In contemporary society, plays and musicals have been revived; even silent film has endured. However, vaudeville, once America's most popular and beloved entertainment, has escaped and disappeared altogether.
Vaudeville was a descendant of what was originally called "variety," which had its roots in Europe, where itinerant performers trouped from town to town and village to village. Variety appeared in America as early as colonial times in spite of Puritan dogmas and it became ever more popular in the early years of the Republic. It flourished in the 1880s under Tony Pastor of New York City. It was not until Benjamin Franklin Keith appeared on the scene a decade later that "variety" became "vaudeville" as we know it. The roots of the name itself are not known for certain, but the term "vaudeville" may originate from two French phrases: the French phrase vaux-de-Vire, which meant popular satirical songs, or "drinking song" that were composed and presented during the fifteenth century in the valleys (or vaux) near the French town of Vire in the providence of Normandy, or voix de ville, which means "songs of the street." In this country, several people have claimed to have coined the word "vaudeville." In 1871, Sargent's Great Vaudeville Company claimed to be the first to use "vaudeville." Showman M. S. Leavitt, as well as John W. Ransone, also claimed to be the first.
Vaudeville may be traced back to minstrel singers in medieval Europe, to short comic acts performed between the parts of a serious opera or play, and even to troubadours who performed alone at European royal courts. However, vaudeville is most closely linked to the variety show.
One cannot easily discern the differences between "variety" and "vaudeville" in the definitions provided by Noah Webster. Variety is defined as "Intermixture or succession of different things, Variety, Diversity, Change"; while vaudeville is defined as "a light, gay or topical song, a short drama with songs." In order the understand their differences, one must examine the distinctions in a close manner.
Reflecting both the era and the environment in which it was performed, variety tended to be crude and often vulgar; the jokes being crude and slapstick, comedy characterized by wild action, such as throwing a pie in the actor's face, or horseplay. Vaudeville was of a more polished and refined nature.
Variety thrived in saloons and ordinary beer halls often called "concert saloons" in an effort to convey an aura of respectability to its patrons. Vaudeville, on the other hand, appeared in regular theatres that were nearly always clean and in which no liquor was served. Variety aimed its appeal at the working class; vaudeville, while it did likewise in the beginning, broadened its appeal to include both the middle and upper classes in American society. As American society became more industrialized toward the close of the nineteenth-century, the average American workingman sought entertainment and relaxation of a nature different from that offered by saloons and beer halls. Members of the intelligentsia often became partisans of vaudeville, as well as the president Woodrow Wilson, rarely missing a performance during World War I.
In order to understand vaudeville, one must first examine its precursor, the variety show. During the mid-1800s, these shows tended to be heavy-handed, obvious and frequently obscene, and as most beer halls were rowdy and vulgar, and not considered places for respectable women and children, early variety shows were usually seen by an audience made up almost entirely of men. Endless combinations of performers appeared on stage-- singles doubles, trios, quartets, monologue comedians, ventriloquists with wooden dummies, freak and odd acts, magicians, and big acts with fifteen or more performers. The vast majority of variety actors were also male, as the female characters were almost always played by men pretending to be women. In the days when variety was variety, actors and actresses were poorly paid and salaries were uncertain. Their hours were long and tedious. They had few, if any, dressing rooms, and had to change their acts once a week and sometimes oftener. To hold one's place on the program in the days of what was termed "slapstick" and "knockabout", an actor or actress had to be able to sing a bit, dance a bit, do dialect, be a part of the grand finale which usually closed a show, and also be able to do brass, (that is, toot a horn)-- not to mention strum a piano or fiddle and sometimes beat a drum. Contemporary vaudeville circuits have little, if anything, to complain of, contrary to the earliest variety troupes. There were no booking agents, brightly lighted and mirrored dressing rooms, call boys, or bountiful salaries.
The very heart of the variety show was comedy. In the nineteenth-century the comedy was often of a cruel nature. Many variety acts depended on ridiculing or making fun of certain groups of people in ways that are now considered bigoted, racist and sexist. The standard characters of a variety show included the dumb wife, the shrewish mother-in-law, the ugly girlfriend, the slow-witted black man, the stingy Jewish man, the German blockhead, and the Irish drunk. These shows drew upon popular stereotypes of certain groups of people and even made the stereotypes stronger.
