Essay On Vaudeville And Burlesque

Since theatre was established as an art form, it has constantly been changing and developing as new methods of theatre styles came to light. This is also true with how musical theatre developed into how we know it today. Vaudeville and burlesque were forms of theatre in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that forged the way for the American musical to emerge. The elements that writers used from vaudeville allowed for not just musical acts to be performed during the course of the story, but eventually became a way for the story to further be told. The American musical was not always as big as it is today, and vaudeville and burlesque acts made it possible for such a type of performance style to develop. Musical writers used multiple elements, not just the song element, in their stories. This change did not just happen overnight. The evolution from vaudeville and burlesque was a gradual one, taking years to further develop the performance styles into the Broadway musical we can see today.

Even the performance genres of burlesque and vaudeville had to get their origins from somewhere. One of the earliest acts with a musical element was minstrelsy. Blackface performers were around several decades before the first minstrel shows evolved. These acts were common features in circuses and traveling shows form the 1790s onward (Kenrick 52). A white entertainer named Thomas Rice in the 1820s caused a nationwide sensation with a blackface song and dance act that burlesqued negro slaves. Many white performers took part in minstrelsy, but black performers took advantage of the stereotypes they were labeled as and made their own minstrel acts as well. Minstrel shows developed a standard three-part format. In his book, Kenrick explains in detail t...

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...mance as Ixion gained rave reviews, but when she moved to another theater, the reviews took an abrupt shift to the discourse of burlesque. They called it the “leg business” and the “nude drama,” and performers were recast as “brazen-faced, stained, yellow-haired, padded limbed creatures” (Allen 16). Burlesque became to be known as a vehicle to over-sexualize women and an opportunity for women to parody masculinity. William Dean Howells wrote an essay on burlesque, he declared: “[T]hough they were not like men, [they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame” (Allen 25). Burlesque could be said to be grounded in the aesthetics of transgression and the grotesque.