Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. For a list of cabarets between 1911 and 1920, see table 1 in Lewis Erenberg’s Steppin’ Out, 120–121. 2. See Henry F. May’s The End of American Innocence: The First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917, 338. 3. Michael A. Lerner explains the origins of this term. “Likely derived from the ‘speak-softly shops’ of nineteenth-century England, where smuggled, untaxed liquor could be bought cheaply, the term ‘speak- easy’ served in New York as a catch-all phrase for illegal bars ranging from cellar dives peddling twenty-five-cent beers or fifty-cent glasses of ‘smoke,’ to fancy townhouses in midtown outfitted with multiple bars, dining areas, game rooms, and live entertainment . Whether these gathering places were tucked away in construction sites, hid- den in apartment back rooms, disguised behind receptionists’ desks in office buildings, or brazenly situated across from police precinct houses, New Yorkers delighted in discovering the locations of speak- easies as if it were all part of a game” (Lerner 138). 4. According to Lerner, the New York City Police Department “esti- mated the number of illegal drinking establishments [at the height of the Prohibition-era] to be as high as 35,000 with 2,200 in the Wall Street area alone” (138). 5. His Follies of 1907 ran for 70 performances. In the following year, his production had 120 performances. The 1910 and 1911 Follies ran for 88 and 80 performances respectively. For more, see Patinkin, 92–94. 6. While appropriating the Folies Bergère and other aspects of Parisian entertainment culture, such as the Moulin Rouge, Ziegfeld aligned his productions with European theatrical forms, but he frequently cast his girls in far more exotic roles. As Ann Marie McEntee has argued, Ziegfeld was tapping into the country’s fascination with 138 Notes Orientalism. On his stage, “[E]xotic stage pictures, dripping with sensuality—another aspect of the culture’s preoccupation with Orientalism—eclipsed the Americana satires and patriotic numbers” (179). From Ann Marie McEntee’s “Feathers, Finials, and Frou-Frou: Florenz Ziegfeld’s Exoticized Follies Girls” in Art, Glitter, Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America, eds. Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004: 177–188. 7. The Palace Theater on Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street, com- pleted in 1913, quickly became the epicenter for talents like Fanny Brice, Harry Houdini, Irving Berlin, and blackface performer Eddie Cantor. 8. Nickelodeons in New York City alone grossed $6 million in 1908, for instance (Sklar 16). 9. For more on the diversity of early film audiences, see Richard Butsch’s The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990, 140–157. 10. The movie industry that had been highly profitable in the early twentieth century gradually eclipsed all other forms of entertainment during the 1920s. In 1923, there were 15,000 theatres in the United States that had an average weekly attendance of 50 million people, and by 1928 “65 million tickets were being sold nationally each week” (Kyvig 93, 94). 11. The dynamics of the movie theatre space changed abruptly in the late 1920s. Picture palaces, like vaudeville houses, provided places for people to socialize with each other as they watched a mixture of staged routines and film. This atmosphere created a sense of commu- nity among the audience as they audibly expressed views about the film, making each screening a unique social event. The Jazz Singer (1927) with Al Jolson, however, altered this dynamic. The tremen- dous success of the film and the talkies that immediately followed allowed theatres owners to cut vaudeville and musical acts from the program. Furthermore, as Robert Sklar explains, “With talkies, . people who talked aloud were peremptorily hushed by others in the audience who didn’t want to miss any spoken dialogue. The talking audience for silent pictures became a silent audience for talking pictures” (153). 12. Poggi 47. He also notes that the height of commercial theatre in New York coincided with the start of its decline. After the 1925–26 sea- son, “Plays were closing more quickly and theaters were kept open less frequently” (50). Notes 139 13. For more on the play, see Ted Merwin’s In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture. 14. In “Jazz and American Culture,” Lawrence W. Levine surveys the cultural debate surrounding jazz in the 1920s: “Various critics insisted, bore the same relationship to classical music as a limerick did to poetry, or a farmhouse to a cathedral, or a burlesque show to legitimate drama. Jazz was attacked not only for returning civilized people to the jungles of barbarism but also for expressing the mecha- nistic sterility of modern urban life . It was praised and criticized for breaking out of the tight circle of obedience to Eurocentric cultural forms and giving expression to indigenous American attitudes articulated through indigenous American creative structures. It was, in short, praised and criticized for being almost completely out of phase with the period’s concept of Culture” (437–438). 