Abstract
{ 154 } BOOK REV IEWS ment industry), examine briefly military theatre since World War I, and a most effective summary that provides in a scant six pages a wonderful profile of the successes and failures of the Liberty Theatres, emerging “from a thicket of twisted motives and stumbling down a crooked path” to its initial openings, momentum in the spring of 1918, and final demise. Four appendixes, copious notes, and effective illustrations complete this superb effort (an excellence expected from the editor of the extraordinarily useful three-volume American Theatre Companies, 1986–89). —DON B. WILMETH Emeritus Professor, Brown University Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers. By Arthur Frank Wertheim. New York: Palgrave MacMillan , 2006. 332 pp. $75.00 cloth. Although the history of American vaudeville has been reasonably well examined , no work has focused so directly on the economic and managerial aspects of the industry as Arthur Frank Wertheim’s Vaudeville Wars: How the KeithAlbee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers. Using a combination of first-person accounts, primary source materials, and exhaustive financial data, Wertheim tracks the rise, merger, and fall of the two dominant forces in big-time vaudeville. The resulting narrative is a compelling and insightful look into the inner workings of an American entertainment monopoly . Wertheim begins in the mid-1880s, tracking the course of the young Benjamin Franklin Keith and his first theatre in Boston. The small venue began as a dime museum, featuring a mixture of variety acts and sideshow attractions such as“Boz, the Canine paradox, described as a‘dog with a human brain’”(15). In July 1885, in an effort to maximize his profits, Keith shifted his performance schedule to a continuous, repetitive rotation of acts, becoming one of the first to embrace the format that would become the defining characteristic of vaudeville . Wertheim’s narrative then details the addition of Edward Franklin Albee to Keith’s managerial staff, thus cementing the pairing that would become the foundation of the eastern vaudeville circuit. As the Keith-Albee story unfolds on the East Coast, Wertheim introduces \ { 155 } BOOK REV IEWS the history of the rise of the Orpheum circuit on the West Coast. German immigrant Gustav Walter’s Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco opened in 1897, featuring acts imported from the East as well as from Europe. Walter’s combination of popular and high culture appealed to a wide range of customers, achieving a profitable respectability that would later become the model for his Orpheum circuit. From these beginnings, Wertheim tracks the expansion of each circuit throughout the 1890s, including exhaustive details about key players, economic data, marketing strategies, and management structure. Under the shrewd financial direction of Morris Meyerfield, the Orpheum circuit added venues in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Omaha, and Denver, eventually opening a booking office in Chicago in 1889. Keith and Albee first added New York to their empire, successfully challenging the great Tony Pastor with their Union Square Theatre in 1893. They also followed the Orpheum’s notion of broad cultural appeal, with ticket prices at one of their Boston locations ranging from 15 cents to $1.50. By 1899 the circuit constituted four large theatres, one each in Boston, New York, Providence, and Philadelphia, with the Boston theatre alone averaging twentyfive thousand customers per week. Having detailed the origins of the Keith-Albee and Orpheum circuits, Wertheim then outlines the various attempts of vaudeville performers to organize resistance to the increasingly strong-armed tactics of management. Beginning with the formation in 1900 of the White Rats of America, the rapidly expanding circuits on both sides of America faced organized challenges to their employment practices. The middle portion of Wertheim’s book focuses on the continued consolidation of both circuits, the inner workings of their business operations, and the overall failure of the White Rats and other organizations to make any significant gains in rights for vaudeville performers. Keith and Albee joined with several other eastern managers in 1907 to form the United Booking Offices of America (UBO), and by 1913 the UBO had established a formal relationship with the Orpheum management to centralize control...
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