Class, Consumption, and Ethnic Performance in Vaudeville

During the last decade of the 19th century, vaudeville became the nation's most popular entertainment form, drawing unprecedented numbers of spectators and appealing to members of diverse socioeconomic groups by staging a rapid succession of acrobats, comedians, legitimate theater stars, pet-tricks, and dramatic sketches. In a cultural scene that Lawrence Levine and others tell us was marked by the historical separation between legitimate and mass cultural practices, critical observers (then and since) have greeted the diversity of vaudeville's audience and the range of its performance with a mixture of surprise and liberal enthusiasm.