Vintage Photography, Advertisements And Playbills Illustrated: Lingerie, Bathing Beauties, Boudoir, Vaudeville, Burlesque And The Pin-Up

Book excerpt: Introduction To Vaudeville: The typical vaudeville show line-up By the turn of the century, there was a standardized lineup of acts on the vaudeville stage. The bill was divided into two parts with an intermission in the middle. The show would open with a "dumb act," usually an animal or acrobatic act. "Dumb" did not refer to the quality of the act, but rather to the fact that they did not rely on sound, and thus were appropriate to use as opening and closing acts when patrons were noisily entering and leaving. Dumb acts were rarely given prime positions on the bill. "The second act could be almost anything at all, as long as it provided more entertainment than the first act" (Di- Meglio 1973, 35). The third act "was intended to wake up the house, the number four to deliver the first solid punch, and the last before the interval a knockout that would bring them back wanting more" (Banham 1995, 1161- 1162). This fifth act usually had to feature a big name. After the intermission, the sixth act had to sustain the impact of the previous acts yet not supersede in popularity the ones that would follow. The main attraction or star would appear as the next to closing act. The concluding act was often called a chaser since it was meant to play as people would be exiting the theater early. Often a chaser was a motion picture. Some historians have indicated that the use of the motion picture as a chaser indicated its low position in the vaudeville theater, but it is also possible that it was used for closing merely because it, too, was a "dumb act" that need not rely on sound. The chaser, while allowing theater-goers to exit noisily if necessary, also had to be entertaining enough to keep the remaining audience members happy with the entire bill. The entire bill typically included eight to ten acts with some theaters using more or less. Motion pictures as vaudeville acts The novelty of a moving image being projected on a screen was first viewed by American in 1895. Vaudeville theaters were among the first venues for these early motion Edison/Armat Vitascope, Latham Eidoloscope, Lumiere Cinematographe, and Biograph "were all demonstrated in American vaudeville theatres" (Allen 1980, 4-5). There was a vast network of vaudeville theaters around the country and, therefore, motion pictures were seen by large numbers of people soon after their inception. Vaudeville theaters remained the primary setting for the exhibition of motion pictures for the next ten years. Theater patrons of the late nineteenth century were accustomed to many types of visual novelty acts on the vaudeville stage. These acts included magic lantern presentations, living pictures, pantomime, shadowgraphy, puppetry, and melodrama (Allen 1980, 311); The motion picture was simply the latest visual novelty to be shown on the stage. Possibly the earliest exhibition of a motion picture projector may have been that of the Lumiere Cinematographe in France, March 1895. In the United States, the first exhibition of a motion picture projector in a theater may have been the Latham Eidelscope in 1895. This machine was supposedly featured on Broadway in May 1895, and later moved to Hammerstein's Olympia vaudeville theater. The Latham Eidelscope subsequently appeared at Chicago's Olympia Theatre. The Eidelscope had technical limitations that made the projected image indistinct and therefore did not attract large audiences.