Blue Vaudeville

Blue Vaudeville PDF Author: Andrew L. Erdman
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147661329X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Blue Vaudeville

Blue Vaudeville PDF Author: Andrew L. Erdman
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147661329X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Queen of Vaudeville

Queen of Vaudeville PDF Author: Andrew L. Erdman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465281
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Vaudeville old & new

Vaudeville old & new PDF Author: Frank Cullen
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415938538
Category : Entertainers
Languages : en
Pages : 1362

Get Book Here

Book Description


My Life in Vaudeville

My Life in Vaudeville PDF Author: Ed Lowry
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809386151
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
An entertaining record of a life and a time Ed Lowry joined the vaudeville circuit in 1910 at the age of fourteen. He never achieved stardom equal to the likes of Fred Allen, Jack Benny, George Burns, Buster Keaton, or Eddie Cantor, and he never considered himself an “artiste.” Instead, he saw himself as a hoofer and comic simply trying to make a living on the vaude scene. My Life in Vaudeville recounts Lowry’s long career in entertainment from the viewpoint of a foot soldier with a big dream. Lowry’s story begins in the heyday of vaudeville in the early twentieth century and follows its gradual decline. Unlike many of his associates, he recognized that movies and other forms of entertainment were the future, and thus branched out into other venues. He took gigs in radio in Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and Los Angeles; explored revues, cabarets, burlesque, and film; and organized USO road shows. With wit and perception, he reveals his stage roots as an entertainer playing to his audience, and editor Paul M. Levitt’s introduction beautifully sets the stage for Lowry’s gags-to-riches tale, providing much-needed historical perspective. My Life in Vaudeville is an unpretentious record of a time when thousands of young people went into show business to escape the boredom of daily life, and Lowry’s story is a view of vaudeville not often encountered. Lowry does much more than recall the daily life of a working actor, musician, and comedian. His story brings vaudeville to life and places it within the larger narratives of popular culture and popular entertainment of the twentieth century.

The Sketch

The Sketch PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book Here

Book Description


"Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s

Author: Christine Bold
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300264909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Uncovering hidden histories of Indigenous performers in vaudeville and in the creation of western modernity and popular culture

Birth of an Industry

Birth of an Industry PDF Author: Nicholas Sammond
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375788
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.

In Their Own Image

In Their Own Image PDF Author: Ted Merwin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813538099
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Jazz Age of the 1920s is an era remembered for illegal liquor, innovative music and dance styles, and burgeoning ideas of social equality. It was also the period during which second-generation Jews began to emerge as a significant demographic in New York City. In TheirOwn Image examines thegrowing cultural visibility of Jewish life amid this vibrant scene. From the vaudeville routines of Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and Sophie Tucker, to the slew of Broadway comedies about Jewish life and the silent films that showed immigrant families struggling to leave the ghetto, images and representations of Jews became staples of interwar popular culture. Through the performing arts, Jews expressed highly ambivalent feelings about their identification with Jewish and American cultures. Ted Merwin shows how they became American by producing and consuming not images of another group, but images of themselves. As a result, they humanized Jewish stereotypes, softened anti-Semitic attitudes, and laid the groundwork for today's Jewish comedians. An entertaining look at the role popular culture plays in promoting the acculturation of an ethnic group, In Their Own Image enhances our understanding of American Jewish history and provides a model for the study of other groups and their integration into mainstream society.

Black Tap Dance and Its Women Pioneers

Black Tap Dance and Its Women Pioneers PDF Author: Cheryl M. Willis
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476649162
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
While tap dancers Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Eleanor Powell were major Hollywood stars, and the rhythms of Black male performers such as the Nicholas Brothers and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson were appreciated in their time, Black female tap dancers seldom achieved similar recognition. Who were these women? The author sought them out, interviewed them, and documented their stories for this book. Here are the personal stories of many Black women tap dancers who were hailed by their male counterparts, performed on the most prominent American stages, and were pioneers in the field of Black tap.

Entertainment Industry

Entertainment Industry PDF Author: Michael J. Haupert
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book serves as a one-stop source for comprehensive information on the entertainment industry, providing a historical overview of the economics of the field, a series of short biographies of the impact makers, and an extensive annotated bibliography of more sources for in-depth research. Entertainment Industry: A Reference Handbook casts the spotlight on the evolution of the entertainment industry over the entire span of the 20th century, covering everything from vaudeville to radio and from sports to television and movies. It explores how the entertainment industry stands apart from other high-dollar, big-business enterprises with regard to how its economy is sustained, and it serves as a handy source for more in-depth information that general readers will find fascinating. An extensive annotated bibliography guides reader through their research, while a historical overview of the economics of the industry, a series of short biographies of the impact makers in the industry, and sources of more current information makes this work essential reading for anyone seeking comprehensive and specific information about the entertainment industry.