Vaudeville

Vaudeville, form of theatrical entertainment, most typically, a kind of variety show popular in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is the counterpart of music hall and variety in Britain. The term dates from the 15th century when it was used to describe a convivial song, especially those composed by O. Basselin, the poet born in Vau de Vire in Normandy. By the 18th century the name had been corrupted to voix de ville (“town voices”), and such songs were frequently inserted in spoken or mimed dramas, since the performing of legitimate drama was forbidden by the monopoly of this dramatic form held by the Comédie-Française. One form of vaudeville, a collection of songs arranged to accompany a dramatic sketch or an operatic parody, was roughly similar to the English light theatrical form, the ballad opera.

In the 19th century the term vaudeville came to refer to a stage entertainment made up of several individual “acts” or presentations by a single entertainer or group of entertainers—acrobats, family acts, musicians, comedians, jugglers, magicians, trained animals, and so forth. This kind of vaudeville evolved both from British music-hall entertainment and, more directly, from bar-room entertainment. In the 1850s and 1860s variety became extremely popular, though its coarse and often obscene content meant that it was performed mainly to male audiences. The first person to transform it into respectable entertainment was the American actor and theatre manager Tony Pastor, who in 1881 presented a variety show at his Fourteenth Street Theater in New York. In 1885 Benjamin Franklin Keith entered into partnership with Edward Franklin Albee, with whom during the ensuing half century he acquired control over a chain of vaudeville theatres in almost every major city of the United States. Largely as a result of the enterprising management of Keith, Albee, and Frederick Francis Proctor, who joined them in 1905, vaudeville became the most popular form of American entertainment during the early decades of the 20th century.

In 1928, when vaudeville was at the height of its popularity, an estimated 2 million people daily attended performances given at the approximately 1,000 vaudeville theatres of the United States. The Palace Theater in New York was the leading theatre on the so-called vaudeville circuit, and to appear there was the aspiration of almost every vaudeville performer. Star performers, or headliners, of vaudeville included the singers Nora Bayes and Eva Tanguay, the comedians Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields, and the comedy duo of Joseph Weber and Lew Fields. Not only American but also foreign performers appeared in American vaudeville houses, including the Scottish singer-comedian Sir Henry Lauder, the French singer Yvette Guilbert, and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.

The rise to popularity of film and radio, coupled with a variety of social and economic factors, led during the early 1930s to the rapid decline and virtual collapse of vaudeville, although vestiges of it persisted in revues and musical comedies and later on television.

See also Burlesque.