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Evangelist Billy Sunday’s arrival in Boston demonstrated both the ephemeral nature of urban revivals and their complex role in constructing fundamentalist resistance. Dubbed the “Vaudeville revivalist” by his critics, Sunday’s moralistic, combative rhetoric quickly threatened to divide the city’s Protestants into pro- and anti-revivalist camps. But in the end, the Sunday campaign demonstrated the relative weakness of evangelicals in Boston — a prohibition vote in the midst of the campaign went down in defeat — and the relative resilience of liberal Protestants, as the city’s Unitarians launched a vigorous revival of their own in the wake of Sunday’s departure.

In July and August 1914, the Six Brown Brothers toured the British Isles in a show called All American Vaudeville, headlined by the Avon Comedy Four and featuring Josie Heather, (J. Francis) Dooley and (Corinne) Sales, Charles and Fannie Van, the Four Bards, Ethel Mae Barker, and The Stanleys. This chapter describes the show. The tour was successful, but the outbreak of the First World War cut it short and led the entertainers to return to the United States.

This chapter discusses Wong's trans-Atlantic Career over seven years. It details her stardom in Shanghai Express with Dietrich and Daughter of the Dragon with Warner Oland and Sessue Hayakawa. It uncovers Wong's Vaudeville routine around Europe based upon Noel Coward song, Half-Caste Woman. Wong's relationship with family and mother's death is analysed. It also evaluates the controversial casting of German actress Luis Rainer in lead female role in film adaptation of Pearl Buck novel, The Good Earth, bypassing Wong. Wong responded to racial casting by announcing trip to China.

This chapter examines the key role of the BBC in fostering a culture of imperialism from the 1920s to the eve of the Second World War. The broadcast of The Four Feathers revealed several aspects of the BBC's relationship to empire and imperialism during the period from its inception in the early 1920s to the Second World War. The reach and potential influence of the BBC suggests that the empire remained important to British national identity in the 1950s, even after the first wave of decolonization. The extent and range of programmes that had empire as their subject matter were considerable such as Empire Vaudeville and Radio Times. From its inception, the BBC acted as an agent to promote the empire among its audience. When war came in 1939, the empire figured prominently in the BBC's programming. As the war progressed the BBC devoted a remarkable amount of time in its schedules to promoting the empire.

This chapters explores the opportunities and limits facing Hawaiian entertainers in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the early rise of the Hawaiian steel guitar in the American consciousness. It examines the vaudeville career of Kekuku, July Paka, and Toots Paka’s Hawaiians. It details the earliest Hawaiian music recordings on wax cylinders and 78 rpm records. It also demonstrates the role of Richard Tully’s musical production, Bird of Paradise, and that of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco, as principal purveyors of the Hawaiian steel guitar in North America. Due to the efforts of Hawaiian guitarists in vaudeville and other musical tours, recordings, and world fairs, Hawaiian music by the 1910s became some of the most popular music in North America.

This introductory chapter describes the extent of Eva Tanguay's popularity from 1908 to 1918. At that time, she was considered the jewel in the crown of a mass-market brand of entertainment. From the stage, she ruled a popular culture that bristled with opportunity, seduction, and the kind of chaos that was both glamorous and sordid. She delivered frenzied performances that at once sated audiences and left them thirsting for more. Anthony Slide wrote in The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville that “Eva Tanguay [was an] American vaudeville, and for almost its entire existence, she [was] the medium's greatest female star.” In today's terms, it is possible to compare Eva's fame to that of Madonna and Lady Gaga, even though the cyclonic vaudevillian did not have the dancing skills of the Material Girl nor the songwriting gifts of the Poker Face.

This chapter traces the early life of Charles Walters from his childhood in Anaheim, California, to his early professional endeavours as a young adult. It discusses his introduction to dance, the influence of vaudeville, and his early theatrical aspirations. The chapter discusses his initial dance tour with a Fanchon and Marco troupe, his one year studying law at University of Southern California, and the mounting of the Pasadena Playhouse production Low and Behold. This chapter also focuses on Walters’ friendships with Leonard Sillman and Tyrone Power.

Nina Mae McKinney (1912-1967), American star of stage and screen, arrived in Australia in 1937 as the leading lady of a vaudeville theatrical performance. She was the first African American film actress to appear in Australia, and the sheer scope of her media interest produced reviews of performances, stories of her film career, and commentaries of her associations with other African Americans of contemporary interest. Taken together, this ephemera makes for instructive reading as iterations responsive to black internationalism as expressed by a woman who had been marginalized by Hollywood’s racial climate but reified internationally as a major talent. Through a critical examination of McKinney’s Australian press, this essay offers a comprehensive rereading of McKinney’s public presence in Australia through the lens of black internationalism.

