Ziegfeld Follies Research Articles

The Prompter's Box: Back to the Future: One-Hundred Years after Ibsen

The Prompter's Box:Back to the Future: One-Hundred Years after Ibsen Alan Ackerman [T]he man suddenly began to speak to me. He was traveling to Boston, he said, to visit his grown son who was in the hospital. A disease had, among other consequences, impaired the son's speech, so that he could only mouth words soundlessly; still more seriously, as a result of the illness, he had lost his will to live. The father was going, he told me, to try to restore that will, but he was troubled by the thought that he would be incapable of understanding the son's attempts at speech. He had therefore a favor to ask me: would I mime a few sentences so that he could practice reading my lips? Would I say, soundlessly, "I want to die. I want to die"? Taken aback, I began to form the words, with the man staring intently at my mouth: "I want to . . ." But I was incapable of finishing the sentence. "Couldn't I say, 'I want to live'?" Or better still (since the seat belt sign had by this time flashed off), he might go into the bathroom, I suggested lamely, and practice on himself in front of a mirror. "It's not the same," the man replied in a shaky voice, then turned back to the window. "I'm sorry," I said, and we sat in silence for the rest of the flight. -Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (255) Stephen Greenblatt's comic-tragic, autobiographical parable for his New Historicist project, "to explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyze the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity," is marked by a radical and irremediable alterity, a sense of difference between self and other that is impossible to overcome (256; emphasis added). It also indicates a tension between writing and orality (or performance); the "impaired" speech of the son here is silent and leads only to more silence, the difference in the text, [End Page 225] as Michel de Certeau describes it in The Writing of History, like "a missing precious stone" waiting for a "writing to circumscribe it" (213, 210). The role-playing proposed by the father on the airplane leads not to communication but to isolation, even to a form of pathetic (sorrowful) solipsism. Of the two men borne together in (a return) flight, it is not an angel of history but a historian who turns "lamely" back to his book (Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures). The father, "an isolated, needy individual," his face to the window, looks into a vacant exterior space or into himself (who knows?), as both are propelled forward by a jet engine yet also back to another figure of history - this one not a heavenly vision but a speechless son, an emblem of descent, wrapped in a quotidian, decaying, and incommunicable reality (256). This tragic-comic quality, elsewhere described, in similarly paradoxical terms, as a "lightly ironic piety," haunts Greenblatt's enormously influential critical practice (Greenblatt, "Prologue" 9). In one of his most vivid and intimate, yet also hilarious and publicly oriented, anecdotes, the literarily entitled "Prologue" to Hamlet in Purgatory," Greenblatt describes his own father's obsession with death, a fascination characterized by a blend of wonder and denial informed by a tension between the theatrical and the anti-theatrical, that appears ironically to have been transmitted across the generations: The wonder had a specific origin: my grandfather had died in New York. . . .My father then had to bring back the body to Boston by train. The coffin was in the baggage car; and my father was sitting quietly weeping in the club car, when in New Haven, Connecticut, the entire chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies climbed on board. The chorus girls, leggy, buxom, bejeweled, bedecked in feather boas and wide-brimmed hats, sweetly crowded around my weeping father, kissing and hugging him and trying to cheer him up. It was perhaps my father's purest encounter with the wonderful power of eros over...

The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s

In this insightful new book, Mark Franko explores the many genres of theatrical dancing during the radical decade of the 1930s and their relationship to labor movements, including Fordist and unionist organizational structures, the administrative structures of the Federal Dance and Theatre Project, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the Communist Party. Franko shows how the structures of labor organization were reproduced and acted out but also profoundly reasoned through in corporeal terms by choreography and performance of the proletarian mass dance, the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies and the reflexive backstage musical film, Martha Graham s modern dance, the revolutionary dance movement of the proletarian avant-garde, African-American ethnic opera-ballet, and Lincoln Kirstein s American ballet. The contributions of many important personalities of American theatrical, visual and literary culture are included in this study. Franko's focus extends from the direct impact of performances on audiences to the reviewing, reporting and photography of print journalism.

Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music (review)

Reviewed by: Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music Wayne Schneider Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music. Volume I: 1890– 1930. By Don Rayno . ( Studies in Jazz, 43.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2003. [ xxviii, 775 p. ISBN 0-8108-4579-2. $49.95.] Illustrations, chronology, discography, bibliography, indexes. Paul Whiteman (1890-1967) was the most popular dance orchestra leader in America in the 1920s, and surely one of the most controversial figures in American popular music. Classically trained, Whiteman played viola in the Denver Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Minetti String Quartet. Lured by syncopated dance music, ragtime, and the intoxicating rhythms of early jazz, Whiteman organized a successful dance orchestra in California in 1918, later moving to Atlantic City, and eventually settling in New York in 1920. Recording contracts with Victor and later Columbia spread the orchestra's popularity nationwide. Whiteman's recording of "Whispering" (1920) backed with "The Japanese Sandman"—only the eleventh one-million-record seller since the birth of the recording industry—sealed his fame. As the twenties roared, the Whiteman Orchestra swelled in size (from a few players to nearly thirty) and glory, dominating popular music entertainment. The orchestra headlined Broadway revues (George White's Scandals, Ziegfeld's Follies), held court in fabulous New York hotel ballrooms, and toured extensively in the United States and abroad. Paul Whiteman, Inc., sponsored "satellite" bands that played officially sanctioned concerts of authorized Whiteman musical arrangements. The orchestra was featured on radio (The Old Gold Hour), and in half a dozen films—most famously, The King of Jazz (1930). The Depression hit big bands hard in the 1930s, but Whiteman persevered with a smaller, brassier ensemble. Embracing the new technology of television in the 1940s, Whiteman conducted studio bands for pioneer broadcasts of Goodyear Revue, Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club, and others. Whiteman was music director of ABC-TV until his retirement in the 1960s. In his heyday in the 1920s, Whiteman's musical recipe served up dance music, rhapsodic arrangements of popular songs, syncopated versions of light classics, and concert music—what Whiteman called "symphonic jazz." The highlight of Whiteman's career was his much-ballyhooed "Experiment in Modern Music," at Aeolian Hall in New York, 12 February 1924. This "educational" concert was designed to show the progress of jazz from its "crude" origins to the refined heights of 1924s popular music. The showstopper of the concert, of course, was the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, for piano and jazz band, featuring its 26-year-old Tin Pan Alley composer George Gershwin at the piano. The same year, flushed with commercial success, Whiteman's publicity team resurrected the slogan "King of Jazz," first applied to Whiteman during a 1919 gig at the Maryland Hotel in Pasadena. Whiteman was uncomfortable with the title, but it stuck to him—for good or ill—for the rest of his life. Clearly, Whiteman knew what jazz music was, generally, and hired the best white "hot" jazz soloists he could find, often scooping them up from failed white jazz bands. Whiteman featured these hot soloists in spotlight sections of his arrangements, bookended (smothered, some say) by the entire ensemble. For years, jazz aficionados have blamed the Whiteman Orchestra's top salaries and bland stylings for the alcoholism and early death of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931), Whiteman's most famous hot soloist. Not surprising, then, that the "King of Jazz" publicity stunt has stuck in the collective craw of many jazz performers, fans, and writers for decades. So Don Rayno's enormous new biography of Whiteman begins on the defensive. Editor Norman P. Gentieu, in "Some Comments," describes jazz writers Marshall Stearns and Otis Ferguson as "early Whiteman bashers, whose eager-beaver epigones are still around today and still slicing the same stale baloney" (p. ix). William Youngren, in the excellent foreword, takes on the Beiderbecke fans, arguing that Beiderbecke loved the discipline of the [End Page 114] Whiteman Orchestra, was alcoholic before joining Whiteman, and succumbed in spite of Whiteman's efforts to keep him healthy. After those sour notes, Rayno's biographical narrative (pp. 1-250) follows Whiteman to May 1930. The chronicle unfolds year-by-year, always very...

