Vaudeville theater (1 gen 1880 anni – 1 gen 1900 anni)

Descrizione:

vaudeville theater: A type of professional stage show popular in the 1880s and 1890s that included singing, dancing, and comedy routines.
Despite their dangers and problems, industrial cities could be exciting places to live. In the nineteenth century, white middle-class Protestants had set the cultural standard; immigrants and the poor were expected to follow their betters, seeking “uplift” and respectability. But in the cities, new mass-based entertainments emerged among the working classes, especially youth. These entertainments spread from the working class to the middle class — much to the distress of middle-class parents. At the same time, cities became stimulating centers for intellectual life.
One enticing attraction was vaudeville theater, which arose in the 1880s and 1890s. Vaudeville customers could walk in anytime and watch a continuous sequence of musical acts, skits, magic shows, and other entertainment. First popular among the working class, vaudeville quickly broadened its appeal, creating forms that deeply influenced later radio and television. By the early 1900s, vaudeville faced competition from movie theaters, or nickelodeons, which offered short films for a nickel entry fee. With distaste, one reporter described a typical movie audience as “mothers of bawling infants” and “newsboys, bootblacks, and smudgy urchins.” By the 1910s, even working girls who refrained from less respectable amusements might indulge in a movie once or twice a week.
More spectacular were the great amusement parks that appeared around 1900, most famously at New York’s Coney Island. These parks had their origins in world’s fairs, whose paid entertainment areas offered giant Ferris wheels and camel rides through “a street in Cairo.” Entrepreneurs found that such attractions were big business. Between 1895 and 1904 they installed several rival amusement parks near Coney Island’s popular beaches. The parks offered New Yorkers a chance to come by ferry, escape the hot city, and enjoy roller coasters, lagoon plunges, and “hootchy-kootchy” dance shows. Among the amazed observers was Cuban revolutionary José Martí, working as a journalist in the United States. “What facilities for every pleasure!” Martí wrote. “What absolute absence of any outward sadness or poverty! … The theater, the photographers’ booth, the bathhouses!” He concluded that Coney Island epitomized America’s commercial society, driven not by “love or glory” but by “a desire for gain.” Similar parks grew up around the United States. By the summer of 1903, Philadelphia’s Willow Grove counted three million visitors annually; so did two amusement parks outside Los Angeles.

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