This chapter focuses on Nina's appearance in Summit, New Jersey to headline a benefit for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It further confirmed that Andy was right. Nina did have her music. “I played on stage for a reason, and when I walked off stage those reasons still existed,” she said, long outlasting the applause. In an odd juxtaposition beyond Nina's control, the Hootenanny show she taped in Clarksburg was broadcast on television just four days before the Summit concert. Perhaps to piggyback on the event, Andy had taken out a two-column, four-inch-high ad in Variety that featured a new, appealing headshot of Nina and proclaimed her “star of the Ford Caravan of Music for 1964.” He had even hired promotion man Paul Brown to help, and his name was featured along with Andy's as a contact. However, the ad ran in Variety's Vaudeville section, hardly prime space in the weekly.

In this chapter, Louis B. Mayer resigns from M-G-M, as Dore Schary continues to reduce budgets and production schedules. Walters directs Arthur Freed’s nostalgic, but ill-fated, The Belle of New York (1952) starring Fred Astaire and Vera-Ellen. With Roger Edens supplying musical material, Walters directs and stages Judy Garland’s 1951 engagement at The Palace Theatre in New York. His manner as a choreographer is discussed by his dancers. This salute to “two-a-day” vaudeville earned critical and popular acclaim, resulting in an extended nineteen-week run. Walters appears on stage with Garland on opening night, performing the duet “A Couple of Swells.” Walters comments on Garland’s mystique and public appeal.

Chapter two focuses ona groundbreaking, self-reflexive episode of Little Sammy Sneeze, a comic which follows a boy whose potent sneezes leave mayhem in his wake. Sammy's sneezes even shatter the frame that contains him, dismantling the divide between viewer and subject. Here McCayexplores time and motion within the narrative space of the comic strip, as well as sneezing as a disruptive social practice, that acts on the body much the way the comic strip interrupts the sober narrative of the newspaper. While employing humor as a strategy for critiquing societal norms, McCay drew upon assorted popular visual art forms, including vaudeville and early film, to create an anarchic response to consumer culture. With Sammy Sneeze and The Story of Hungry Henrietta, McCay was instrumental in creating an audience for comics, by both acclimating them to the visual language of comics, and dismantling these selfsame conventions before their eyes.

Chapter One argues that the seemingly trifling discussions of vaudeville theater in Either/Or can provide a guide to the nature of Kierkegaard’s rhetoric as a whole, even when it becomes overtly theological. The chapter examines how the two pseudonymous authors of Either/Or, Aesthete A and Judge William, each respond to the French vaudeville play The First Love. It argues that the Aesthete and the Judge represent two divergent forms of desire for “first love” and two ways of striving to elicit desire through rhetoric.

This chapter considers the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood on Vaudeville. It asks: How did actual, brick-and-mortar theaters and people professionally trained to entertain act within this larger realm and moment of theatricality? What was the special function of live theater in a world symbolically saturated by expiating ritual? And what was the role of entertainers who brought their training out of doors into the muck and mire, or who brought their experience of that muck—and its human costs—back onstage? In the spring of 1927, Vaudeville awakened its considerable network to raise money for the Mississippi flood victims. Its powerful but doomed circuit and its intrinsic form represented the public's signature rite of live response to the social and environmental collapse occurring in the Delta.

Chapter Two explores Ernie Bushmiller'sNancy.In what embodies an overlooked facet of the strip, many of its signature traits, central characters, and core qualities can be traced back to one the most popular modes of entertainment in the United States during the early twentieth century: vaudeville.From the gag humor employed throughout the comic and Nancy's penchant for linguistic misunderstandings to Sluggo's use of working-class dialect and the comedic exchanges that take place between him and Nancy, the strip is an amalgamation of vaudevillian elements. An understanding of the way in which vaudeville permeates Nancy helps to account for the tremendous appeal of the strip along with its longstanding low cultural esteem. At the same time, the elements of vaudeville that can be located within Nancy add a new facet to discussions of class, ethnicity, and race within the comic.

Joplin met Joseph F. Lamb in late 1907 or early 1908 and urged Stark to publish his music. Over the next decade Stark was to publish a dozen rags by Lamb, these comprising the basis for Lamb’s reputation. Stark also published Fig Leaf Rag (1908), the last new Joplin piece he was to issue. Joplin’s next eight piano works, in 1908/9, were published by Seminary Music, associated with Ted Snyder Music. One of these eight was Paragon Rag, which he dedicated to the CVBA—Colored Vaudeville Benevolent Association—an important professional and fraternal organization. Another was Euphonic Sounds, which he and others considered one of his most innovative rags. Joplin reportedly had resumed music studies, probably to enhance his opera; this may have been with opera coach Bruto Giannini, with whom he would study a few years later.

This chapter looks at Western understandings of Sufism other than those already considered (as mysticism and as esoteric universalism). It shows how these understandings developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in verse, fiction, drama, painting, and journalism. They were often trivial, emphasizing dervishes as Oriental stereotypes or vaudeville figures. Even serious, accomplished figures such as Lessing and Goethe ultimately did no more than trivialize Sufism. The best-known, possibly Sufi poem in Western history, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, is considered in detail, and is shown to have been understood as both Epicurean and as mystical. It is argued that the tension between these two understandings is precisely what made it a great poem. The chapter closes with an alternative understanding of Sufism: that is, of dervishes as fanatical warriors, the product of colonial warfare from Algeria to the Caucasus via the Sudan.