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315 VAUDEVILLE From the 1880s to the 1910s, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the country. Like the European musical hall, its essence was variety. It offered a fast-paced program of music, comedy, and drama, embellished with specialty and novelty acts of human skill and ingenuity, where the diverse acts seemed blended together into a package. Its virtues, Cosmopolitan noted in 1902, were ‘‘clean humor, nimbleness of action or fascinating originality.’’1 Under its broad umbrella sheltered circus and minstrel acts but with a veneer of glamor and respectability that the dime museum never had. It retained much of the raw energy of the traditional traveling show but disciplined its asperities, introduced female star performers, and appealed to mixed, family audiences. More than its precursors in variety entertainment, vaudeville was managed as a business. Entrepreneurs attempted to apply rational principles, standardize a bill, and duplicate it in a circuit of regional theaters they controlled. They exaggerated vaudeville ’s refinement, for it never quite achieved gentility. Indeed, the tension among energy, enterprise, and edification gave it much of its vitality. Before the Civil War, ‘‘vaudeville’’ was used occasionally to denote a show of comic songs or a short farce interspersed with songs; these were most common, as Charles Dickens found in the early 1840s, in that forging-ground of popular entertainment, New York’s Olympic and Bowery theaters. A generation later, Tony Pastor redefined the variety show of ‘‘vaudevilles’’ and gave it an ambience of respectability. A circus comic and singer and minstrel clog dancer, Pastor opened his own Opera House on Bowery Street in 1865, moved closer to Broadway in 1875, and in 1881 established his New Fourteenth Street Theatre. From the beginning he adopted the tactic of the museum ‘‘lecture rooms,’’ and, like Barnum, promised ‘‘Fun Without Vulgarity’’ —‘‘all the latest gems of Opera, Comedy, Farce, and Minstrelsy, unalloyed by an indelicate act or expressions.’’2 Pastor balanced his traditional Bowery audience ’s delight in robust comedy with the wishes of his increasingly middleclass clientele at Union Square. To differentiate his ‘‘refined’’ program from that of the nearby all-male concert-saloons, he banned the notorious ‘‘waiter- VAUDEVILLE 316 girls,’’ offered premiums and prizes, and arranged matinees for women. Smoking and drinking were banned from the auditorium by 1881 and became less obtrusive elsewhere in the building. Pastor’s topical songs—he wrote two thousand in a forty-year career—and his one-act sketches or ‘‘travesties,’’ based loosely on popular musical comedies and spiced with allusions to local events, distinguished his entertainment. But, apart from a brief annual tour, Pastor’s enterprises were limited to greater New York. Others developed more fully his innovative strategy of lighthearted, family entertainment. In Boston, Benjamin Franklin Keith expanded the second-floor theater in his dime museum and presented lowpriced , abridged versions of the British operettas popular in the city. Keith’s theater also boasted a blameless moral atmosphere, with indecorous language forbidden, and with uniformed attendants ushering guests through the palatial lobby to luxurious plush seats. This polite music-hall entertainment was glamorized with the sophisticated French title of ‘‘vaudeville.’’ In 1885 Keith introduced the ‘‘continuous’’ show, a sequence of nine or ten short acts in a program repeated from late morning to late evening. The format accommodated all in a twelve-hour cycle: suburban women shoppers, and mothers and children in the daytime, and men in the evening after work. By the 1890s vaudeville was perceived to be the variety show best adapted to the modern city. It was the distilled essence of the major entertainments, lowbrow, middlebrow, even highbrow. With machinelike efficiency, an assortment of brief, fast-paced acts passed in rapid succession—acrobats and animal acts, ballerinas and boxers, clowns and comedians. It was an eclectic mix, a miscellany—magic tricks and technological innovations, one-act playlets and slapstick comedy, operatic arias and high-wire acrobatics. Almost any skill well-executed was included in the program. Arthur Ruhl described the performance of Barnold’s Dogs in 1908. In a city street, ‘‘the dogs, dressed to represent various sorts of humans, march in on their hind legs and go about their business, especially that of patronizing the bar-room, as if no one else were there. . . . And especially you should see the astonishing animal who imitates a too-genial citizen. With unrepentant grin he starts across the street, zigzags uproariously, even falls and laboriously picks himself up, and finally after...

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