And nothing could be more illuminating than the moments in vaudeville when the tricky and the bogus appear. I face here willingly the protest of intelligent men and women who have gone to vaudeville to see or hear one turn and have sat through some of the dreariest æsthetic dancing,[20] have heard the most painfully polite vocalism, have witnessed “drama.” If vaudeville requires half of what I have said, how do these things get in and get by? Largely as a concession to debased public taste. Note well that all the culture elements in vaudeville, the dull and base and truly vulgar ones, are importations. The dance appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance; its proper music is ragtime or jazz; the playlet which belongs to it (witness the success of A Slice of Life) is burlesque. Yet like every other popular art in America, vaudeville is required, by the tradition of gentility, to be cultural; and its dull defenders often make it their boast that it does give culture to the masses (the same sort of thing is heard in connexion with the music played at moving-picture houses) because among its native acts appear tableaux vivants out of Landseer or because a legitimate actor brings to the common herd scraps and snatches of Les Misérables. The process continues, regrettably, and extends to the spoiling of good vaudeville material. It isn’t a loss of anything precious, except time which could be filled by something better, when Mr Lou Tellegen struts about on the variety stage; it is a defamation of something good in the major line and equally a loss of moments when the “Affairs of” Anatol are inexpertly and tastelessly produced “for vaudeville.” But what shall we say of such a real disaster as the return of Miss Ethel Levey to vaudeville, still so rich in attraction that she plays four weeks at the Palace in New York, wholly spoiled for variety because she has had a triumph abroad and has become a “great actress” or is it “an artiste”? There was in Miss Levey something roughly elemental, something common and pure; whatever she did had broadness and sharpness both. Corrupted by her success abroad, she returns still magnificent, the voice still throbbing, the form heavy but dominant—yet no longer vaudeville. She has the grandeur of a star and appears in full stage with a grand piano and silk-shaded lamps and draperies and sings All by Myself with shocking bad sentimental acting, and gets all she can out of Love’s Old Sweet Song before the touch of her old spirit protests—and recites a dramatic monologue entitled Destiny! Now and again flashes of burlesque reveal her ancient flavour; but it is an axiom in vaudeville that you can’t be good in it if you are too good for it.
Vaudeville. By Charles Demuth
I omit the people who aren’t, simply, good enough; there are second-rate people in vaudeville as in everything else, and first-rate people of its second order. The part that is pure, I am convinced, is rarely matched on our other stages. Certainly not in the legitimate, nor in the serious artistic playhouse where knowing one’s job perfectly and doing it simply and unpretentiously are the rarest things in the world. Revue and musical comedy require and often attain the pitch of technical accuracy which vaudeville sets as a standard, and these two forms draw heavily upon vaudeville for material and stars, whom they incorporate only in so far as the stars are not pure variety themselves. They are as much entitled to the jazz bands as any other stage, but to me a jazz band is not essentially variety, although it has a legitimate place there. That is why I reject Mr Walter Haviland’s ranking of Ted Lewis as one of the greatest of vaudeville acts, for the great acts in vaudeville are those which could not be perfectly appreciated elsewhere. (The æsthetics of the question have been canvassed in Laokoön, I believe.) Johnny Dooley, who always breaks up the show in musical comedy, is a real vaudeville player, and Jack Donahue, who was the sole attraction of another such piece, is always right, his fumbling for words is inspired, and so is his dancing, and altogether it is a completely realized act. Among the most popular of the big-time acts I am left cold by Van and Schenck, who are perpetually stopping short of perfection; their songs are funny, but not witty; their music is current, no more; their rendition is always near enough right to be passed. The Four Marx Brothers do better in creating their special atmosphere of low comedy; the Six Brown Brothers are at the very top with their saxophones. It is an independent act, wholly self-contained, not nearly so appropriate in any other framework, except possibly a one-ring circus; it is a real variety turn where a jazz band is only half and half; and in the case of these performers everything they do is exquisite.
