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American Vaudeville Museum |
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All material © 1998-2008 American Museum of Vaudeville, Inc. Page 195 |
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A Pictorial History of Vaudeville by Bernard Sobel (224 pp, 1961, Bonanza/Crow/Citadel, NYC, LOC #61-18015). Over half of the pages are given over to photographs of many of the big-time acts which affords even a casual reader some sense of the time and the performers and their acts. The photos are accompanied by a brief history of vodvil from minstrel days to the beginnings of television. The Palace by Marion Spitzer (259 p-p, 1969, Atheneum Press, NYC, LOC #68-27670). By focusing upon one theatre, the pinnacle of big-time, two-a-day vaudeville, Ms. Spitzer eschewed the wide angle lens to create a sense of the day-to-day business of operating vaudeville’s most renowned theatre and enlivened it with anecdotes about the various personalities who played the Palace. Broadway Below the Sidewalk: Concert Saloons of Old New York, edited by William L. Slout (110 pp, 1994, Borgo Press, San Bernadino, CA, ISBN #0-8095-0301-8). This fourth entry in the Clipper Studies in the Theatre series is drawn from reports published in the Nineteenth Century by the New York Clipper. A must for anyone who wishes to explore the rude beginnings of variety in old Manhattan. The Vaudevillians by Bill Smith (269 pp, 1976, Macmillan, NYC, ISBN #0-02-611890-4). Thirty well-known and not so well-known vaude vets get a chance to tell their stories in interviews with the author. Their memories are not always unbiased or completely accurate, but the firsthand viewpoint is invaluable. We Can Still Hear Them Clapping by Marcia Keegan (158 pp, 1975, Avon/Hearst, NYC, ISBN #0-380-00402-X). What started out as a photographic essay by the city government of New York turned into a poignant last hurrah for some of the aging veterans of vaudeville. American Vaudeville as Seen by its Contemporaries, compiled and annotated by Charles W. Stein (378 pp, 1984, Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf, NYC, ISBN #0-394-53743-2) offers reprints of articles by and about vaudeville’s practitioners and observers as culled from various periodicals of the day.
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