Virtually vaudeville

A ONE-LEGGED TAP DANCER. A ventriloquist channeling Teddy Roosevelt. Midgets. Female impersonators. Sarah Bernhardt. E. Merian and his Kennel of Canine Players in a parodic “Elopement of Salome.”

Variety was the essence of vaudeville, the wildly popular entertainment that rampaged across American stages from the 1880s through about 1930, regaling all corners of the country with its motley acts – high art and low comedy, slapstick and opera, and even the odd performing mule.

Crystallized in Boston around 1883, when impresario B.F. Keith introduced performers and freak attractions to his theater and dime museum on Washington Street, vaudeville proved as diverse in its audience as it was in its programming, appealing to Americans of all classes and backgrounds. “There is always something for everybody,” wrote Keith’s partner E. F. Albee, whose son was the adoptive father of playwright Edward Albee. Vaudeville, he suggested, exemplified American democracy. (Boston’s historic Opera House, newly restored and set to reopen with great fanfare in July, was originally the B.F. Keith Memorial Theatre, built by Albee in 1928 as a monument to his partner.)

Not only did vaudeville help shape American musical theater, film, and television, many performers bred on vaudeville stages became cultural icons (W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, and Bob Hope, to name just three). In fact, vaudeville – the name derives from the French term voix de ville, or “voice of the city” – was largely responsible for the rise of a mass audience. “A lot of our popular entertainment today comes directly out of vaudeville,” says David Z. Saltz, incoming head of the University of Georgia’s drama department. Indeed, vaudeville represented “the beginnings of the very notion of a popular culture,” Saltz argues. It was “a lingua franca for people in America.”

Yet the colorful history of vaudeville itself has largely vanished from contemporary consciousness. So the time may be ripe for a groundbreaking, Web-based project that Saltz and a team of other theater historians have just launched, one that combines scholarship and cutting-edge technology to reintroduce vaudeville to the general public.

Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and part of a larger effort to develop a tool for performing-arts scholarship, “Virtual Vaudeville” (unveiled last Wednesday

at www.virtualvaudeville.com) is an interactive virtual-reality environment that recreates an 1895 vaudeville theater, based on New York City’s now-demolished Union Square Theater, complete with historically accurate architectural and decorative details – down to the spandrel panels over the proscenium. Filling the venue’s seats are 800 spectators whose animated reactions vary according to their demographics and seating location, from the parterre to the segregated second-balcony section reserved for African Americans.

Playing to this audience are cyber-incarnations of several historical vaudeville performers, beginning with ethnic comedian Frank Bush and, starting in January 2005, Eugene Sandow, a strongman who paraded on stage in the scantiest of briefs and, for a fee, allowed ladies to feel his muscles backstage afterwards.

Eventually, in addition to watching the performers from different angles, viewers will not only be able to zoom through the virtual theater space but will also be able to switch to “avatar mode,” which allows one to adopt the perspectives of four people typical of an 1895 audience: a middle-class African-American man and his date, a middle-class woman and her 6-year-old daughter, a recent Italian immigrant, and a showgirl who’s with a wealthy playboy. The four profiles were chosen to represent a range of social and economic backgrounds, highlighting vaudeville’s diverse appeal, a range of seating areas (the immigrant sits in the cheaper gallery seats, the African Americans in the segregated section, etc.), and a range of behaviors, reflecting age and background.

Meanwhile, links that appear in onscreen icons as the performances unfold supply footnotes – a helpful resource when you’re absorbing a 19th-century joke about bustles or antiquated slang like “glass puteen” (a window installer).

Both of those appear in the Frank Bush skit, “The Hebrew Glazier,” in which the performer parodies a tippling Irish-American home-owner and a Jewish “sheeny,” reeling off jokes steeped in ethnic stereotypes. Understanding the impact that acts like Bush’s had on spectators was crucial to the work of Saltz and his team. Audience reaction is key to live art, even if it leaves scant traces in the historical record.

“It’s been difficult for theater historians to be able to document and research what happened with theater audiences during the long 2,000 years or so of theater history we have evidence about,” says Bruce McConachie, a University of Pittsburgh professor who is a former president of the American Society for Theatre Research, and who worked on “Virtual Vaudeville.”

“Most of what we know about the past is about plays and their production, and less about the audience and the play’s reception.” In fact, it was frustration at this academic shortfall, and not zeal for vaudeville itself, that originally motivated the work of McConachie and his teammates. Vaudeville was a desirable genre to work with in part because the acts were short (simulating, say, Tartuffe, would be prohibitively labor-intensive) and heterogeneous. “We did want to look at audience response to a range of theatrical offerings,” McConachie says, “and vaudeville gives us that.”

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Reconstructing these audience reactions raises quandaries that are not just academic and technological, but social and political. The project “isn’t meant to be simply light entertainment,” says Saltz. “We’re confronting people with 19th-century cultural history – both the fun part of it, and the parts that now strike us as disturbing.”

