8 - Vaudeville, Incorporated

Summary

By the 1880s much of variety had transformed from concert saloon to vaudeville. Variety moved into regular theaters with balconies, galleries, and so on, and was independent of saloons. The entertainment was changing from something akin to minstrel turns to something more like drama. Comic sketches – abbreviated forerunners of television situation comedies – displaced standup routines. But the more significant change was the nationalization and centralization of the industry wrought by Benjamin Franklin Keith, Edward F. Albee, and Frederick Freeman Proctor. These men and their partners built vaudeville theater chains and then combined them into an even more powerful nationwide booking agency that forced many independent theater owners and performers to become dependent clients of a national business. Tony Pastor had opened variety to a new audience of women and children. Keith and Albee and Proctor turned this newly respectable entertainment into big business. The United Booking Office had the power to offer or withhold employment from performers in theaters across the country, moving from house to house every week. To theater managers they offered a package of weekly changing bills of acts of predictable quality. The new generation of vaudeville entrepreneurs created what would be called big-time vaudeville in large, plush, downtown theaters, and combined these with small-time houses in outlying or less desirable locations that continued the earlier variety traditions. The booking agency made smalltime circuits as a sort of minor league to big-time circuits.