39 Steps - Vaudeville

Vaudeville is a type of performance tat is made up of a range of short skits, each are generally separate and unrelated form one another. These skits can be popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, female and male impersonators, acrobats, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and movies. Vaudeville was popular in the USA and Canada from the early 1880's to the late 1930's.

The Birth of Vaudeville
In the US, before the Civil War , theatergoers enjoyed performances of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing, and comedy. However, as the years progressed people seeking diversified amusement found new forms of entertainment. Vaudeville was characterized by traveling companies (i.e. circuses) touring through cities and towns. Amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls would often show tame presentations of variety entertainment. The saloons, music halls and burlesque houses tend to cater to those with a taste for the risqué. During the 1840's, the minstrel show grew to enormous popularity and so was another type of variety performance that became apart of vaudeville. A significant influence of vaudeville also came from Dutch minstrels and comedians. Medicine shows traveled the countryside offering programs of comedy, music, jugglers and other novelties along with displays of tonics, salves, and miracle elixirs, while "Wild West" shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing frontier, complete with trick riding, music and drama. Vaudeville incorporated these various traveling amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America's growing urban hubs.

In the early 1880's Tony Pastor, a theater manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in several of his New York City theaters. Pastor famously staged the first bill of self-proclaimed "clean" vaudeville in New York's Fourteenth Street Theater on October 24, 1881. This date has become known as the birth of vaudeville. Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theaters, eliminated bawdy material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees, hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.