The disturbing aspects include not only ethnic cliche-stoked acts like Bush’s but also blackface numbers. The creators of “Virtual Vaudeville” considered reproducing a performance of this latter type, but rejected the idea as “too explosive,” in Saltz’s words. “The image of blackface,” he says, “is incredibly loaded; it produces a very powerful, visceral reaction in people.”

Recreating vaudeville acts has been tricky enough as it is: C.B. Davis, the professor in the University of Georgia’s drama department who researched and edited “The Hebrew Glazier,” had to track down reviews of Bush’s shtick in now-defunct publications like the Dramatic Mirror (a theatrical trade journal published in New York between 1879 and 1922), as well as in turn-of-the-century pamphlets that reprinted (without permission) popular performers’ choicest songs and jokes. A document in Brown University’s archives contained a script of “The Hebrew Glazier,” but Davis really got lucky, he says, when he located – on eBay, no less – an Edison cylinder recording of Bush performing.

The Edison cylinder was made available to actor George Contini, who performed “The Hebrew Glazier” in front of cameras. Through the magic of motion-capture (the technology that brought you Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings”), Contini’s voice and movements provided the basis for the “Virtual Vaudeville” act, in which an uncanny simulation of a human being scurries onto the stage, dressed at first in gray shirt, black cap, and black pants with a hole in the seat, and starts capering through his routine.

“We automatically think of it as racial stereotypes,” Davis says of Bush’s act, “but at the time when he presented his Irish and Jewish characters, there would have been a certain amount of solidarity among the Irish [audience members] when the Irish character came out.” And since each vaudeville performance was a motley of acts, spectators of other ethnicities would be lampooned in turn. “It was all equal-opportunity mockery,” Saltz observes. “You knew that in any given vaudeville performance you’d see a half dozen or more different ethnic groups being made fun of.”

Despite the xenophobic overtones, vaudeville’s tropes helped orient Americans in an increasingly complex racial and ethnic landscape, Saltz suggests. “At the time, the majority

of the people in that audience would have been first-generation, and for many English wasn’t their first language,” he explains. So vaudeville was “a way for people to be introduced into American culture by seeing that they were not alone.”

This ethnic humor became a progenitor of many stereotypes that linger to this day, Saltz adds. Davis, fresh from his work on “The Hebrew Glazier,” seconds the idea. “Whenever you’ve heard Robin Williams or Billy Crystal go into their Jewish guy, they’re going all the way back to Frank Bush and that character, the stage Jew,” he says.

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The issue of ethnic stereotypes is just one example of how deeply vaudeville is imprinted on our own popular culture, though other aspects of its legacy are less troubling. Television has long reverberated with vaudevillian rhythms. Many variety shows of yesteryear were virtual equivalents of the stage-variety format.

“The Ed Sullivan show was probably the last true vaudeville,” Saltz says. Yet even today, he points out, “shows like David Letterman and Jay Leno bring in their specialty acts, and they bring in their singers. The talk-show format is basically a descendant of the vaudeville format. . . . If you’re bored with Billy Crystal, wait two seconds and you’ll get Mariah Carey or whoever.”

Rather than the talk-show format itself, however, the real legacy of the Keith/Albee era may be the concept of “the all-American guy in a suit who makes an entire nation laugh.” So argues the writer and performer Trav S.D., whose history of vaudeville is slated to be published in 2005. “What Leno and company owe to vaudeville is their conception of the ‘stand-up comedian,’ ” he emphasizes, tracing that iconic image “back to Hope and Benny and Berle and ultimately back to Frank Fay” – a monologist who was a vaudeville headliner.

And Fay’s heirs have infiltrated not just television but more aesthetically rarefied circles as well. Performers such as the celebrated clown, actor, and playwright Bill Irwin (recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant) and the juggling Flying Karamazov Brothers – who specialize in postmodern interpretations of juggling, magic acts, and the like – have been labeled “new vaudevillians.” The fact that artists like Irwin appear in regional theaters and “present what they do in the context of ‘high art,’ ” Trav S.D. suggests, makes them “a sort

of renegade movement” in the annals of populist vaudeville. He discerns a separate school of contemporary performers, like the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and disciples of the “new burlesque,” who adhere to more unassuming, let’s-entertain-them values.

Some of these artists may be nearer than you think: In the past few years, according to Trav S.D., purveyors of traditional vaudeville repertoire – ventriloquists, magicians, and so on – have been plying their trade in bars and nightclubs. Perhaps it’s fitting that an academic project like “Virtual Vaudeville” should appear just as vaudeville-inspired acts are resurging in such locales. After all, vaudeville historically bridged social and cultural divides, and the gap between today’s barroom and the ivory tower is not much greater than the gulf that might have yawned, in vaudeville’s heyday, between fans of Sarah Bernhardt and admirers of Frank Bush’s crude humor.

Celia Wren is the managing editor of American Theatre.