Vaudeville

“ This age has been styled the age of the short-story and of vaudeville—it is, indeed, the age of the playlet.
The actor looking for a vaudeville vehicle today is not content with merely an incident that will give him the opportunity to present the character with which he has won marked success on the legitimate stage. Nor is he satisfied with a series of incidents, however amusing or thrilling they may be. He requires an offering that will lift his work into a more artistic sphere. He desires a little play that will be remembered after the curtain has been rung down. ”

“ In English usage “vaudeville” is practically synonymous with what is more generally known as “musical comedy,” but in America it is applied also to a music-hall variety entertainment. This modern sense is developed from the French vaudeville of the 18th century, a popular form of light dramatic composition, consisting of pantomime, dances, songs and dialogue, written in couplets. ”

“ To complete its claim to the title of variety, to separate itself from a likeness to the circus, to establish itself as blood brother of the legitimate stage, and, most important of all, to satisfy the craving of its audiences for drama, vaudeville tried many forms of the short play before the playlet was evolved to fill the want.
Everything that bears even the remotest likeness to a play found a place and had a more or less fleeting—or lasting—popularity. ”

“ The vaudeville audience is in the mood for rapid alterations of attention; it has the habit of variety. This is just as much a convention of vaudeville as the single play is now a convention of the traditional theatre. Indeed, anything longer than a one-act play in vaudeville would be frowned upon. Any one wishing to push the analogy can find more than one correspondence between a vaudeville program and the contents of a "popular" magazine; each, certainly, is the present refuge of short fiction. Yet vaudeville can hardly be considered an ideal cradle for a serious dramatic art. ”

“ The most carefully constructed definition cannot describe even the simplest thing with satisfying exactness. But the human mind is so formed that it have a definition for a guide to learn anything is new. Therefore let us set up this dogmatic definition:
A pure vaudeville two-act is a humorous talking act performed by two persons. It possesses unity of the characters, is not combined with songs, tricks or any other entertainment form, is marked by compression, follows a definite form of construction, and usually requires from ten to fifteen minutes for delivery. ”

“ Any vaudeville two-act that stepped behind the Olio and was able to hold a bit of a plot alive amid its murdering of the King's English and its slap-stick ways, took the name of "a sketch." But the "proper sketch," as the English would say—the child of vaudeville and elder half-brother to the playlet—did not make use of other entertainment forms. It depended on dialogue, business and acting and a more or less consistent plot or near-plot for its appeal. Usually a comedy—yet sometimes a melodrama—the vaudeville sketch of yesterday and of today rarely makes plot a chief element. ”

“ It is not at all uncommon for a playlet writer to be asked to fit some legitimate star, about to enter vaudeville, with a playlet that shall have for its hero or its heroine the particular character in which the star has had marked success. [1] And often a man and wife who have achieved a reputation in vaudeville together will order a new playlet that shall have characters modeled on the lines of those in the old playlet. ”

“ Yet there will be found still fewer dramatic offerings in vaudeville that do not conform to some of these principles. Such near-playlets succeed not because they evade the type, but mysteriously in spite of their mistakes. And as they conform more closely to the standards of what a playlet should be, they approach the elements that make for lasting success. ”

“ The great success of the return of Weber and Fields to vaudeville in 1915-16, with excerpts from their old successes, is only one more proof of the perennial value of sure-fire business.
Human nature—as we have analyzed it, with results that will be told you by the cashier at our bank—will laugh louder and oftener at these spectacles, in the respective order we have chronicled them, than at anything else one might name. Human nature here, as before, insists that the object of the attacks—the other man—be not really hurt. ”

“ We have no trouble in keeping vaudeville clean and wholesome, unless it is with some act that is just entering, for the majority of the performers are jealous of the respectable name that vaudeville has to-day, and cry out themselves against besmirchment by others. ”

“ Furthermore, when an experienced playwright sits down to write a vaudeville offering he does not consider definitions. He has in his mind something very definite that he plans to produce and he produces it irrespective of definitions. He is not likely to stop to inquire whether it is a sketch or a playlet. [1] The only classifications the professional vaudeville writer considers, are failures and successes. He defines a success by the money it brings him. ”

“ Edward Clark, the third collaborator, has written many successful vaudeville acts.
"The System" is said to have been characterized by Mr. George M. Cohan as the best one-act melodrama he ever saw. Its extraordinary popularity in this country and in England is but added proof of the tenseness of its scenes and its great ending. ”

“ How many people shall I have in my playlet? ought to be one of the very first questions the writer asks, for enough has been said in the earlier chapters, it would seem, to establish the fact that vaudeville is first of all a commercial pursuit and after that an artistic profession. While there can be no hard and fast rule as to the number of persons there may be in a playlet, business economy dictates that there shall be no more than the action of the playlet positively demands. ”

“ Abandoning his profession as assistant ship’s doctor in the navy, he went to Paris to study singing and acting. He had some experience at a small theatre, and was preparing to appear at the Opéra Comique when the director of the Vaudeville offered him an engagement. Here he made his début in 1821 in La Somnambule, and his good looks and excellent voice soon brought him into public favour. After several years at the Nouveautés and the Vaudeville, on the burning of the latter in 1838 he went to England, and married, at Gretna Green, Ienny Colon, from whom he was soon divorced. ”

“ To sum up the whole matter, a vaudeville playlet may be considered as preserving unity of time when its action occurs in continuous minutes of about the length the episode would take to occur in real life. ”

