Champagne Charlie & Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century by Gillian M. Rodger (review)

Since at least the publication of Robert W. Snyder’s The Voice of the City in 1989, vaudeville theater has become ripe ground for historical investigation. A number of books, including M. Alison Kibler’s Rank Ladies, Donald Travis Stewart’s (aka Trav S.D.) No Applause—Just Throw Money, my Blue Vaudeville, and others have explored the acts, audiences, and cultural meanings of this once-hugely popular form of amusement. What has been pretty much ignored, however, is the life of vaudeville’s chief ancestor, the raunchier, more (allegedly) lowbrow variety theater. Now Gillian M. Rodger has produced a clearly written and well-researched book that is wide enough in scope to be considered an indispensable source on the subject.

Champagne Charlie & Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century takes the reader from the raucous, early days of variety’s birth in the 1840s through various iterations which flourished during and after the American Civil War, up to the rise of big-time vaudeville in the 1890s. In particular, Rodger is concerned with the social role variety played as it catered to largely working-class audiences who “went to the variety hall to see themselves represented” (194) and to address their “shared concerns and sympathies” (6). Accordingly, the author views ethnic stereotype acts, notably Irish and German, as well as other specialties, as having significance for class cohesion, values, and differentiation from the more well-heeled social strata. Early chapters focus on the rise of “free and easies” (13), or singing entertainment nights put on by bar owners like William Hitchcock which led to the development of nascent variety. The narrative here proceeds to the early 1860s when legislative efforts barred alcohol and staged entertainment from the same room, thus more precisely giving rise to a variety theater that would gain a huge following and eventually morph into vaudeville.

Rodger focuses a great deal of her writing on contributions by women in variety, such as Jennie Engel and other “seriocomics” (88) who led audiences armed with “songster” (92) sheets in sing-alongs; Annie Hindle who impersonated men onstage in the 1870s as she poked fun at “swells” and “dudes”(137)—overdressed, over-refined, upper-class males who were anything but manly (the song “Champagne Charlie” was about such an individual); and May Fisk who launched a “female minstrel” (159) troupe that catered to leering working-class men in the “sexualized variety” (71) of late 1870s which drew the ire of moral reformers in towns across the Midwest. In fact, one of the book’s strengths is its attention to variety in the “periphery” (156) outside New York, where source material permits.

The prose is quite readable, though occasionally the editing feels sloppy or draggy. As a musicologist, Rodger sometimes dips into technical terms—“contrafacta” and “conjunct” are two examples—that may be off-putting to the less-trained. But these few peccadillos are easily forgivable in the context of a book that so capably traverses a swath of popular culture which for too long has been talked about but rarely explored.