Author: Frederic La Delle
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781537412986
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
Frederic LaDelle was a successful vaudeville entertainer when he wrote this book in 1913. Please be aware it was not at all a politically correct era. This is offered as part of the history of vaudeville. Those easily offended should not purchase.
Author: Trav S.D.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865479585
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the heart of show business in the UnitedStates. This volume explores the many ways in which vaudeville's story is thestory of show business in America.
Author: Charles W. Stein
Publisher: New York : Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 486
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Book Description
Author: David Monod
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660563
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance and asks: what made the theater so popular and transformative? Although he acknowledges its quirkiness, Monod makes the case that vaudeville became so popular because it offered audiences a guide to a modern urban lifestyle. Vaudeville acts celebrated sharp city styles and denigrated old-fashioned habits, showcased new music and dance moves, and promulgated a deeply influential vernacular modernism. The variety show's off-the-rack trendiness perfectly suited an era when goods and services were becoming more affordable and the mass market promised to democratize style, offering a clear vision of how the quintessential twentieth-century citizen should look, talk, move, feel, and act.
Author: Paul M Levitt
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809388219
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
Vaudeville Humor: The Collected Jokes, Routines, and Skits of Ed Lowry contains vaudeville jokes, skits, and routines from the first three decades of the twentieth century originally compiled by comedian Ed Lowry (1896–1983). Although occasionally found in bits and pieces in anthologies and in some period dramatic comedies, vaudeville humor has never before been available in one collection—performers rarely if ever kept a record of their jokes and routines. Fortunately, Ed Lowry was an inveterate collector. He kept copious notebooks of jokes and routines that he not only commissioned but also stole from other comics, clipped from newspapers, and copied from now defunct popular magazines of the day. Editor Paul M. Levitt has reorganized the material into categories that preserve some of the flavor of Lowry’s scrapbooks yet provide for finer distinctions. Part one, “Jokes,” is organized by subject matter and cataloged by genre, dialects, and wordplay. From “Accidents” to “Work,” this exhaustive catalog of humor features over one thousand jokes with topics that range from city slickers and country hicks through midgets and old maids to Swedes and tattoos. Part two, “MC Material: Biz, Jokes, Routines, and Skits” is germane to the job of master of ceremonies, routines, and skits. It features topics from fractured fairy tales to stuttering. Part three, an appendix, “Ed Lowry Laffter,”reproduces a privately published collection that is now a rare collector’s item. “Although some of the jokes can undoubtedly be found in other places,” explains Levitt in his introduction, “I know of no source as rich as this one for the twenties and thirties, a period so abundant in humor that for years afterward it fueled radio, cinema, and television.”
Author: Robert M. Lewis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801887488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399
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Book Description
Before phonographs and moving pictures, live performances dominated American popular entertainment. Carnivals, circuses, dioramas, magicians, mechanical marvels, musicians, and theatrical troupes—all visited rural fairgrounds, small-town opera houses, and big-city palaces around the country, giving millions of people an escape from their everyday lives for a dime or a quarter. In From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, Robert M. Lewis has assembled a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century primary sources that document America's age of theatrical spectacle. In eight parts, Lewis explores, in turn, dime museums, minstrelsy, circuses, melodramas, burlesque shows, Wild West shows, amusement parks, and vaudeville. Included in this compendium are biographies, programs, ephemera produced by theatrical entrepreneurs to lure audiences to their shows, photographs, scripts, and song lyrics as well as newspaper accounts, reviews, and interviews with such figures as P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Lewis also gives us reminiscences about and reactions to various shows by members of audiences, including such prominent writers as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, and Maxim Gorky. Each section also includes a concise introduction that places the genre of spectacle into its historical and cultural context and suggests major interpretive themes. The book closes with a bibliographic essay that identifies relevant scholarly works. Many of the pieces collected here have not been published since their first appearance, making From Traveling Show to Vaudeville an indispensable resource for historians of popular culture, theater, and nineteenth-century American society.
Author: Frederic LaDelle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Vaudeville
Languages : en
Pages : 20
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Book Description
Author: Geoffrey Hilsabeck
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781952271069
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Book Description
A dreamlike, evocative reckoning with a lost epoch in popular culture--and with old, weird America. At the heart of American Vaudeville is one strange, unsettling fact: for nearly fifty years, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, vaudeville was everywhere--then, suddenly, it was nowhere. This book tells the story of what was once the most popular form of entertainment in the country using lists, creation myths, thumbnail biographies, dreams, and obituaries. A lyric history--part social history, part song--American Vaudeville sits at the nexus between poetry, experimental nonfiction, and, because it includes historic images, art books. Geoffrey Hilsabeck's book grows out of extensive archival research. Rather than arranging that research--the remains of vaudeville--into a realistic picture or tidy narrative, Hilsabeck dreams vaudeville back into existence, drawing on photographs, letters, joke books, reviews, newspaper stories, anecdotes, and other material gathered from numerous archives, as well as from memoirs by vaudeville performers like Buster Keaton, Eva Tanguay, and Eddie Cantor. Some of this research is presented as-is, a letter from a now forgotten vaudeville performer to her booking agent, for example; some is worked up into brief scenes and biographies; and some is put to even more imaginative uses, finding new life in dialogues and prose poems. American Vaudeville pulls the past into the present and finds in the beauty and carnivalesque grotesqueness of vaudeville a fitting image of American life today.
Author: Anthony Slide
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496801083
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 1108
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Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville provides a unique record of what was once America's preeminent form of popular entertainment from the late 1800s through the early 1930s. It includes entries not only on the entertainers themselves, but also on those who worked behind the scenes, the theatres, genres, and historical terms. Entries on individual vaudevillians include biographical information, samplings of routines and, often, commentary by the performers. Many former vaudevillians were interviewed for the book, including Milton Berle, Block and Sully, Kitty Doner, Fifi D'Orsay, Nick Lucas, Ken Murray, Fayard Nicholas, Olga Petrova, Rose Marie, Arthur Tracy, and Rudy Vallee. Where appropriate, entries also include bibliographies. The volume concludes with a guide to vaudeville resources and a general bibliography. Aside from its reference value, with its more than five hundred entries, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville discusses the careers of the famous and the forgotten. Many of the vaudevillians here, including Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jimmy Durante, W. C. Fields, Bert Lahr, and Mae West, are familiar names today, thanks to their continuing careers on screen. At the same time, and given equal coverage, are forgotten acts: legendary female impersonators Bert Savoy and Jay Brennan, the vulgar Eva Tanguay with her billing as “The I Don't Care Girl,” male impersonator Kitty Doner, and a host of “freak” acts.
Author: DeAnna Cameron
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101561386
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
New York City in 1907 is a kingdom of endless possibilities for anyone who dares to dream. The Gilded Age has ended, and immigrants fill the bustling streets. The glamour of Broadway lures those who desire the limelight-but only a few are fortunate enough to thrive in the lights of a city that casts long, dark, and merciless shadows... Pepper MacClair and her mother arrived penniless in New York thirteen years ago, and their fortune has not changed. A dancer of fluid grace and motion, Pepper is still only one chorus girl among many, struggling for an opportunity to prove herself worthy of something bigger. For now, Pepper dances at The Chance, a rundown venue long past its prime. It is not only Pepper's workplace, where she has pushed her physical endurance to its limit, but also her home. And as the larger world changes around her and she is pulled into the intrigues of New York's elite, it is her last hope, not only to fulfill her dream, but to fulfill her heart.
