Variety Theatre Research Articles

Teddy Brown and the Art of Performing for the British Variety Stage

British variety theatre has been largely ignored by theatre historians, in spite of its huge popularity in the early twentieth century. Here, Oliver Double examines variety through its exemplification in the work of one performer, Teddy Brown, a virtuoso xylophone player whose career coincided with the heyday of the variety stage between and just after the two world wars. The key historical and stylistic aspects of the form typified by Brown's success included the development of a stage persona, novelty, skill, participation, a distinctive musical style, and the ability to exploit the complex relationship between variety and the other types of popular entertainment of the time, notably cinema, revue, and radio. Former comedian Oliver Double is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005). His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas is available from the University of Kent website.

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

James Stokes Ellis

Jim Ellis was born in Selborne, Hampshire. He was brought up in Eastbourne, where he was educated as a day boy at Eastbourne Preparatory School. There he met his lifelong...

Interrogating America through theatre and performance

Savage Other: Indianizing and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Culture R.K. Bank Defining Faith: Theatrical Reactions to Pro-Slavery Christianity in Antebellum America A.E. Hughes Negotiating a New Identity: Irish-Americans and the Variety Theatre in the 1860s S. Kattwinkel Drama and Cultural Pluralism In America of Susan Glaspell's Inheritors. N.H.Real Beneath the Horizon: Pipe Dreams, Identity, and Capital in Eugene O'Neill's First Broadway Play J.E.Jenkins Vernacularizing Brecht: Political Theater of the New Deal I.Saal Let Freedom Ring: Mordecai Gorelik's Politicized Stage Designs A.Fletcher Choreographing Re-defining American Ballet in the Age of Consensus A.Harris Arthur Miller: In Memoriam C.Bigsby Menageries, Melting Pots, Movies: Tennessee on America J.V. Haedicke Facts on Trial: Documentary Theatre and Zoot Suit J.O'Connor The Ground on Which I Stand is I, Too, Am America: African American Cycle Dramatists, Dramas and the Voice of Inclusion L.Menson-Furr My Uncle Sam in Consumer Society: Len Jenkin and the Death of Death of a Salesman S.Feffer From Paradise to Parasite: Information Theory, Noise, and Disequilibrium in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation M.Heuvel Not Very Steven Spielberg?: Angels in America on Film D.Geis Reflections in a Pool: Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses and post-9/11 New York City A.Nouryeh An American Echo: Suzan-Lori Parks's America Play and James Scruggs's Disposable Men R.Vorlicky List of Contributors Index

Montreal-Glasgow

Edited by Bill Marshall. University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 2005. xiv+262 pp. Pb £15.00. This well-edited volume deals with the culture (in the broadest sense) of two great cities and is divided into several sections: Architecture, History, Literature, Theatre, Film and Television, and Exchanges. The approach is largely but not exclusively comparative. Holly Kinnear shows how personalities involved with both cities were responsible for the impact made on their urban landscapes by the Beaux-Arts movement, and François Dufaux underlines the high proportion of rental accommodation in the shape of multi-family tenement-type buildings to be found in both cities, but notes a number of differences in their architectural conceptions. Alena Prochazka discusses the extent to which major new buildings in Montreal conform to the established character of the city's built environment. Iain Stevenson studies the Canadian Pacific service of passenger liners that linked the two cities for much of the twentieth century, illustrating the chapter with several stunning poster images. The Scottish presence in Montreal is explored in two chapters by Gillian Leitch and Paul-André Linteau, and Harold Bérubé compares major commemorations of their history, during the crises of depression or war, by the two cities as well as by Toronto. The fine arts are represented by Alexandria Pierce's study of Lord Strathcona's art collection in nineteenth-century Montreal. Sébastien Socqué highlights the importance of the writer and politican, André Laurendeau, in integrating Montreal's cosmopolitan and exceptional character into a coherent notion of French Canada. As for literature, Maureen E. Waters explores the Gothic in the urban landscape of the two cities, although her text reads like the synopsis of a much longer work. Jacques Cardinal provides a dense interpretation of Jacques Ferron's novel, Les Confitures de coings, highlighting the political dimension of the work. Jean-François Chassay compares Gaétan Soucy's L'Immaculée Conception (1994) and Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers (1999), but the two novels seem too distant, in every sense, to lead to significant insights. Bill Findlay demonstrates how Glasgow audiences were particularly receptive to translations into vernacular Scots, by Martin Bowman and Findlay himself, of plays by Michel Tremblay, because of the continuing tradition of variety theatre in the city. David Hutchison studies the manner in which television drama with a Glasgow context portrays working-class, but rarely middle-class, experience and hence in some sense betrays the complexity of modern Scottish, especially Glaswegian, life. Pierre Véronneau, in a notably well-written text, contrasts the approaches to Montreal of two of French Canada's most significant film directors, Denys Arcand and Charles Binamé, and Bill Marshall's contribution is a well-realized comparison of the work for the cinema of Marc-André Forcier and Peter Mullan. The book concludes with Mark Rowbotham's study of Prestwick's Freeport and Montreal-Mirabel's foreign trade zone, a feature of the two cities likely to be little known outside business circles, and Michel Sarra-Bournet's overview of Montreal's cultural institutions, their history and probable future directions. This is, all in all, a varied and stimulating volume.

