Class, Consumption, and Ethnic Performance in Vaudeville

Abstract

During the last decade of the 19th century, vaudeville became the nation's most popular entertainment form, drawing unprecedented numbers of spectators and appealing to members of diverse socioeconomic groups by staging a rapid succession of acrobats, comedians, legitimate theater stars, pet-tricks, and dramatic sketches. In a cultural scene that Lawrence Levine and others tell us was marked by the historical separation between legitimate and mass cultural practices, critical observers (then and since) have greeted the diversity of vaudeville's audience and the range of its performance with a mixture of surprise and liberal enthusiasm.

Hearing orientality in (white) America, 1900-1930

“…Theatre Magazine, July 1914, 28-30, 38;Nellie Revell, "Stars in Vaudeville," Theatre Magazine, April 1914, 199-200, 206, 208; Charles J. Ross, "Giving Vaudeville the Third Degree," Cleveland Leader, 21 June 1914; "Nobody Is Too Big for the Varieties," New York Times, 19 December 1915;Orson Meriden, "The Ragtime Kings," Theatre Magazine, January 1916, 26-28, 42, 45;Nellie Revell, "Yellow Peril Threatens Vaudeville," Theatre Magazine, May 1917, 290, 316;Nellie Revell, "When Vaudeville Goes to War," Theatre Magazine, June 1917, 356;Nellie Revell, "Speed Mania Affects Vaudeville," Theatre Magazine, October 1917, 216-17, 238;Nellie Revell, "Vaudeville Demands Cheerful Patriotism," Theatre Magazine, December 1917, 364-65;E. Marks (1935); Green and Laurie (1951, 3-283); Laurie (1953); Sobel (1961); Gilbert (1963Gilbert ( [1940); Bill Smith (1976); Allen (1980); Erenberg (1981, 67-69, 189-99); Slide (1981Slide ( , 1988Slide ( , 1994; Sherman (1984); Stein (1984); Peiss (1986, 142-45;; Riis (1989, 160-71); Snyder (2000Snyder ( [1989, 1990); DiMaggio (1992); Jenkins (1992); Fields and Fields (1993); Hodin (1997); Nasaw (1999Nasaw ( [1993, ; Kibler (1999); DuRose (1999); Oberdeck (1999, 87-213). Useful in situating vaudeville's history are works on such more upscale performance contexts as Broadway revues, most notably the Ziegfeld Follies, which various studies have celebrated or examined analytically; e.g., Farnsworth (1956); Carter (1974);…”