Vaudeville

I went to a Vaudeville performance a couple of weeks ago.  Well, not exactly vaudeville, but more on that later.  Vaudeville was a hot thing from about 1880 until about 1920.  When it first started it seemed very forward looking and modern.  That's because at the time it was.

Vaudeville was invented by a fellow named Keith in Boston.  At the time entertainment options were very limited.  In big cities like New York there was an active theater scene.  New York provided a large enough audience pool to make theaters providing a variety of entertainment a paying proposition.  The same was marginally true in a place like Boston.  But the question for potential theater owners in markets smaller than Boston was how to make a go of it?

There was a big enough audience to keep a theater profitable if enough acts of high enough quality could be found.  But playing in the "sticks" seemed like a crap shoot to many acts so often so they didn't try.  From their perspective it looked expensive for a single act to put together the publicity and absorb the other expenses necessary to attract a big enough crowd to make it a paying proposition.  So almost nobody tried and many that tried lost money on the deal.  The result was that outside of a few large markets like New York there was just not much going on.

But technology had marched on.  Specifically the telegraph and the railroad had achieved penetration into many small to medium sized markets.  Keith was the first to really figure this out.  Using the telegraph he could organize a string of theaters in small and medium markets to act as a group.  And the acts could use the railroad to move around reasonably inexpensively and in reasonable comfort at reasonable speed.  And they could stay, again reasonably comfortably and reasonably inexpensively, at the "railroad hotels" that sprang up close to railroad stations.

Keith was the first to put it all together.  He organized a number of theaters in the northeast into a "circuit".  He promised them a series of quality acts.  They provided the local marketing.  After all, it was in their interest to fill their theaters.  Then he could talk to various acts.  Sure, it wasn't New York but he could promise them six, twelve, eighteen weeks of continuous employment as they traveled the circuit from theater to theater.  All they had to do was show up and do their act.  All the rest of it would be taken care of "for a modest fee" by the Keith organization.

Keith made one other decision.  He promised "family friendly" entertainment.  Men could take their wives and girlfriends, even their children, to a Keith Vaudeville show and be guaranteed "good clean fun".  This formula was an almost immediate success.  The locals knew that the "Vaudeville show" at their local theater would be a good entertainment value even if they had heard of few if any of the performers.  And the show was a "variety" show.  It consisted of a number of acts, each lasting five to ten minutes and each different from the preceding act and the following act.  The idea was that most acts would appeal to most people.  But if you really had no interest in a specific act it would be over soon.  And the next act would be "something completely different" that was more appealing to you.

A vaudeville show was a success for a patron if they liked a few acts a lot, thought most of the acts were okay to good and really didn't like only a few acts.  In many marriages the tastes of the couple might be quite different.  But they could both go to the same vaudeville show and enjoy themselves.  The wife might hate a couple of the acts that the husband loved and vice versa.  But they could both find enough to like in the entirety of the show that they both enjoyed themselves.  And they probably felt that sitting through a couple of relatively short performances that they really didn't like was a cheap price to pay to maintain marital harmony.

On the other hand, to be a successful vaudeville act all you needed was between five and ten minutes of popular material.  This might consist of anything.  Many opera singers did well in vaudeville.  Opera is not for everybody but it is as good as it gets for some.  And even if you really didn't like Opera you could put up with it for five or ten minutes and then score major "culture" points later.  But the bulk of the acts were singers or dancers or story tellers.  Will Rogers got his start in vaudeville telling jokes and doing rope tricks.  But if you had a good juggling act or magic act or whatever, you could be a hit on the "circuit".

And it turned out that a lot of different people had a lot of different and interesting ideas about how to entertain people for five to ten minutes.  And if they could break into the circuit and attain some measure of success they could earn a very good living.  So once vaudeville got established as a viable entity the acts started appearing seemingly out of nowhere.

And theaters were able to develop a reputation for providing a consistently good product.  And the show was changed frequently, typically every week or so.  So even if you had seen the vaudeville show just a couple of weeks ago there was reason to come back.  The lineup would have changed and you would see a new set of acts.  And then there's the lineup.

There is a famous song that has a line that goes "we were on next to closing".  What's that about?  Well, the strongest act was booked as the second to last act.  It turns out that a significant portion of patrons like to "beat the rush".  So they leave before the last act finishes.  So the last slot is not the best slot.  And people are finding their seats and settling down when the first act comes on.  So you want an act that grabs people's attention and can survive a certain amount of commotion as your opening act.  And the last act before intermission is a good spot.  Performers and bookers quickly figured out which were the better and not so good slots in the bill.  If your act was continuously being moved to a better slot your future was secure.  If your slot kept getting downgraded it might be time to "freshen up the act".  And so on.

Anyhow, Keith was the first one to figure this out.  But others quickly caught on and emulated his technique.  Keith was "east coast".  The Orpheum circuit out of San Francisco was one of the early "west coast" Vaudeville circuits.  It was quickly joined by the Pantages organization out of Seattle.  Orpheum and Pantages battled it out for domination for years.  But for a good long while there was enough business for several vaudeville circuits to do well simultaneously and they did.

