Vaudeville programs

This is not acceptable to the AVM and deviates from the original agreement with the Board of Regents. We have found other locations willing to take the remaining collections we have on hand but it has become too difficult for us to continue. Once they are gone, there will be no more. We will be auctioning off vaudeville. Thank you all for your years of support.

It is dedicated to the preservation, collection, presentation and publication of all vaudeville materials, records and effects as may advance and preserve the knowledge of vaudeville, its performers and its place in the cultural and social history of the United States.

Many made acts from the confusions of being a foreigner, while others displayed skills they had learned back in the old country. Once an act worked, performers repeated it in front of audience after audience. Many performers became known simply by their signature act.

With the advent of the radio, however, America found a free and easy way to tap into that variety of entertainment they had looked for in vaudeville. With such specialized skills, the performers continued to perform to smaller and smaller crowds. In time, theaters began to show films, and the few vaudevillians left took what work they could get performing between reels.

Ironically, it is through the movie and TV industry that vaudeville eventually left its greatest mark. Nearly every actor in the beginning of the century either performed or visited vaudeville. The silent movies, with former vaudevillians such as Burt Williams, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, incorporated the animated physical comedy of the vaudeville stage. Even today, shows such as Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live continue the traditions of popular variety entertainment.

Skip to main content Skip to footer site map. Burlesque, musical comedy and revue were live entertainment rivals to vaudeville, but they, like vaudeville, faced their greater challenge from flickering images on a flat screen. Movies were linked to vaudeville from the time they began to be exhibited to paying patrons.

Even before motion pictures presented stories on the screen, many people saw their first films at the close of a vaudeville bill. Those early exhibited films were primitive in technique. Moviemakers had barely begun to explore the possibilities of editing and continuity, and the available cameras, usually mounted on tripods, required a steady focus and stable source of light to properly capture images.

Cameras were repositioned only between scenes. Like many technological breakthroughs, radio presented different opportunities to different people. To those who developed the tools of broadcasting, the challenge was to send signals across a large area without delay between the transmittal and its reception. The telephone and telegraph had achieved some of that purpose when they managed to send, via cable, electronic impulses that converted back into distinguishable sounds such as words and music.

The first durable Trans-Atlantic Cable, laid across the ocean from Ireland to Newfoundland in , seemed at the time to be the major breakthrough in signal technology, but the future proved to be in wireless transmission. Radio, to those not involved in its development, seemed to burst on the American scene much as computers did more than a half century later.

But before radio ended up as a piece of talking furniture in millions of homes throughout the western world, it evolved through a long process beginning in the s with experiments in electromagnetic waves. During the s and early s, many individuals invented bits and pieces of the transmission and retrieval technology that culminated in with the first successful wireless broadcast of words and music.

Unlike the telegraph and telephone that transmitted messages between two fixed points, the great advantage of radio named for the process wherein electronic impulses radiated through the ether was that a receiver could be mobile as long as it remained within range of the sender. It was a communications boon between ships at sea and quickly was adopted by the military for its navies, whose communications via undersea cables could be cut.

Less grand but of greater interest to the eventual radio listener were the crystal radio receiver kits. A rudimentary predecessor of the radio receiver, the crystal set was the outgrowth of many years of experimentation dating from the nineteenth century.

The sets were manipulated by its users to scan the air to detect broadcast signals and to pull in, amplify and convert those signals into language and music.

Crystal sets were easily built by people with little or no training. Many became amateur enthusiasts who worked to improve and better integrate the components and enhance amplification. The New York Clipper was published weekly from to The accuracy of its news and the generous treatment accorded performers in minstrelsy, variety, vaudeville, musical comedy and moving pictures made the Clipper the most important and influential medium for people in the entertainment business.

The Clipper, first published by Harrison Fulton Trent on 14 May , was a competitor of the sensationalist Police Gazette, a weekly covering sporting activities and lurid stories of murder and mayhem. After two years of editorial and financial struggle, Trent sold the paper to its young editor, Francis Frank Queen.

During its early years, the Clipper devoted its space to sports news, including pugilism, sculling, billiards, running, horse racing and the beginnings of baseball.

The paper provided authoritative and reliable coverage for the most part disdained by the news dailies. The phonograph, radio and silent movies had once seemed the ultimate. Technology can enhance but does not define artistry. So creativity turns limits to advantages. A silent screen lacking dialogue and sound effects save musical accompaniment seems experimental and incomplete, yet the artists of the silent film created poetic masterpieces for which chatter and realistic sound effects would have been ruinous.

Deprived of words, the silent movie surmounted the barriers of specific language and became a universal art form. Then came radio, which offered sound but no picture.

Listeners, though, accustomed to phonograph records, were fully engaged by singers, orchestras, orators, news reports, stand-up comedians and dramas and comedies for which those at home provided the mental images. Even ventriloquists Edgar Bergen , mentalists Dunninger and tap dancers could succeed in a totally aural environment.

Skip to content Histories.