VAUDEVILLE QUOTES II

quotations about vaudeville

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The embarrassingly patronising minstrel shows, in which blackface performers obligingly fulfilled white stereotypes ... were on the wane. A new sort of mass entertainment called vaudeville was taking its place, in which black performers could "strut their stuff" without the need to dissemble, and sing of real-life experience. The performers in these travelling shows could call on a new, more truthful kind of song called the blues.

IVAN HEWETT

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If vaudeville is to be revived, its revival will hinge upon something other than the mere revival of the features that were largely instrumental in killing it.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

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Vaudeville was a symptom of ... a time and a year when there was place for boyish fun and simple nonsense and engaging unconcern. It was a kid game for men in their kid moments. And men don't seem to have such moments any more.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

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Vaudeville, like the vanished hansom cab, the window tables at Delmonico's and Sherry's, the four-hour lunches at Luchows and checkers at Lafayette, has paid the price of modern speed, money-grubbing and excited boredom. No longer is there time for such things; no longer are ease and casualness part of our lives; no longer are evenings to be sampled haphazardly.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

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If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.

LARRY GELBART

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I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan, because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it through all kinds of adversities.

JULIE ANDREWS

Tags: Julie Andrews

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Vaudeville was variety cleaned up -- at least in theory.

RICHARD BUTSCH

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Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism -- acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape.

KAREN ABBOTT

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Vaudeville was this much more open society, where women could work and actually make pretty good money.

JULIETTE FAY

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Vaudeville dominated showbiz for the half-century before the cinema replaced it (1880-1930). Within vaudeville was a subculture of outsiders. It served as a socio-economic ladder for those outside the pale of the native born and the middle class. Its expanding ranks filled rapidly with talents from immigrant and working-class backgrounds, especially Irish, Jews, and (a relatively few) African Americans. Collectively these representatives of submerged ethnicities and classes did much to undermine Victorian manners and moral attitudes. Where Victorian ways were formal and deliberate, genteel and austere, variety entertainment was exuberant, funny, irreverent, and sensual.

H. LORING WHITE

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Before radio, vaudeville was the place where you could reach the masses and talk about current events and politics. That's what late night TV is today. And when entertainers become as dominant as Jon Stewart or Jimmy Fallon, it's inevitable they'll influence other artists.

CATEY SULLIVAN

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Everybody's going to the clockwork vaudeville
Everybody wants to see the show
People crowd the door and scream and shout for more
While music and song fill the air

DAVID BENNETT

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I have this dream, we're all at the table
Sharing verses, stories and song
Vaudeville Nanna and The Banjolele
She hands it to me and I play along
The best days of my life
Are somewhere up the road
With my family and friends
I can close my eyes
And I can see them, see them

PETER FRAMPTON

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It was the most democratic popular art in American history. To get onstage, all you needed was chutzpah and moxie. If you had the right stuff, you picked up the dance steps, the vocal style, the comic timing that could make you a star--maybe even one of the Marx Brothers. No wonder their mother, Minnie, loved vaudeville. And millions of fans and thousands of performers agreed. Yet despite its profound influence on every facet of entertainment, from the musical to the television sitcom, American vaudeville had a trajectory as astonishingly brief--if sparkling--as a Roman candle.

STEFAN KANFER

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Vaudeville was the theatre of the people, its brassy assurance a dig in the nation's ribs, its simplicity as naïve as a circus.

DOUGLAS GILBERT

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Vaudeville was a people's culture. What has remained of vaudeville is the act -- a distillation of a performer's best material into a near-perfect performance piece: the product of personality, talent and skill -- the vaudevillian's reason for living.

FRANK CULLEN

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I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me.

ANNA HELD

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Vaudeville was the only thing I knew so I tried to break in. Unfortunately for me, vaudeville was already dead and gone.

LUCILLE BALL

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Everything I know I learned in vaudeville.

JAMES CAGNEY

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Vaudeville was more like a talent show; it contained a little bit of everything--basically, anything that might entertain an audience. Big-time vaudeville was the top of the entertainment pyramid and featured the greatest entertainers in the world.

MICHAEL JOHN HAUPERT

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