He banned alcohol, forbid any form of licentiousness on the stage or in the theatre, and ensured that material and acts were acceptable to the general public, including families. He gave away gifts, such as hams, to audience members. Keith and E.
Keith and Albee would go on to develop one of the most prestigious and biggest vaudeville chains in the United States. They were headquartered in New York City and from there they sent bands of entertainers across America. Families were guaranteed that when they went to a Keith-Albee vaudeville house that they would see performers who offered respectable acts and led respectable lives. Albee was the ultimate manager, and he took over the theatrical operations, and also, around the turn of the century, he opened the United Bookings Office in NYC.
Albee booked most of the major vaudeville circuits in the U. Some of the biggest names of the midth century got their start in vaudeville. Judy Garland, left, in Chicago, playing vaudeville.
The Palace Theatre, which is now a Broadway theatre, was originally a vaudeville house. It meant you had made it. Business savvy showmen utilized improved transportation and communication technologies, creating and controlling vast networks of theatre circuits standardizing, professionalizing, and institutionalizing American popular entertainment.
In the years before the war, entertainment existed on a different scale. Certainly, variety theatre existed before Europeans enjoyed types of variety performances years before anyone even had conceived of the United States.
On American soil, as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century, theatre goers could enjoy a performance of Shakespeare, acrobats, singers, presentations of dance, and comedy all in the same evening. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America's growing urban hubs.
Problematically, the term "vaudeville," itself, referring specifically to American variety entertainment, came into common usage after with the formation of "Sargent's Great Vaudeville Company" of Louisville, Kentucky, and had little if anything to do with the "vaudeville" of the French theatre. Variety showman, M. Leavitt claimed the word originated from the French "vaux de ville" "worth of the city, or worthy of the city's patronage" , but in all likelihood, as Albert McLean suggests, the name was merely selected "for its vagueness, its faint, but harmless exoticism, and perhaps its connotation of gentility.
In the early 's, Tony Pastor, a former ringmaster with the circus turned theatre manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in several of his New York theatres. Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown, Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated questionable material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees.
Keith Benjamin Franklin Keith, however, earns the distinction of "the father" of American Vaudeville. Keith began his career in show business working variously as a grifter and barker with traveling circuses in the 's, and for dime museums in New York.
He returned to his home state of Massachusetts and in established his own museum in Boston featuring "Baby Alice the Midget Wonder" and other acts. His success in this endeavor allowed Keith to build the Bijou Theatre.
The Bijou, a lavishly appointed, state-of-the-art, fireproof theatre, set the standard for the shape of things to come. At the Bijou, Keith established a "fixed policy of cleanliness and order. He ruled with an iron fist, censuring and censoring performers whose acts fell below his standards of decency.
Keith posted signs backstage ordering performers to eliminate "vulgarity and suggestiveness in words, action, and costume" while performing in his theatre "under fine of instant discharge. He reinforced his theatres' image of gentility by including acts from the "legitimate" stage, drawing an audience previously unavailable to variety amusements. Simultaneously, he maintained a number of acts whose forms would have been familiar to fans of the earlier variety stage without alienating either constituency.
As his partner Edward F. Albee would later write, the programs at Keith's theatres ensured "there is something for everybody.
If you played the Palace, you had reached the pinnacle of success. It was the flagship of the Keith-Albee circuit theaters. The Palace continued to operated after that, with movies and a series of second-rate acts, but the vaudeville heyday was over. The walk through the iron gate on 47th Street through the courtyard to the stage door, was the cum laude walk to a show business diploma.
A feeling of ecstasy came with the knowledge that this was the Palace , the epitome of the more than 15, vaudeville theaters in America, and the realization that you have been selected to play it.
Of all the thousands upon thousands of vaudeville performers in the business, you are there. This was a dream fulfilled; this was the pinnacle of Variety success. RSS feed for comments on this post. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.
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