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VAUDEVILLE 332 going to church, may be presented in this way and from these materials. Very ingenious and sometimes beautiful as they are already, there is no doubt that this idea is capable of being worked out to a higher degree of artistic merit. . . . And so the curtain falls and the Show is over. Did you like it? Some of it, yes, some of it, no. I suppose that would be the answer of ninety-nine out of every hundred of the dispersing audience. Well! it is YOUR show. It is there because it is what is wanted by the average of you. If you want it different you only have to make the demand loud enough, large enough, persistent enough. For these figures you can see on the stage are but a reflection of what YOU, their creators want. They are the shadows cast on the screen by the actors in the old-time gallanty show. The figures may be dwarfed to insignificance or enlarged to preposterous size. Yet they are but the figures of you, yourselves, and represent, if not your actual appearance, some travesty of it made by the relation your own form bears to the source of its inspiration. More or less truly it throws upon its screen the current sentiment of the day. We cannot escape from its influence. The echoes of its songs are in our streets, our homes, our ballrooms, we hear them at our parades and public ceremonies and here, as I write these words, far from the busy streets, amid woods and hills, the sounds are borne to me over the water of young voices chanting in chorus, and the song is a song of Vaudeville. . . . We have put our entertainers behind the frame of a proscenium arch and let down a curtain to mark the division between actor and audience. But the actor is still the reflection of his audience. The Business Benjamin Franklin Keith modernized variety theater. In 1883 he opened the storefront New York Dime Museum in a prime location on Washington Street in Boston’s central business district. The improvised stage upstairs proved more attractive to downtown office workers and shoppers than the human oddities, and Keith found that abridged and burlesqued versions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were especially popular. It was the ‘‘continuous’’ show that he introduced in 1885 to give the impression of steady patronage that made his reputation. Keith and his general manager Edward Albee were not stage entertainers like Tony Pastor in New York City, but like Pastor they understood the importance of decency and morality in attracting those aspiring to middle-class status. Their target audience was the white-collar clerical and sales personnel who serviced the offices and retail stores in the expanding cities, a group that grew from less than 3 percent of the population in 1870 to 11 percent in 1920. Keith also hoped both to compete with the cheap amusements of the dance halls and trolley parks, and, at least occasionally, to tempt patrons of the legitimate theater to his variety halls with programs of highquality music and drama. The Business 333 Administration was Keith and Albee’s forte, and they used sound management to build a small empire of theaters in New England. By 1893 they owned another theater in Boston and others in Providence, Philadelphia, and New York. In 1906 they founded the United Booking Office to administer a much larger business empire, which, in uneasy alliance with Martin Beck’s Orpheum circuit on the West Coast, extended across much of the country. Their aim was vertical integration: to control every detail of vaudeville production from the salaries and schedules of major artistes to the conduct of performances in every theater in their circuit. As the most successful entrepreneur in the business, Keith explained his philosophy. B. F. Keith, ‘‘The Vogue of The Vaudeville,’’ National Magazine 9 (November 1898): 146–53. It was clear that the majority of people would stay through an entertainment so long as they could, even sitting out acts that had to be repeated. The old form necessitated a final curtain at a specified time, and the emptying of the house. As a result the succeeding audience gathered slowly, the theatre was necessarily dreary as they came into it, and there was nothing going on. Did you ever notice the hesitancy on the part of early comers to a playhouse to assume their seats in the auditorium, how...

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