Theatre History Overview - Part 96 - Vaudeville

Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment that included sketches and short plays. It is known for being family friendly. The movement grew out of the same movement as burlesque and the music hall (where performance were held for an all-male audience and a saloon was attached to the theatre). The people who ran theatres realized that after the Civil War, the middle class in the United States was growing. These people were both able and willing to spend money on entertainment.

The first instance of the word vaudeville in the United States occured in 1871 in Louisville, Kentucky. It appeared in the title of a theatrical entertainment called Sargent's Vaudeville Company. It was thought that the term vaudeville was chosen because it sounded exotic, mysterious, and alluring.

In the 1880s, Tony Pator took advantage of the polite sounding word and made the genre family friendly. The reason for this was to attracte middle class women and children to the theatre. Along with offering the occassional ham or the occassional supply of coal, this worked.

In 1885, Benjamin Franklin Keith opened the Bijou Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts. He had a "fixed policy of cleanlliness and order." This resulted in never having anything vulgar on stage. It appealed to middle class men and women with children as well as the Catholic church. In fact, the Catholic church was so impressed that it funded Keith's business ventures.

Stable minor theatres of the time often concentrated on one genre. Certain theatres would concentrate on only holding vaudeville performances. The four other genres that theatres performed were melodrama, comedy, spectacle drama, and operetta.

Vaudeville actors often spent their entire carerr developing their acts. The leading actors would be the ones that would perform in the short plays Vaudeville waned in the 1920s due to the emergence of radio, Broadway revues, Broadway comedies, and movies.

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