The Theatre: Merit in Vodvil

Humor, Variety, Beauty, Intelligence

Enthusiasm sometimes makes strange bedfellows. Was it not Mr. Gilbert Seldes of The Dial who a short time ago praised American vaudeville so highly?

Now comes Jack Lait, low-brow writer in a still lower-brow magazine, Variety. He is speaking of one Tom Burke, listed among the “New Acts” appearing at Keith’s Palace, and he dilates on the relative merits of grand opera and vaudeville. After detailing Burke’s former operatic successes at Covent Garden and ” the principal European capitals,”he asserts: “The Palace opening, far from being regarded as a ‘ comedown ‘ may be regarded as the climax to the handsome young Irishman’s career. . . . Covent Garden is some shucks over there, but the Palace is a more important theatre, for it is the high peak of an avenue of art that radiates over the whole world, while opera is a narrow, limited, circumscribed old patch, like one of the Balkan States—it’s great .to write about and lie about but it doesn’t affect anything much.”

Few of us who do our best to appear cultured would dare to express ourselves as frankly as Mr. Lait, no matter how much we really were bored by Die Walküre. Indeed to dismiss all opera with a gesture might really appear, at times, to be going too far. But to the implication that vaudeville is an unappreciated art among our own clever-clevers, it seems safe to assent.

How many of those sophisticates who prate about the perfect strength and grace of the Periclean Greeks have ever seen the Roth Brothers in their marvelous acrobatics, or the Aristpphanic clownings of those amusingtumblers, Fortunello and Cirillino? Or Bird Millman, the circus star who does incredible things? How many intellectuals who lament the passing of the pungent Yankee wit have thought of Will Rogers of the Follies as anything but a mountebank? Or Savoy and Brennan as aught but purveyors of laughter to the Babbittry.

We accept Yvette Guilbert because she is foreign—and our own Ruth Draper has attained a genuine success, both critical and otherwise. But ” American ” jazz orchestras far inferior to that, say, of Vincent Lopez have set all critical Paris talking. And, as Alfred Kreyneborg used to say, “there are others—doz-ens of them.” The truth is that it is hard to believe that even the palmy days of the old English music hall saw anything like the variety, intelligence, humor and beauty sometimes displayed in the leading vaudeville theatres of America today.