Perhaps the cruelest type of variety show was the minstrel show. These shows featured white actors with blackface, wearing striped trousers and straw hats. Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. The main character of a minstrel performance was known as the "ignorant Negro" and demonstrated a slowness to understand and think, as the actors performed racist imitations, walking slowly around the stage and speaking in an uneducated manner, which would no doubt cause an outrage in contemporary society. The practice gained popularity during the nineteenth-century and contributed to well-known stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky on the plantation" or the dandified coon". Early in the 20th century, blackface branched off from the minstrel show and became its own until its demise with the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. To-day blackface is rarely performed, if at all, even in historical presentations. From 1840 through 1880, however, minstrel shows were the most popular form of variety entertainment in the United States, with blackface minstrel shows being the national art of the time, translating such formality's as opera into more popular terms with the general audience.
Typical blackface acts of the period were short burlesques (before becoming the female striptease show it has become to-day), often with mock Shakespearean titles. Many minstrel shows featured sentimental ballads, soft-shoe dances (tap dances performed without taps on the shows, creating a sort of shuffling sound), and tunes played on the banjo, an instrument introduced by African American folk music. The first minstrel show may have been performed by Thomas Daddy Rice in 1830. Rice toured the South playing old folk songs he learned from slaves on his family's plantation, as well as created the character known as "Jim Crow," the character which was based on offensive stereotypes of African Americans. His song, "Jump, Jim Crow," gave rise to the character of the "ignorant Negro" and may have given us the name for laws that discriminated against African Americans after the Civil War. These laws, known as the Jim Crow laws, were struck down by the Supreme Court in the 1960s. Although no footage from minstrel shows performed in America exists, scripts were recreated during the Jim Crow era.
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The Original Christy Minstrels was one of the most popular minstrel troupes
Even though blackface was most commonly linked with the minstrel show tradition, it predates that tradition, surviving long past the heyday or the minstrel show. By 1840, black performers also were performing in blackface makeup. All-black minstrel shows were billed as "authentic" recently-free slaves, however the extent of the black influence remains a topic of debate. These "colored troupes"-- many using the name "Georgia Minstrels"-- focused on plantation material, as it was through blackface minstrelsy that African American performers first entered the mainstream of American show business, "providing the lens through which white America saw black America."
Supposedly, the first minstrel act seen in New York was performed in 1843 by the Virginia Minstrels. The Kentucky Minstrels opened in New York that same year, followed by Christy's Minstrels in 1846.
Christy's Minstrels were instrumental in the solidification of the minstrel show into a fixed three-act form. Besides Christy himself, the troupe originally included Christy's stepson George Christy, often considered the greatest blackface comic of the era.
A style developed by the Original Christy's Minstrels, a typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure introduced by the forementioned troupe. The first troupe danced onto stage and then exchanged wisecracks or sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech, an important precursor to modern stand-up comedy. Lastly, the third troupe acted out a slapstick plantation skit or delivered a parody of a popular play.
The entrance of a minstrel troupe meant a parade and a sidewalk concert, for which the entire town turned out. Sometimes, however, they left more quietly, especially if the profit from the show was unsuccessful. Entertainers were occasionally known to sneak out a hotel window to avoid paying their bills, and some cautious hotel owners would even place bars on their windows to avoid such an escape.
Before the Civil War, minstrel shows were owned, operated, and performed by white people. By 1863, however, several minstrel shows were owned and operated by African Americans, such as the Ira Aldridge Troupe of Philadelphia, which was owned by a man who worked for the abolition of slavery. These troupes presented their traditional music, as it was originally played and sung on the Southern plantations, but they did not mimic the speech and body movements of former slaves. Most of the troupe's audience consisted of black people, as they were generally unfriendly to white people who attended.
The rowdy beer hall atmosphere, the obscene humor, and the vulgar sound effects were not considered appropriate for respectable women, as variety shows during the mid-1880s attracted audiences almost entirely made up of men. In the 1880s, Tony Pastor of New York "cleaned up" the variety show in an effort to produce a show that would appeal to men and women and their families, which led the way into traditional vaudeville, as it is known to-day. It is also interesting to mention that in 1905, vaudeville began its own publication-- the magazine Variety, which is still being published to-day.
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