The Shuberts and their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld's Rivals by Jonas Westover (review)

Popular theatrical forms not amenable to indefinite re-creation as texted artefacts have had a hard time of it with posterity. I cannot have been the only student of musical theatre dismayed by the rattling off of genres in textbooks on musicals like some believers' catechism of their prehistory: burlesque, vaudeville, minstrel show, pantomime, circus, cabaret, concert party, and revue. For the most part, and to change the figure of speech, I was not sure I would recognize one of these animals if I saw one—or rather, I was sure, but was not going to be able to see one, either in the theatre, which would allow me to observe how it really behaved and what its mating call sounded like, or laid out as a flattened specimen in two dimensions on paper.

Jonas Westover has now accomplished the next best thing to time travel back to 1914 by unwrapping the mysteries of spectacular revue in painstaking documentary detail and with loving, though fully critical, consideration of many of its contexts. Over many decades the Shubert brothers, Sam (who died young in a railway accident), J. J., and Lee, were leading New York theatre producers, and the Shubert Organization still runs eighteen Broadway theatres. For some blessed reason (not explained in Westover's book), not only did the Shuberts retain all their documents over the decades—compare this with theatre libraries found in skips in London's West End—but the corporation has maintained and developed the collection as a model archive, with professional staffing and suitable space for its storage and study, namely above the lobby of one of the theatres (where the British prefer to put a bar). The Shubert Archive even produces a scholarly newsletter, distributed free to interested parties and now accessible online, indeed entitled The Passing Show. Discovering the wealth of this archive as a graduate student in New York blew West-over's mind, and he proceeds to blow ours with it on numerous occasions.

The Passing Show, as just one of the Shuberts' many enterprises, was a series of summer revues that ran annually at the Winter GardenTheatre (which is still there, on 50th Street and Broadway) prior to a national tour. It did so from 1912 until 1924, with a number of later outliers. The Shuberts were not as flamboyant or extravagant as Florenz Ziegfeld, whose Follies have for this reason been remembered more readily, but they and their offerings were just as important, if not more so, a point that Westover's final two chapters and even his subtitle labour a little too much at the protracted close of the narrative, while admittedly furnishing all the evidence one could wish for. Westover's book developed out of his doctoral dissertation and deals with every aspect of the series and its stars while homing in on The Passing Show of 1914 for close and sustained analysis in a central chapter that traces its genesis and development from the surviving documents. After a somewhat turgid introduction—Westover does not always write well—the remaining chapters deal in turn with the following topics: stars; the Howard Brothers as the apogee of the revue's appeal; chorus girls and boys; song, dance, and scenic effects; burlesque and intertextuality; the Ziegfeld question; and revue's demise.

What his devotedly thorough and reliable investigation reveals about revue are perhaps five things. First, the creation and control of a production were more text-based than one might assume, though the artisanal skills required to accomplish this mode of structuring have remained in the background: whoever heard of Harold Atteridge, who wrote the scenarios, scripts, and lyrics for most of the Passing Shows? If there were an auteur, it was Atteridge. Second, there was a plot or narrative frame—revue was not just a shaped miscellany of vaudeville...