It isn’t possible to describe the acts, nor even to suggest the distinctive quality of the head-liners. There are inexplicable things in vaudeville, things no rational explanation can touch, such as the persistence of sawing a woman in half, or the terrific impact of the singing of Belle Baker, who destroys you with Elie! Elie! Houdini is variety as all magicians are and all tricksters—the circus side of vaudeville, to be sure, and the sensational side. Here belong the acrobats; I have written elsewhere of the Rath Brothers, who alone are in the spirit and tone of vaudeville, without any intrusion of the circus. At the present moment nearly everything in vaudeville which is best has a touch of parody; not infrequently it burlesques itself. Herbert Williams, of Williams and Wolfus, exaggerates wholly in the manner of a clown; his despairing cry for the “spotli-i-i-ght,” his wail of unhappiness, with his appearance, his gesture, his shambling walk, make him a figure out of the commedia dell’arte—one of the few in vaudeville. Duffy and Sweeney are parodists of their métier; their whole fun is in their elaborate pretense of not caring to amuse the audience. Harry Watson, Jr., has taken out of burlesque the accentuated form, the built-up face, the wide and fatuous gesture peculiar to that type, and in his broken-down prize-fighter has created a real character with his jumping the rope “fi’ thousand conseggitiv times” and “tell ’em what I did to Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.” I am dragged into a catalogue of names, which I want to avoid; but I cannot omit the macabre Moving-Man’s Dream of the Briants, the rustic studies of Chic Sale, the elaborate burlesque of melodrama by Charles Withers, and the exceptional mad magician of Frank Van Hoven. Van Hoven carries farther than anyone else the appearance of not knowing the audience is to be amused. He complains in a mutter of the presence of human beings, individually probably all right, but en masse...! He leaves the stage and passes out of the auditorium, bidding the audience amuse itself while he’s gone. And his great finale, with a bowl of goldfish, a handkerchief in a trunk, a table covered with a cloth, an inflated paper bag, and a revolver shot—at the sound of which exactly nothing happens, is the last word in destroying the paraphernalia of the magician and all his works.
I have committed myself to the statement that Joe Cook is perfect and am in no mood to withdraw it. As vaudeville he is perfect; I can see him in no other milieu because he lacks the gift—not needed in vaudeville, though useful there—of holding the audience in his hand. He is liked, not loved; his act is met with continuous chuckles, smiles, and laughter; seldom with guffaws. This is not necessarily to his credit; it means that he does one sort of thing, and does it extremely well. It happens to be just the thing for which vaudeville is made. As Ethel Levey is what most vaudeville players aspire to be, so Cook is what they ought to be. He is exactly right. Yet to give the quality of his rightness is difficult. To recognize it is easier.
He is versatile, but not in the manner of Sylvester Schaeffer. He is a master of parody and burlesque, yet not in the fashion of Charles Withers; his delicate impersonations have an ease and certainty far beyond the studies of Chic Sale. Essentially what distinguishes Joe Cook is that he is very wise and slightly mad, and his madness is not the “dippy” kind so admirably practised by Frank Van Hoven. It is structural. Mr Cook’s is probably the longest single act in vaudeville, and after it is over he saunters into one or more of the acts that follow his on the programme, as his fancy takes him.
His own starts as a running parody of old-time vaudeville, beginning with the musicians coming out of the pit, through the magician and the player of instruments to—but no one has ever discovered where it does go to. For after the card tricks—the ace of spades is asked for and, as he remarks after five minutes of agonized fumbling behind his back, the ace of spades is asked for and practically at a moment’s notice the ace of spades is produced; and it never is—Mr Cook finds it necessary to explain to the audience in one of the most involved pieces of nonsense ever invented why he will not imitate four Hawaiians playing the ukulele. After that literally nothing matters. He might be with Alice in Wonderland or at a dada ballet or with the terribly logical clowns of Shakespeare. I think that Chaplin would savour his humours.
In an art which is hard and bright and tends to glitter rather than radiate, he has a gleam of poetry; but he is like the best of poets because there are no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours; he is exact and his precision is never cold. He holds conversations of an imbecile gravity: How are you? How are you? Fine, how’s yourself? Good. And you? Splendid. How’s your uncle? I haven’t got an uncle. Fine, how is he? He’s fine. How are you? He is amazingly inventive, creating new stunts, writing new lines, doing fresh business from week to week. His little bits are like witty epigrams in verse, where the thing done and the skill of the method coincide and pleasing separately please more by their fusion. His sense of the stage is equalled by but one man I have ever seen: George M. Cohan.
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