The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York

by Robert W. Snyder

From 1880 to 1930, the vaudeville show reigned as the most popular form of entertainment in America. Vaudeville was a meeting place--an inclusive form of theatre that fostered cultural interaction between New Yorkers. With its daredevils, comics, tear-jerkers, slapstick clowns, and crooners,
vaudeville succeeded in presenting as many voices as New York City itself, allowing them to swell together in a chorus rarely in unison, sometimes in harmony, and always as loud, brassy, and quintessentially New York as the sound of the subway train roaring into Times Square.
Robert Snyder's entertaining and enlightening book depicts the rise of popular culture in America by brilliantly recapturing the essence and commercial trappings of one of its most vital forms of entertainment--the vaudeville show. Snyder reconstructs famous acts such as Eddie Cantor, Sophie
Tucker, and Weber and Fields; describes the different theaters from Broadway's famous Palace to local Bronx and Brooklyn venues; and demonstrates how entrepreneurs such as B.F. Keith and E.F. Albee created a near monopoly over bookings, theaters, and performers.
First exploring the early transformation of the variety theater into a more tasteful form of entertainment for middle-class women, men, and their families, he then introduces us to such influential showmen as Tony Pastor, who took vaudeville out of the Bowery without taking the Bowery
completely out of vaudeville. He brings us to the opening of Keith and Albee's theater on Union Square and describes their efforts to make vaudeville a nationwide industry, along the way offering lively descriptions of the performances of Maggie Cline, the lusty-voiced "Irish Queen" of Tony
Pastor's theater, Eubie Blake, the ragtime pianist, composer, and son of former slaves, and countless others. He also shows us vaudeville's decline, with the appropriation of vaudeville audiences by musical comedy, radio, and, most importantly, motion pictures, and the Depression and the closing of
the Palace--which became a movie house and featured as its first film The Kid From Spain , starring one of the kings of vaudeville, Eddie Cantor.
Within the vaudeville theater, New Yorkers found celebration and sentiment, freedom and confinement, abundance and exploitation, intimacy and bureaucracy, glitter and meanness; in other words, they found the voice of the city.

Genres: History

244 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Marti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very readable for a book that began as a dissertation. It's a good introduction to the topic for anyone interested in the business of Vaudeville as well as the rather risque material which helped to usher out Victorian morality.

What started in Bowery "concert saloons" in the mid 1800s, (a haven for everything contemporaries considered low and degraded, like minstrel shows and can can dancing) morphed into a well oiled capitalist machine providing mass entertainment under the Keith Orpheum circuit. The idea was to broaden the appeal of the Bowery by taming it (and removing alcohol on the premises), without eliminating everything that the "rowdies" liked about it. The variety of acts ensured there was something for everyone.

The headquarters of the operation in Times square was like the stock exchange where acts were bought and sold, then placed on a pre-ordained circuit. This formed the basis of other media conglomerates that came after it. It is commonly said that Vaudeville died after the advent of films in the 1920s, but many of the stars graduated to other forms of media like film, radio, TV, and standup.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even with a BA in Theatre Arts, much of the information in "The Voice of the City" was news to me. Robert W. Snyder presents vaudeville as it really was, at least in New York City. From "small-time" to "big-time" we see how it all came together as an entertainment force spanning the period post Civil War to the Great Depression. The book covers the topic from the theatre owners to the talent agencies to the acts (and their audiences) themselves. Most interesting is how acts promoting ethnic stereotypes actually helped to bring diverse communities together and promote cultural exchange. No matter what you think you know about vaudeville, this book is sure to offer new insight.

[Bill Lydon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wish there was more performers and less sociology.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just read this book for the second or third time and still enjoyed it very much. It is an excellent, scholarly, well-researched, but wholly accessible history of vaudeville, placing the form in its historical context and geographical setting.

[Devan Fronk]

Pretty informative and interesting, I feel like I got a good glimpse into the world of vaudeville and learned more than I thought I would from this book.

[Jeanne T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great piece about vaudeville in new york city at the turn of the century.