Simple Pleasures: the Ten-Minute Play, Overnight Theatre, and the Decline of the Art of Storytelling

The ten-minute play is burgeoning in the United States, yet it is a phenomenon which has received virtually no critical attention. Here, a contributing playwright places the ten-minute play – and its cousin, the ‘overnight’ play – within an historical and theoretical context in order to examine the aesthetic and political implications of the genre. Rick Mitchell's discussion thus ranges between the history of the one-act play, Walter Benjamin's essay on storytelling, Bertolt Brecht's notions of ‘complex’ (as opposed to ‘simple’) pleasures and epic acting, Filippo Marinetti's writings on the variety theatre, and Chekhov's ideas about the strengths of the short, nonsensical, vaudeville farce. Rick Mitchell also relates his own recent experience in creating a ten-minute comedy, Acadiana Sludge – written, rehearsed, and performed (off-book) in less than twenty-four hours – and the text of this play augments the article. Rick Mitchell's other plays include Brecht in L.A., Ventriloquist Sex, Urban Renewal, Potlatch, and The Composition of Herman Melville, recently published by Intellect Books. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he directs the Northridge Playwrights Workshop, and he has published numerous articles about performance, theory, and playwriting.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

The Actress in Victorian Pornography

Decades before the theories of conditioned reflexes and behavior modification were expounded in England, moral reformers recognized that to control passions in the Skinnerian boxes of Victorian theatres passionate stimuli must be checked. The need to control passionate stimuli was a concern limited to a few, for only a few who understood the stimulants and the nature of the passions were willing to eradicate a socially sanctioned source of so much erotic pleasure. If the vast majority of playgoers were indifferent to the sensual marketplace inside the variety theatres' promenades and outside the legitimate theatres' colonnades, they wholeheartedly defended the sensual content of performance and patronized it faithfully.

Theatre on the Frontier: Winnipeg in the 1880s

The paper discusses the influence of the frontier environment on theatres in Winnipeg during the 1880s by looking at the suppression of variety theatres by the City Council and the role in the community of the Princess Opera House and its resident stock company.

Radlov's Theatre of Popular Comedy

Sergei Radlov (1892-1958) is remembered today chiefly for his inventive Shakespearean productions of the Thirties, during the last period of theatrical experimentation in Stalinist Russia. Yet, Radlov was largely responsible for the growth of an entirely new performance mode in the Soviet theatre—Constructivism. During the years 1920-1922, Radlov's Petrograd group, Theatre of Popular Comedy, drawing its inspiration from Yuri Annenkov's production of The First Distiller (September 24, 1919), popularized many of the performance concepts of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's “Variety Theatre Manifesto.” Within a few months, however, Radlov began to introduce changes that would radically alter the development of Soviet theatre.Like Annenkov, Radlov received his earliest training in the pre-Revolutionary studios of Nikolai Evreinov and Vsevolod Meyerhold. By the winter of 1918, after organizing the agitational group, The First Communal Troupe in Petrograd, Radlov mounted comic reconstructions of ancient Greek and Russian farces under the auspices of the Theatre Department of the Ministry of Education (TEO).

Two Manifestos: The Influence of Italian Futurism in Russia

From the very beginning of the Futurist movement in Italy in 1909, Russian artists, poets, and critics were well informed about the movement's manifestos and general development. Strong schools of Futurist poetry and painting quickly came into being. By 1913, Russian Futurism was already in full force. In that year, on December 2 and 3, the first Futurist theatre productions took place: Vladimir Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Kruchenykh's Victory Over the Sun (T52). However, Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh were not familiar with the first Futurist manifesto devoted to theatre: the Variety Theatre Manifesto (September 29, 1913). Their plays and productions were influenced by general Futurist principles, rather than a specific theatrical theory.