15. In the realm of the theatre, African Americans had been establishing independent performance troupes, companies, and productions since the late nineteenth century. After the Civil War, most of these troupes performed in blackface since the prejudices of white audiences “cir- cumscribed the performance boundaries of African American stars,” requiring them to “speak and sing in dialect, wear funny costumes, sing ‘coon’ songs, and end their acts with a cakewalk or some other kind of ‘darky’ dance . Only in black theaters were the black per- formers permitted to imitate whites” (Nasaw 57). The first black show to make it to Broadway was Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898). Composed by African American Will Marion Cook (with lyrics by Laurence Dunbar), it can be credited with introducing “rag- time and eccentric dancing” to Broadway (Graziano 94)—though this type of syncopated music had been part of vaudeville and min- strelsy for quite some time. This inspired other African American musicals, including Sons of Ham (1901), In Dahomey (1902), The Shoo-Fly Regiment (1907), and The Red Moon (1909). In 1921, the revue Shuffle Along (with its all African American cast including a young Josephine Baker) captivated white and black audiences with its rich mixture of blues, jazz, ballads, African American songs, and quick dance numbers. It was also the first musical to allow African Americans to sit on the main floor of the theatre. Though Shuffle Along “ushered in a new period of black musicals on Broadway,” as John Graziano has argued, “it was a continuation of the stereotypical representations of African Americans that had been seen twenty years earlier” (98). The white patronage of musicians like Berlin, Kern, and Gershwin was still required to give this music mainstream appeal. 140 Notes 16. Nasaw 31 and 47–61. “Even on Broadway, African Americans who wished to see the black comedy team of Bert Williams and George Walker performing In Dahomey had to undergo the humiliating experience of entering the theater by a back entrance and taking seats in the upper gallery” (49). 17. This flurry of popular entertainment also reveals a significant change in American social life at the time. As mentioned earlier, escapism of one kind or another appealed to most Americans in the early twentieth century, and the rise of leisure culture can thus be viewed as a response to an increasingly regimented workplace. As Lynn Dumenil explains, Americans turned toward leisure and consumption as a response to “the degradation of work and the erosion of individual autonomy in mass corporate culture” (57). Modern machine production for blue-collar laborers and bureaucracy for white-collar employ- ees created a working environment that demanded routine tasks over individual autonomy. Henry Ford’s assembly lines, which were first introduced in 1913, epitomized these changes for the proletariat. This technology transformed the individual’s role in the workplace, subdividing labor into specialized tasks and reducing his role to a sin- gle, repetitive action such as tightening nuts and bolts. It also transformed productivity. As this innovation became more widespread, backbreaking speed and mind-numbing repetition began to charac- terize the factory laborer’s daily life. At the same time such innova- tions enabled him and his family to experience a greater degree of freedom to enjoy popular culture. Although “the nine-hour day and fifty-four hour week continued to be the legal standard in New York well into the 1920s” (Peiss 43), labor unions were successfully reducing this time. By 1923, many working-class women worked forty- eight hours or less per week. Salaried workers also began to receive two-week paid annual vacations by the middle of the decade, and this trend reflecting the growing interest among white-collar workers for commercial entertainment as well. 18. As Fearnow notes, Lawrence Langner, an attorney who helped fund and write the manifesto for the Washington Players, was the driv- ing force behind the Theatre Guild, which he wanted to be fully professional and self-sustaining. See “Theatre Groups and Their Playwrights,” 356. 19. More specifically in 1923, O’Neill, along with Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, quickly launched Experimental Theatre, Inc. (1923–25). Despite the new name, they still advertised programs as part of the Provincetown Playhouse. The group placed a premium Notes 141 on professionalization and expanded the scope of productions, oper- ating two theatres (the Provincetown Playhouse and the Greenwich Village Theater). The expense of these productions (particularly those that failed financially) caused a division among the organiza- tion yet again.

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