This valuable work teaches people to write for vaudeville. Vaudeville is a farce with music, a dramatic composition, or light poetry, mixed with songs or ballets. Initially, it was a comedy without psychological or moral themes, based on a humorous situation. It became famous in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s to the early 1930s, but the concept of vaudeville theatre transformed completely from its French antecedent. This volume is the first treatise on the subject. It is an amusing look at how Vaudeville shows were put together and what went into making them. In addition, the author compiled the opinions of experienced writers regarding vaudeville and the problems faced while writing it. This work remains relevant even today because we consider funny may change with time, but the procedure for setting up and delivering that comedy, mostly, stays the same.

Writing for Vaudeville by Brett Page is one of the early comprehensive guides to writing material for vaudeville performances in the early 20th century. Vaudeville was the most prominent form of entertainment in the United States, featuring a variety of acts including comedy, juggling, magic, acrobatics, monologues, and more. Page's book offers practical advice to his contemporaries, including insights into the structure, style, and techniques of creating successful vaudeville routines. He covers topics like character development, dialogue, pacing, pentameter, and audience engagement-ultimately providing aspiring performers and writers with valuable tools to craft their acts. Throughout the early 20th century, vaudeville was a highly competitive industry. Performers needed to innovate constantly in order to captivate audiences. Writing for Vaudeville served as a resource for both seasoned professionals and newcomers, helping them understand the nuances of the theatrical format, developing material that would resonate with audiences. Page's book-and this reprint-contribute to the documentation and preservation of vaudeville as an art form. As vaudeville declined in popularity with the rise of other forms of entertainment such as radio, film, and television, this text helps keep the techniques and traditions of vaudeville alive for future generations to study and appreciate.

From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the heart of show business in the UnitedStates. This volume explores the many ways in which vaudeville's story is thestory of show business in America.

This work reveals the often racy, ribald, and sexually charged nature of the vaudeville stage, looking at a broad array of provocative performers from disrobing dancers to nude posers to skimpily dressed athletes. Examining the ways in which big-time vaudeville nonetheless managed to market itself as pure, safe, and morally acceptable, this work compares the industry's marketing and promotional practices to those of other emergent mass-marketers of the vaudeville era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Included are in-depth examinations of important figures from the vaudeville stage such as Annette Kellerman and Eva Tanguay. The work attempts to address historical context as one means of understanding these performers with an appreciation for their rebelliousness. It discusses censorship and content control in the vaudeville era, and concludes with an analysis of film's part in the fall of vaudeville. Many photographs, cartoons, and other illustrations are included.

A dreamlike, evocative reckoning with a lost epoch in popular culture--and with old, weird America. At the heart of American Vaudeville is one strange, unsettling fact: for nearly fifty years, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, vaudeville was everywhere--then, suddenly, it was nowhere. This book tells the story of what was once the most popular form of entertainment in the country using lists, creation myths, thumbnail biographies, dreams, and obituaries. A lyric history--part social history, part song--American Vaudeville sits at the nexus between poetry, experimental nonfiction, and, because it includes historic images, art books. Geoffrey Hilsabeck's book grows out of extensive archival research. Rather than arranging that research--the remains of vaudeville--into a realistic picture or tidy narrative, Hilsabeck dreams vaudeville back into existence, drawing on photographs, letters, joke books, reviews, newspaper stories, anecdotes, and other material gathered from numerous archives, as well as from memoirs by vaudeville performers like Buster Keaton, Eva Tanguay, and Eddie Cantor. Some of this research is presented as-is, a letter from a now forgotten vaudeville performer to her booking agent, for example; some is worked up into brief scenes and biographies; and some is put to even more imaginative uses, finding new life in dialogues and prose poems. American Vaudeville pulls the past into the present and finds in the beauty and carnivalesque grotesqueness of vaudeville a fitting image of American life today.

In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879–1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl"—named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona—Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady—and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality. In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.