Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925
Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925

Author: David Monod

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1469660563

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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.

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925
Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Author: David Monod

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781469660578

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"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"--

American Vaudeville as Ritual
American Vaudeville as Ritual

Author: Albert F. McLeanJr.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0813184797

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This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticsm or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers—which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.

Vaudeville Wars
Vaudeville Wars

Author: A. Wertheim

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2009-02-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780230611368

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This book maps the intriguing story about how the tycoons of the two most powerful circuits, Keith-Albee in the East and the Orpheum in the West, conspired to control the big time. Despite the battles between the performers and the circuit moguls, the vaudeville wars forged an electrifying entertainment that at its zenith brought joy to millions.

From Traveling Show to Vaudeville
From Traveling Show to Vaudeville

Author: Robert M. Lewis

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2007-10

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0801887488

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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.

No Applause--Just Throw Money
No Applause--Just Throw Money

Author: Trav S.D.

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2006-10-31

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0865479585

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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.

American Vaudeville
American Vaudeville

Author: Geoffrey Hilsabeck

Publisher:

Published: 2021-07

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 9781952271069

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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.

Masturbation in Pop Culture
Masturbation in Pop Culture

Author: Lauren Rosewarne

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0739183680

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Through reference to over six hundred scenes from film and television—as well as a diverse and cross-disciplinary academic bibliography—Masturbation in Pop Culture investigates the role that masturbation serves within narratives while simultaneously mirroring our complicated relationship with the practice in real life and sparking discussions about a broad range of hot-button sexual subjects. From sitcoms to horror movies, teen comedies to erotic thrillers, autoeroticism is easily detected on screen. The portrayal, however, is not a simple one. Just as in real life a paradox exists where most of us masturbate and accept it as normal and natural, there simultaneously exists a silence about it; that we do it, but we don’t talk about it; that we enjoy it but we laugh about it. The screen reflects this conflicted relationship. It is there—hundreds and hundreds of times—but it is routinely whispered about, mocked and presented as a punchline, and is inevitably portrayed as controversial at the very least. Masturbation in Pop Culture investigates the embarrassment and squeamishness, sexiness and inappropriateness of masturbation, showcasing and analyzing how our complex off screen relationship is mirrored in film and television.

Settling Scores
Settling Scores

Author: David Monod

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-03-08

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0807876445

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Classical music was central to German national identity in the early twentieth century. The preeminence of composers such as Bach and Beethoven and artists such as conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler and pianist Walter Gieseking was cited by the Nazis as justification for German expansionism and as evidence of Aryan superiority. In the minds of many Americans, further German aggression could be prevented only if the population's faith in its moral and cultural superiority was shattered. In Settling Scores, David Monod examines the attempted "denazification" of the German music world by the Music Control Branch of the Information Control Division of Military Government. The occupying American forces barred from the stage and concert hall all former Nazi Party members and even anyone deemed to display an "authoritarian personality." They also imported European and American music. These actions, however, divided American officials and outraged German audiences and performers. Nonetheless, the long-term effects were greater than has been previously recognized, as German government officials regained local control and voluntarily limited their involvement in artistic life while promoting "new" (anti-Nazi) music.