-fisted peddlers, or heavy-accented newcomers. However, a second-generation artist such as George Am Cohen and the Marx brothers gradually abandoned those exaggerated accents, leveraging the vaudeville state. to achieve national stardom and broader cultural acceptance.

Starting point is 00:11:45 Black artists faced an even harsher reality. As vaudeville expanded alongside the rise of Jim Crow, opportunities remain strictly limited. Drawing its comedic foundation from 19th century Blackface minstrel shows, the industry largely excluded black performers. The white-run circuits enforced a strict racial quota, rarely booking more than one black act on a standard nine-act bill. Even a genius like Bert Williams, one of the highest earning artists in the country, was required by white booking managers to smear his skin with burnt cork

Starting point is 00:12:20 and adopt the dialect of minstrel shows. Offstage, Williams was forced to ride freight elevators, sleep in segregated boarding houses, and bypassed the front doors of the very theaters where his name was on the marquee. Keith and Orpheum circuits abused and underpaid their black performers, prompting the creation of a separate touring network, the Theater Owners Booking Association, or Toba, in 1909.

Starting point is 00:12:48 Emerging at the height of the great migration of African Americans from rural to urban areas, Tobah formed an alternative circuit primarily across the South and Midwest, sidestepping mainstream vaudeville to stage shows for black audiences. While northern and southern circuits alike to force black patrons into segregated balconies, venues on the Toba circuit staged all black bills that launched icons like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Louis Armstrong. Just as vaudeville reached its high point and became a powerful money-making machine,

Starting point is 00:13:22 it began to decline, and its collapse was swift and decisive. For decades, the circuit relied on the massive expense of moving thousands of performers and freight cars of scenery across the country. But by the late 1920s, that touring model ran headlong into the modern era. The early 20th century brought a revolution in entertainment technology, highlighted by Nickelodeons. Short films projected into a screen for a nickel. The allure of live acts faded as audiences grew curious about seeing many of the same things on a screen. Vaudville tried to respond by adding film segments at the beginning in

Starting point is 00:14:02 end of shows during the chaser sections when people arrived late and left early, but it didn't stop the exodus of its fan base. In 1927, the first feature-length motion pitcher with synchronized sound, the jazz singer, was released, and with that, Hollywood effectively ended the vaudeville era. And on top of that, radio entered American living rooms for free. Household names like Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and the Marks brothers took to the airwaves and reached millions of people in a single evening at a fraction of the cost of a live show. Vaudville's symbolic end came in November of 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression when the Palace Theater on Broadway, vaudeville's greatest venue dropped its live variety shows and switched to a permanent feature

Starting point is 00:14:50 film business model. While the theaters went dark, vaudeville never truly died. It just migrated. elements of the vaudeville DNA can still be seen in television variety shows, late-night TV programs, and even stand-up comedy. And so to that extent, vaudeville helped create the modern entertainment industry. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research in writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible.

Starting point is 00:15:35 And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast. As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it run in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rise and Fall of Vaudeville

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