“ Vaudeville stars and artists, they call themselves for the sake of decency; and out of courtesy we countenance it. Yes, yes, I know. But remember, the women who come over the trail must be one or the other. There is no middle course, and those who attempt it are bound to fail. So you are a very, very foolish girl, and you had better turn back while there is yet a chance. If you will view it in the light of a loan from a stranger, I will advance your passage back to the States, and start an Indian over the trail with you to-morrow for Dyea. ”

“ The management of the Majestic Theater in Chicago always have a small sign at the side of the stage announcing the headline act for the following week. Upon this particular occasion this sign announced the coming of Mabel Hite and Mike Donlin.
There was a chap sitting down in front with his girl, who wanted her to think that he knew everybody and everything in Vaudeville. You know, one of those people who call all actors and actresses by their first names, and can tell you (incorrectly) all about their private affairs. ”

“ The commercial element of vaudeville often makes it inadvisable for a playlet to show more than one scene—very often an otherwise acceptable playlet is refused production because the cost of supplying special scenes makes it a bad business venture. ”

“ Out on the deck was a party of young folks: two of the girls were playing mandolins and they were all singing.
"'By Jove!' I exclaimed. 'That's a beauty! Whose is it?'
[72] "'Oh, that is Will Cressy's boat,' replied my friend impatiently. 'He is another of those Vaudeville people. There are a number of them over across the lake there, but we don't know them at all.'
"I sat for a while—thinking. Here I was, a recognized Broadway player of legitimate rôles, a man who could play any juvenile Shakespearian rôle without a rehearsal, a member of The Lambs and The Players Clubs. ”

“ The very nature of the playlet makes it the more difficult to achieve dramatic effect the more the number of characters is reduced. But while four persons are perfectly permissible in a playlet designed for vaudeville's commercial stage, the beginner would do well to make absolutely sure that he has reduced his characters to their lowest number before he markets his playlet, and, if possible, make a three-person or a two-person offering. ”

“ It is strange but true that a writer able to produce a successful vaudeville playlet often writes a successful full-evening play, but that only in rare instances do full-evening dramatists produce successful vaudeville playlets. ”

“ So that if a comedian has originated a funny story that makes a hit in New York, by the time he reaches Philadelphia he finds that another comedian has filched it and told it in Philadelphia, and the originator finds himself a dealer in second-hand goods.
It is manifest, I think, that vaudeville is very American. It touches us and our lives at many places. It appeals to the business man, tired and worn, who drops in for half an hour on his way home ”

“ The only Vaudeville shows we had at the time consisted of the somewhat too continuous performances of the monkeys and the poll-parrots right there in our own back-yard, so that that menace to the happy home was entirely unknown to us, and inasmuch as I was the only cook in all Christendom at the time, the idea of not coming home to dinner never occurred to Adam. It is true that at times he criticised my cooking, but in view of certain ”

“ All Artists, while playing "the Provinces" in England, stop at "lodgings," that is, private houses. The landlady always keeps a book, in which she has the visiting Artists write their autographs, and a line telling how much they have enjoyed her "lodgings."
E. J. Connelly got into one house where he did not feel like writing just what he thought about it; but the landlady was so insistent that finally he took the book and wrote—
"Quoth the Raven; E. J. Connelly."
One night at the Vaudeville Comedy Club the conversation drifted around to Stage Tramps. ”

“ VIOLA: Wait a minute till I go into the house and get a veil. The sunlight hurts my eyes. (She exits at L.)
CHARLIE: (Moving towards R.) That will just give me time to go into the grove and smoke a cigarette. (Exits.)
(Enter CHLORINDA from house. She has a green veil on, which hides her face; she sits down on bench.)
CHLORINDA: Ebery wench on dis plantation has got a fellah 'ceptin me, so I went to a fortune tellah an' she said Ah should sit on dis heah bench ebery day and ah nice fellah would come along. Well, I'se been doing it now for ovah a month an' Ah habent seen no nice fellah yet ”

“ The Whitonville Camera Club was to meet at Will Vaughan's house Wednesday evening. Whitonville is a town of some size in the western part of New York. Mr. Vaughan, Will's father, one of its earliest residents, lives in a large old-fashioned house on the main street, opposite the Whitonville Bank, of which he is president. All day the overcast sky had given promise of a downpour, and the sultry atmosphere, charged with electricity, presaged plenty of thunder and lightning before midnight. ”

“ A thick mist having risen up from the valley, the Vaudois set out, late at night, under the guidance of Captain Poulat, a native of the district, who well knew the paths in the mountains. They climbed up on to the heights above, over icy slopes, passing across gaping crevices and along almost perpendicular rocks, admitting of their passage only in single file, sometimes dragging themselves along on their bellies, clinging to the rocks or to the tufts of grass, occasionally resting and praying, but never despairing. ”

“ Like the Quakers, the Vaudois were a quiet, even a timid people. They did not seek the notice or the glory of the world. The life they loved the best was that of their lonely Alpine valleys, the simple days of shepherding among the fairy-haunted hills, the evenings when the head of every house read, in his own dialect, the Bible to his assembled children; the bursting of the flowers in spring (flowers which the Fantines, the Vaudois fairies, watch and water every day until they blow) ; the long days out on the hills in summer, when the cattle are led to the upper meadows ”

“ Inaction and waiting were the hardest of trials to this girl, child of the mountain as she was.
Patience, Rénée! The time for doing will come. The blood of heroes does not flow uselessly in your young veins; ‘to do’ comes by nature to hearts like yours; ‘to wait’ is a lesson taught by care Divine.
Some stray reports penetrated even to the far recesses of this valley, the most southern of all the Vaudois dwelling-places. Some wandering folk would come from Vigne or Villaro, outcasts like themselves, whom they might question. ”