Review Essay: "Something You Don't Expect": The Recordings of Bert Williams

Williams: Middle Years, 1910-1918. Archeophone, 2002. $17.75 CD. Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922. Archeophone, 2001. $17.75 CD. Everybody, it seems, has an opinion on Williams. Unfortunately, Williams is known today more by his reputation than his repertoire. Whether praised as a comic genius or vilified as a burnt cork darky stereotype, Williams suffers from a tragic lack of reissue projects has kept his recorded legacy nearly a secret from current generations. reissue of his complete extant works as they are being released on Archeophone label, however, makes Williams' fascinating, highly entertaining, historically important work available for re-evaluation and demonstrates just how talented, important, and influential a figure he was, a figure even Booker T. Washington acknowledged had done more for African Americans than Washington himself had done: has smiled his into people's hearts. I have been obliged to fight my way (Charters 6). We wear mask, Paul Laurence Dunbar began his famous poem of same name, that grins and lies, and in a particularly poignant this was true of one of great comedians of twentieth century, Egbert Austin Bert Williams. Born in 1874, light-skinned Williams, of Danish and West Indian extraction, from a well-to-do background in Antigua, found himself relegated to lower socioeconomic rungs in this country with rest of his darker-skinned brethren when he and his family moved to San Francisco in 1885. When he discovered his talent as a mimic at a young age, he sought work in shows, but ultimately wound up performing on streets and in clubs on Barbary Coast after his graduation from high school and brief attendance at Leland Stanford University. That is, until a felicitous sequence of events paired him with George Walker and set two on a bumpy road toward stardom in touring shows of day. Although two initially scorned grotesque blackface minstrel stereotypes had been in force for half a century, they eventually capitulated to demands for lying, thieving, shiftless, superstitious, gullible, ignorant, lazy, or dandified and comically vain images fed feelings of white superiority as they appeared on stage. While other shows advertised presence of blackface coons, Williams and Walker advertised themselves as The Two Real Coons, doing their best to please predominantly white crowds while lending an air of dignity to figures draped in shameful indignities and shuffling under a shock of artificial kinky hair. They were a huge hit in such shows as Clorindy (where they popularized cakewalk), A Lucky Coon, Bandanna Land, and In Dahomey. Williams later went on to star with Ziegfeld Follies after George Walker fell ill. All while, he lamented his lot as an educated, upper class African American longing for mainstream respectability would not be offered to him. He was quoted as saying in his understated there was nothing disgraceful about being colored, but he often found it inconvenient--in America (Charters 12). James Weldon Johnson would use quote in his passing novel of 1912, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (155). Johnson also commented in chapter seven of novel Here was a man who made people laugh at size of his mouth, while he carried in his heart a burning ambition to be a tragedian; and so after all he did play a part in a tragedy (105-06), particularly since, as Johnson recalled in Along This Way, his actual demeanor was entirely unrecognizable as shambling, shuffling 'darkey' he impersonated on stage (Jasen 48). It was a quote could well be applied to Williams, who was called by fellow Ziegfeld performer W. C. Fields the funniest man I ever saw, and saddest man I ever knew (Debus, His Final Releases). While seen as a natural at what he did, ironically Williams in fact had to learn dialect he mastered for his audience since his own background and diction placed him far from Southern stereotype. …

Vaudeville Philosophers: "The Killers"

Kenneth S. Lynn's biography of Hemingway states that behind Killers lay some obvious influences: Hemingway's firsthand acquaintance with petty criminals in Kansas City, his close observation of men entering back room in Venice Cafe, and steady attention he paid in 20s to journalistic accounts, in European as well as in American newspapers, of blood-drenched careers of Chicago hoodlums. (112). Behind story also is Hemingway's acquaintance by 1926 with and with idea of vaudeville. The connection has long been noted: in 1959, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren mentioned vaudeville team of Max and Al, and gag and dialogue that remind reader of their unreal and theatrical quality.(1) The essay is, however, only briefest of sketches on subject. By mid-1920s, entertainment had become part of visual and literary art. Music hall scores echoed in work of T. S. Eliot; lyrics of Broadway hits were reprinted in pages of E Scott Fitzgerald; and revues and Follies were described in fascinating detail in essays of Edmund Wilson. The expression the seven lively coined by Gilbert Seldes, was meant to include comics, dancers, and Krazy Kat - and to displace such bourgeois delights as grand opera. It was fate of one of those lively arts, vaudeville, to wax and wane with modernism. To be useful to Hemingway as a subject in 1926, two things had had to happen to vaudeville: first was its permeation of social world, second its recognition by intellectual world. We know that first of these happened because from W. C. Fields to Eddie Cantor and even to Ed Sullivan, vaudevillians not only dominated Palace and Ziegfeld Follies - hence imagination of much of New York - but also went on to radio and movies. The second happening was a consequence of first. A brief chronology: in 1922, became Great American Art for New Republic, in which Mary Cass Canfield wrote that it need not apologize for comparisons with Robinson and Frost, Masters and Sandburg. In fact, she thought it held its own with work of Mark Twain as a kind of artistic reaction to our native social repressiveness: Grotesque or not, represents a throwing away of self-consciousness, of Plymouth Rock caution, devoutly to be wished for. Here we countenance extreme, we encourage idiosyncrasy. The dancer or comedian is, sometimes literally, egged on to develop originality; he is adored, never crucified for difference. Miss Fannie Brice and Sir Harry Lauder are examples of performers who have been hailed, joyfully and rightfully, as vessels containing sacred fire, and who have been encouraged into self-emphasis by their audiences. . . . (225) Equally important was fact of universal intellectual acceptance: Darius Milhaud, George Auric and others write ballets and symphonies in which may be heard irresponsible cancan of ragtime. John Alden Carpenter, perhaps most vivid talent among our own composers, will occasionally shift from cooly subtle disharmonies, illustrating poetic or lyric subjects, to write a Krazy Kat Ballet. (226) Vaudeville was for intellectual world equal to other forms of artistic composition. And it seemed to gain meaning when it was compared to modes of modernism. Throughout 1923, Edmund Wilson produced a barrage of pieces on ideas and personalities, and on meaning of dance, jazz, comic scripts, and revues. He identified some of leading comics and mimes, among them Bert Savoy, Johnny Hudgins, and Bert Williams. He speculated on satire of and especially on its urban modernist meanings. Wilson thought that Ziegfeld Follies were inherently part of his and Fitzgerald's literary world: Among those green peacocks and gilded panels, in luxurious haze of New Amsterdam, there is realized a glittering vision which rises straight out of soul of New York. …

Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine, From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies, by Barbara Stratyner. Studies in Dance History No. 13. Society of Dance History Scholars, 1996. Distributed by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH. xvi + 128 pp., photographs, notes, chronology, notated dance instructions, bibliography, index. $21.95 clothbound.

Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine, From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies, by Barbara Stratyner. Studies in Dance History No. 13. Society of Dance History Scholars, 1996. Distributed by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH. xvi + 128 pp., photographs, notes, chronology, notated dance instructions, bibliography, index. $21.95 clothbound.

Will Rogers at the Ziegfeld Follies

Will Rogers at the Ziegfeld Follies

Dancing for Joffrey

Although I began ballet lessons in my hometown of Boston at the age of two, I did not become serious about a career until I was three, when I began studying with Harriet Hoctor, a former Ziegfeld Follies ballerina who was admired by George Balanchine and who appeared in several Hollywood films, including Shall We Dance with Fred Astaire. Before leaving Boston, I also studied with E. Virginia Williams, the founder of the Boston Ballet. In 1954, at the age of sixteen, I was seen in Frederic Franklin's class in New York by Sergei J. Denham, the director of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, who invited me to join the company. I toured with them for four years, eventually attaining the rank of soloist. In the summer of 1957, I was studying with Valentina Pereyaslavec at the Ballet Theatre School. One day, as I was leaving the studio after class, Erik Bruhn passed me on his way in. I immediately turned around and followed him back into the studio, determined to take class with him from whoever was teaching. It was Robert Joffrey, and my life was changed forever. Regularly attending Bob Joffrey's classes at that time, both at the Ballet Theatre School and at his own studio, were well-known Broadway and modern dancers and members of Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and eventually, owing to my enthusiastic recommendation and my obvious improvement, several from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

American Musical Revue: From the Passing Show to Sugar Babies

American musical theater, Bordman has become as important a historian as Stephen Sondheim is a writer, according to Library Journal. The author of the monumental American Musical Theater: A Chronicle (absolutely the best reference book on its subject--Newsweek) here completes his trilogy which began with American Operetta and American Musical Comedy, each focusing on a specific musical theatre genre. Revues--Broadway musicals where plot was unimportant or nonexistent and the emphasis was on comedy skits, specialty vocal and dance numbers, catchy songs, and chorus lines of beautiful girls--flourished for half a century, from the 1890s to about 1950. After looking at some forerunners of the revue form, Bordman examines the 1894 Passing Show, generally accepted as the first traditional revue and then traces the genre's development, its long decline and ultimate fate. He then pays homage to the apothesis of the revue, the almost yearly editions of the Ziegfeld Follies (1907-1927) which featured leading comics, singers, and songwriters and prided itself on glorifying the American girl. In the 1930s, Bordman points out, revues were more modest in scale and more satiric in intent and featured performers like Fred Astaire, Fred Allen, Clifton Webb, and Ethel Waters. The postwar period, Bordman notes, saw few memorable revues and television took over many of the functions of the revue. The most successful recent revues--Ain't Misbehavin', Eubie, and Sophisticated Ladies--hve been primarily retrospective concerts of older music. So it may be that the revue now belongs simply to history. But as anyone knows who has ever been fortunate enough to see a revue--or to vicariously enjoy one through this book--what a legacy! About the Author Gerald Bordman's most recent book is The Oxford Companion to American Theatre.