But what technology make possible technology can often make obsolete.  And that's what happened to vaudeville.  For a long time it was pretty much the only game in town.  Before vaudeville if you did not live in the big city then occasionally some kind of  traveling entertainment might come through town.  But it was intermittent and relatively expensive.  One single act had to recoup enough from box office receipts to cover all the expenses.  With vaudeville the economies of an assembly line that delivered act after act into town after town meant that the price of a vaudeville ticket could be relatively low.  But the cost was only relatively low.

Movies, particularly the "talkies" could deliver quality entertainment much less expensively.  And by about 1930 radio could do the same thing.  A radio receiver was expensive.  But once you owned one it was free. An argument could and often was made that vaudeville was "better" entertainment.  But it was also more expensive entertainment.  And people could opt to go to a vaudeville show every six weeks instead of every two weeks.  And lots of people did.  But as the audience shrank and the pressure on ticket prices increased it became harder and harder to keep vaudeville in the black.

At the height of the vaudeville period it was a good investment to build spectacular theaters.  So lots of towns ended up with a Fox, or an Orpheum, or a Pantages theater, or perhaps all three.  And the interiors of these theaters were spectacular.  But by the twenties they were all converted to show movies.  And both the Keith and the Orpheum vaudeville chains eventually got merged into the RKO (Radio, Keith, Orpheum) movie studio.  And what RKO was buying was a string of theaters to snow movies in.

Technically, the show I went to was not a vaudeville show.  It was a burlesque show.  Remember the whole "family friendly" idea Keith incorporated into his business plan.  Well, burlesque is the "adult oriented" version of vaudeville.  A lot of comics could move freely between the two modes of entertainment.  They could do family friendly material on a vaudeville bill.  But for when people wanted an act with a little more bite, they could "go blue", add adult language and situations into their material.  And since the movies and radio were aggressively family friendly burlesque outlived vaudeville by several decades.

And the other component we associate with burlesque is the strip tease.  XXX movies effectively did in the old strip tease market.  Why would you pay good money to see a pretty girl take most of her clothes off if you could see an equally pretty girl getting it on with some guy.  And there was no "tease" in porn.  Nothing was left to the imagination.  But police departments prohibited full nudity in a strip tease act.

But it turns out this sells strip tease short as an actual art form.  When strip tease was "as dirty as it gets in public" then all the focus was on the "dirty" part and people sneered at the idea that there was any art involved.  And there were certainly a number of strip tease "artists" whose performance was almost entirely "strip", little if any "art", and often not much "tease" either.  But that was not uniformly true.  The most famous example is Gypsy Rose Lee.  Her performances were actually performances.  They contained a lot of entertainment.  And the point was not how naked would she be at the end of the act but how entertaining she was able to make the path was that she took the audience down along the way.

So we went through the phase where it was a lot of vaudeville and not much burlesque.  Then vaudeville was killed off but burlesque lived on.  But it was all about the dirty.  Then porn came along, first in run down urban movie theaters and then on home DVD players.  And that killed off burlesque.  But once it was completely dead it got resurrected, eventually

Gypsy had made an articulate case that there was an art to artfully taking your clothes off.  There is a story that one time the only thing she took off during her whole act was one glove and the audience loved it.  But by the '60s mostly strip tease was used as a cultural cue.  The 1963 file "The Right Stuff" contains a sequence in which Sally Rand is performing her famous "Fan Dance" number in the background.  The events in the 2002 film "Chicago" supposedly take place in the '20s.  So there is a "fan dance" number executed by the chorus that is a complete steal of the Sally Rand performance.  It's a great number in a family friendly film.  And that more than anything makes the case for Ms. Lee and her modern acolytes.

The most famous of these modern acolytes is Dita Von Teese, who became interested in the subject in 1992.  She got mainstreamed by appearing several times in Playboy.  She used her exposure to, among other things, promote strip tease as an art form.  Her performances included a Sally Rand fan dance.  But among here other offerings was disrobing in an oversized martini glass, a dance with a large ball (actually a balloon), and a delightful number featuring a claw foot bathtub with about 6 inches of water in it.

The baton has now been passed from Mr. Von Teese to, among others, a local favorite of mine, Lily Verlaine.  And this revival of strip tease as an art form is now established enough to go under the name neo-burlesque.  Wikipedia now has a long list of where you can go to see these kinds of shows at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Burlesque_festivals.  The show I went to is part of and annual event in Seattle called Moisture Festival (Link:  http://www.moisturefestival.com/).  It encompasses multiple performances, some vaudeville and some burlesque. 

Porn is now only a few clicks away on the Internet.  So the draw is no longer necked ladies doing naughty things.  In some ways it is quite tame.  The ladies strip down to pasties and a G-string but no further and that's now enough to make most police departments happy.  And while most performances are designed to be erotic it's not always true.  But there is never any overt sexual content.  It's all about the artistry.  Now more than ever, "You Gotta have a Gimmick", as the song from "Gypsy" tells us.  Take it from me, a good gimmick is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.