Vaudeville 1881 1920

Before the American civil war America was dominated by burlesque acts and risqué performances. Theatre was not only a place to be entertained, it was for men to have a drink and predominantly aimed at men.

In 1881 a pioneer, Tony Pastor decided theatre shouldn't just be for men, that the shows were missing a whole audience. He wanted to make shows cleaner as a variety to appeal to a wider audience. The style was similar to that of a Cabernet or Britains Got Talent and was called Vaudeville. This was aimed at the middle class not just the rich. He then went on to removed risqué and crude performances. Also, he banned drinking in the theatre as he wanted to make it a family orientated activity.

He found that they could make a huge amount of money from performances such as the ones they were doing. And as the years went on the variety shows increased in diversity. Eg: mimes, riverboats were introduced. However there were still some risqué performances to cater for the rich with the burlesque taste.

The purpose of these performances wasn't to get emotionally attached to a scene. the sole purpose was to entertain.

Over the years from the 1880-1920 easiest way to entertain people was to make them laugh. Which was why an increasing number of performances contained comedy sketches and slapstick comedy.

The Demise of Vaudeville

Vaudeville became much more popular as the years went on as it appealed to many audiences featuring Irish and black people. However, these performances were designed to be racist, with people laughing at them whilst watching stereotypical racial performances.

However technology also become Vaudevilles competition as silent movies had started to come out and the cinema was much cheaper. Theatre was more expensive.

Consequently. Vaudevilles became less common as they could not support themselves as much as they once could leading to many theatres shutting down.

As we have progressed Vaudeville has been reborn into something called New Vaudeville, examples of which are BGT or the Royal Variety Show. However comedy sketches have been kept that were brought to life by Vaudeville by presenters such as Morcambe and Wise, Laurel and Hardy and Ant and Dec.


39 Steps is a spoof of Vaudeville performances.

What makes it New Vaudeville.

• Overtop physicality
• Comedy
• No character relationship
• Overtop voices
• Acknowledge audiences presence

Today, we were split into small groups of two or three and given separate scenes from 39 Steps. I took the role of Hannay whilst my partner, the Milkman. One of our main focuses early on was making sure our body language was over the top and exaggerated, as that would be a huge part in the comedy aspect. In addition, we noted that our voices needed to be distinctive and over the top, again, to engage the audience and make it funny. We included slapstick elements to our piece, such as when Hannay bumps into the Milkman, he runs round to catch him before he falls, as it would be a funny and unusual sight to see. In addition, we worked on a very slick coat change where we switch in a matter of seconds. These little things are just as important as dialogue in engaging our audience and making them laugh.

Afterwards, we performed short pieces of our scene in mime. The purpose of this was to see how good we were at portraying the situation and our characters personality and emotions purely through body language. This helped us understand just how important body language is in Vaudeville performances and that it tells a huge story on its own.