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Perhaps… but as Laurie Winer explains in an excerpt from her Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical, at a time when immigrants were pouring into the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe, the vaudeville circuit became a venue for the expression of those arriving cultures– and ultimately gave us so much more…

The term ‘melting pot’ comes from the theater — it was popular­ized by a 1908 drama with that title about a Russian composer who loses his family in the 1903 Bessarabia pogroms, emigrates to America, and falls in love with the daughter of the officer responsible for his family’s murder. Such was the compression of migrants in the first decades of the new cen­tury. In fact, about fifteen million eastern and southern Europeans arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1915. In 1907 Ellis Island received its highest number of immigrants in a single year, processing more than one million arrivals. In the public sphere, all these cultures introduced themselves on the stages and in the audiences of vaudeville, the American equivalent of the British music hall.

Willie Hammerstein managed the country’s premiere vaudeville house from 1904 until 1913, so his son Oscar II grew up at the epicenter of a cul­tural mashup unlike anything that had come before. In an oral history he recorded for Columbia University, Oscar remembered going to his father’s theater, the Victoria, every Sunday, where the performers taught him every­thing he needed to know about comedy and pacing.

Ticket prices were low and audiences comprised many nationalities. Since a good number of performers and spectators alike had escaped fam­ine or pogroms or the social rigidity of the Old World, their evenings to­gether at the theater were fueled by a giddy sense of possibility, both for  themselves and for their new country. For instance, ‘It Isn’t What You Used to Be, It’s What You Are Today’ was a staple song for comedian Al Shean, born Abraham Adolph Schönberg in Germany in 1868.

From the 1880s to the early 1930s, peaking from 1905 to 1915, vaude­ville presented a unique parade of cultures. Here is where theater became integral to constructing a multihued American identity, a space to figure out who we were and who we wanted to become. A dictionary defines vaude­ville as ‘a comedy without psychological or moral intentions,’ and it was this very insignificance that lent the form its power.

With political correctness a concept far in the future, ethnic stereotyp­ing was the entire point of acts like ‘Harry Harvey, the Quaint Hebrew Co­median,’ ‘The Original Wop,’ ‘The Wop and the Cop,’ ‘9 Orientals 9,’ ‘Two Funny Sauerkrauts,’ and ‘The Sport and the Jew.’ Al Shean’s sister Minnie managed and sometimes acted with her five sons, later known as the Marx Brothers, who presented several nationalities in one family. Their first stab at ethnic comedy was an act from 1911 or 1912 called ‘Fun in Hi Skule’: Groucho, playing a thickly accented German teacher, tried, and failed, to control his students, including Harpo (representing the Irish in a bright red wig), Gummo (with a Yiddish accent), and Paul Yale, who played a gay man with a limp wrist. (Chico, who would play the Italian, had not yet joined the act.) Groucho remembered the skit as a big hit, evoking lots of laughter.

In 1905, journalist Hartley Davis wrote an appreciation of vaudeville in Everybody’s Magazine, declaring it to be the ‘most significant development in American amusements of the last decade’:

There is a cheerful frivolity in vaudeville which makes it appeal to more people of widely divergent interests than does any other form of entertainment. It represents the almost universal longing for laughter, for melody, for color, for action, for wonder-provoking things. It exacts no intellectual activity on the part of those who gather to enjoy it; in its essence it is an enemy to responsibility, to worries, to all the little ills of life. It is joyously, frankly absurd …. Vaudeville brings home to us the fact that we are children of a larger growth. It supports the sour Schopenhauer theory — one of those misleading part truths — that life consists in trying to step aside to escape the immediate trouble that menaces us.

Later, when the musical evolved to embrace virtually any subject that could be broached by a play or novel, it kept something of this cheerful fri­volity. Even tragic and historically illuminating musicals, like The Scottsboro Boys (2010) or Shuffle Along (2016), employ the percussive delights of tap or the offhand elegance of a hat-and-cane number, if only to emphasize the cruel distance between representation and reality. That these songs are per­formed on the very stages that hosted legends like George M. Cohan and the Nicholas Brothers adds a visceral link between the past and present.

An era’s popular culture can tell us more than its high art, though crit­ics at the time often have trouble seeing it. About vaudeville, most contem­porary commentators sniffed. For instance, critic and playwright Channing Pollock wrote in 1911 that vaudeville ‘addresses itself to amusement seek­ers incapable of giving, or unwilling to give, concentrated or continuous at­tention.’ For his part, J. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times enjoyed the Yiddish-accented vaudevillians Potash and Perlmutter’s 1926 play Abe and Mawruss (God Forbid!), but allowed that the act ‘makes no pretense to men­tal clarity.’ Audiences, less exacting, showed up to absorb the jabs and jokes, and the country expanded itself nightly in their laughter. In this way vaude­ville provided context and backstory to the progressive nature of American theater and its playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

In Willie’s day, a typical vaudeville bill consisted of nine acts, the order of which spilled over into the Broadway musical of the 1920s. First up was a ‘dumb act,’ mimes or dancers or animals, so that latecomers would not annoy fellow audience members too much, just as, on Broadway, the intro­ductory song was a throwaway having little to do with story, such as it was. The biggest names-acts like Will Rogers, the Three Keatons, or Mrs. Pat­rick Campbell — took either the third slot or the penultimate place, just as, on Broadway, songwriters reserved their most rousing treat, known as ‘the eleven o’clock number,’ for second to last. And the evening ended with something graceful or otherworldly, like an equestrian or trapeze artist, an act that sent the audience out into the night feeling buoyant or revived…

On one of the under-appreciated gifts that immigrants have given America: Vaudeville, from @lauriewiner.bsky.social‬ via @delanceyplace.

* Larry Gelbart

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As we tread the boards, we might send entertaining bitrthday greetings to George M. Cohan; he was born on this date in 1878. A playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer, wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards “Over There,” “Give My Regards to Broadway'” “The Yankee Doodle Boy” [AKA “(I’m a) Yankee Doodle Dandy”], and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

Known in the decade before World War I as “the man who owned Broadway,” Cohan is considered (with Oscar Hammerstein II) one of the fathers of American musical comedy. He got his start performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as “The Four Cohans.”

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