VAUDEVILLE QUOTES III

quotations about vaudeville

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Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight. Vaudeville's buoyant spirit no longer spoke to the country's mood, but burlesque did, loud and clear.

KAREN ABBOTT

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If vaudeville was an equal opportunity insulter, it was also an equal opportunity employer. Even "performers" with no real talent could find success on the stage if they could amuse and please. No matter that one had little or no legitimate singing, dancing, or comedic skills; if a performer could work up an act, especially a novelty act such as plate spinning, backward writing, crying, or sneezing, there was a place on the vaudeville bill. Mail-order courses for aspiring vaudevillians promised to turn anyone into a bicycle trick rider or a barrel-jumping, punching-bag, or mind-reading expert.

AMY WHORF MCGUIGGAN

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During its pinnacle, Vaudeville was both the king and queen of entertainment.

MAUREEN MCCABE

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If vaudeville was not, at the turn of the century, ready to lead the New Folk directly into the land of fun, and if practical considerations demanded the imposition of the "tone" of purity and refinement, the direction which mass entertainment would take in the success-oriented, pleasure-seeking, consumer economy of the mid-twentieth century was already being prophesied.

ALBERT F. MCLEAN, JR.

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Like the Yiddish theater and the circus, vaudeville was a family affair -- singing sisters, dancing brothers, and flying families.

ANONYMOUS

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Vaudeville was once about as big in American life as baseball. It was killed by talking pictures, the radio and the greed of its management. TV, we keep hearing, has brought about a vaudeville renaissance, but those of us who knew vaudeville in its great days doubt this. The pace of TV is too fast, its consumption of material too insatiable: perhaps the outstanding feature of the best vaudeville was the superb assurance of its performers. By the time an act had reached that vaudeville Mecca, the Palace Theater in New York, it was perfect of its kind. There is neither time nor loving care enough in TV to attain such perfection.

EDITORS

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Vaudeville was America in motley, the national relaxation. To the Palace, the Colonial, the Alhambra, the Orpheum, the Keith circuit and chain variety houses, N.Y. to L.A., we flocked, vicariously to don the false face, let down our back hair, and forget.

DOUGLAS GILBERT

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Vaudeville could not vouch for the honesty, the integrity, or the mentality of the individuals who collectively made up the horde the medium embraced. All the human race demands of its members is that they be born. That is all vaudeville demanded. You just had to be born. You could be ignorant and be a star. You could be a moron and be wealthy. The elements that went to make up vaudeville were combed from the jungles, the four corners of the world, the intelligentsia and the subnormal.

FRED ALLEN

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Vaudeville was loud, brassy, and vulgar. The product of an era, it caught and reflected certain facets of American life around the turn of the century, and for several generations it satisfied the cravings of millions of Americans for art and drama. In the most meaningful sense, vaudeville became an American institution. Then suddenly, and to a certain extent mysteriously, it faded.

ARNO L. BADER

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Vaudeville may be most resonant today because it illustrates how America has historically both absorbed and persecuted, or at least sidelined, diversity. Many vaudeville performers were from immigrant or minority backgrounds and found the industry to be a field of opportunity.

CELIA WREN

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Vaudeville was sinking already. A few people made it out; a disaster always has survivors.

ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

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The vaudeville theatre belongs to the era of the department store and the short story. It may be a kind of lunch-counter art, but then the art is so vague and the lunch is so real.

EDWARD ROYLE

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On those occasions when old-time vaudeville was exhumed for revival, in the main it was as a sugarcoated piece of nostalgia, an amateur event trotted out as a happy-time revue for a wholesome family or a cozy remembrance for senior citizens. Equipped with faux straw boaters, striped blazers, feather boas and canes, the young performers, who had little idea of the spice and bite of real vaudeville, sported wide smiles and mustered a golly-gee-whiz attitude that was sad in its artificiality. Vaudeville was theatrical, but it was not fake. It was corny, sophisticated, sarcastic, sentimental, melodramatic, subtle, sly, raucous, intimate, flamboyant, rude, exotic, hilarious, sad, lovely and, on occasion, boring. Until it faltered, it was real, as real as the people who pulled something out of themselves--their spirit, their talent, their personality, their fear and their courage--and put it onstage.

FRANK CULLEN

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Vaudeville was among the first forms of staged amusement in the United States to emerge as, quite simply, a mass-scale product. Unlike earlier entertainments, which involved small groups not acting in concert with one another, vaudeville developed as a hierarchically arranged, centrally controlled, large-scale commercial entity.

ANDREW L. ERDMAN

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Even if vaudeville offered only trivial and light- hearted distraction, that contribution alone to its mass audience, would merit distinction.

JOHN E. DIMEGLIO

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