F. F. Proctor - Vaudeville Pioneer

F. F. Proctor - Vaudeville Pioneer PDF

Author: William Moulton Marston

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2017-08-25

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1473340934

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This vintage book contains William Marston's 1943 biography of Frederick Freeman Proctor, the famous variety entertainer of early twentieth century. Proctor was a vaudeville impresario who invented the method of continuous vaudeville. This fascinating and detailed biography is highly recommended for those with an interest in the life of this secretive theatrical legend. Contents include: "Top Billing", "Program Note", "An Acknowledgement to a Host of Contributions", "A Letter from Mr. George M. Cohan", "Enter: Freddie Proctor", "The Great Levantine", "King of the Vaudeville", "Building the Big Time", "Double Harness", "A Sterling Helpmate" "Ring Down the Curtain", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with its original artwork and text.

F. F. Proctor

F. F. Proctor PDF

Author: William Moulton Marston

Publisher:

Published: 2013-10

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9781258859398

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is a new release of the original 1943 edition.

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925 PDF

Author: David Monod

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1469660563

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance and asks: what made the theater so popular and transformative? Although he acknowledges its quirkiness, Monod makes the case that vaudeville became so popular because it offered audiences a guide to a modern urban lifestyle. Vaudeville acts celebrated sharp city styles and denigrated old-fashioned habits, showcased new music and dance moves, and promulgated a deeply influential vernacular modernism. The variety show's off-the-rack trendiness perfectly suited an era when goods and services were becoming more affordable and the mass market promised to democratize style, offering a clear vision of how the quintessential twentieth-century citizen should look, talk, move, feel, and act.

Historic Theaters of New York's Capital District

Historic Theaters of New York's Capital District PDF

Author: John A. Miller

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1467137464

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Experience the architecture and colorful history of the Historic Theaters of New York's Capital District as author John A. Miller charts the entertaining history. For generations, residents of New York's Capital District have flocked to the region's numerous theaters. The history behind the venues is often more compelling than the shows presented in them. John Wilkes Booth brushed with death on stage while he and Abraham Lincoln were visiting Albany. The first exhibition of broadcast television was shown at Proctor's Theater in Schenectady, although the invention ironically contributed to the downfall of theaters across the nation. A fired manager of the Green Street Theatre seized control of the theater with a group of armed men, but Albany police stormed the building and the former manager regained control.

Vaudeville Melodies

Vaudeville Melodies PDF

Author: Nicholas Gebhardt

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-03-22

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 022644872X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today. In Vaudeville Melodies, Nicholas Gebhardt introduces us to the performers, managers, and audiences who turned disjointed variety show acts into a phenomenally successful business. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, by 1915 vaudeville was being performed across the globe, incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its astronomical success relied on a huge network of theatres, each part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices. Gebhardt shows us how vaudeville transformed relationships among performers, managers, and audiences, and argues that these changes affected popular music culture in ways we are still seeing today. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Gebhardt explores the practices by which vaudeville performers came to understand what it meant to entertain an audience, the conditions in which they worked, the institutions they relied upon, and the values they imagined were essential to their success.

The Papers of Will Rogers: From vaudeville to Broadway : September 1908-August 1915

The Papers of Will Rogers: From vaudeville to Broadway : September 1908-August 1915 PDF

Author: Will Rogers

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2001-05-01

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9780806133157

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This third volume of The Papers of Will Rogers documents the evolution of Rogers's vaudeville career as well as the newlywed life of Will and Betty Blake Rogers and the birth of their children. During these years, the Rogerses moved to New York City, and after many years of performing with Buck McKee and horse Teddy, Rogers began a solo act in vaudeville as a talking, roping cowboy. He appeared on the same playbill with such performers as Fred Stone, Eddie Cantor, and Houdini, and his stage career expanded to include an appearance in the Broadway musical comedy "The Wall Street Girl." Volume Three ends with Rogers's successful transition from vaudeville to Broadway, on the brink of his breakthrough as a star of the Ziegfeld Follies.

Historical Dictionary of Vaudeville

Historical Dictionary of Vaudeville PDF

Author: James Fisher

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 691

ISBN-13: 153811335X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Vaudeville, as it is commonly known today, began as a response to scandalous variety performances appealing mostly to adult, male patrons. When former minstrel performer and balladeer Tony Pastor opened the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York in 1881, he was guided by a mission to provide family-friendly variety shows in hopes of drawing in that portion of the audience – women and children – otherwise inherently excluded from variety bills prior to 1881. There he perfected a framework for family-oriented amusements of the highest obtainable quality and style. Historical Dictionary of Vaudeville contains a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and the dictionary section has more than 1,000 cross-referenced entries on performing artists, managers and agents, theatre facilities, and the terminology central to the history of vaudeville. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about vaudeville.

American Vaudeville as Ritual

American Vaudeville as Ritual PDF

Author: Albert F. McLeanJr.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0813184797

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticsm or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers—which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.

Going Out

Going Out PDF

Author: David Nasaw

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1999-04-15

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0674417593

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

David Nasaw has written a sparkling social history of twentieth-century show business and of the new American public that assembled in the city's pleasure palaces, parks, theaters, nickelodeons, world's fair midways, and dance halls. The new amusement centers welcomed women, men, and children, native-born and immigrant, rich, poor and middling. Only African Americans were excluded or segregated in the audience, though they were overrepresented in parodic form on stage. This stigmatization of the African American, Nasaw argues, was the glue that cemented an otherwise disparate audience, muting social distinctions among "whites," and creating a common national culture.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes