Vaudeville I: Rise and Decline of an Emergent Mass Culture

Abstract

Under its high-class French-sounding name, “vaudeville” became America’s premier mode of live entertainment from the mid-1880s until at least the early 1920s (although lasting for much longer) and was equivalent to the British music hall and the Parisian café-concert of roughly the same period. The vaudeville program in its heyday in cities such as Boston, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, usually consisted of from ten to fifteen individual stage variety acts, featuring magicians, acrobats, comedians, trained animals, jugglers, singers, dancers, and even the stars of grand opera and theater. The genteel-sounding term “vaudeville” itself may well have originated as a corruption of vaux-de-Vire, or the French satirical songs in couplets practiced in sixteenth-century Normandy’s valley of the Vire River, renowned for its popular music and fairs. Vaudeville’s American usage has been ascribed to the proprietor of Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, whose theater on West 23rd Street was prominent among New York’s prolific amusements.¹