Barbara Cohen-Stratyner's blog

My last two blogs have been about images that inspired the exhibition, Vaudeville Nation, and ended up adorning its title. This one concerns an image that inspired the curatorial approach to the exhibition, but ended up almost hidden in the exhibition itself. That happens sometimes -- the curatorial/design team finds other ways to re-state the message from the artifact.

Recent popular entertainment historians have noted that the feature that distinguished vaudeville from other variety forms was its targeting of women audiences for afternoon performances. There were many reasons for this -- the most important being that urban women had discretionary income by the turn-of-the-20th century. Not much, perhaps, but enough for a weekly visit to the local vaudeville palace. Theater owners and vaudeville circuit managers understood that the expense of installing clean lobbies and lounges would be balanced by the extra income from multiple afternoon performances. By the 1920s boom in theater building, they commissioned fabulous lobbies, ladies' lounges, and children's play areas.

I found this image on the back cover of a Keith's circuit theater program, Boston, 1906. It is one of the clearest statements of the management advertising directly to women to attend the theater each week. They wanted a vaudeville habit, not an interest in a particular performer.

In order to emphasize the importance of targeting women in the gallery, we set up 3 cases of mannequins in day-time, street clothes with arrays of vaudeville programs. We also developed a section on theater interiors and hung enlargements that brought the visitor through the exterior, lobby, and stage house of typically ornate vaudeville and picture palaces.

The first blog in this series concerned one of the icon images for the Vaudeville Nation exhibition and web site (www.nypl.org/vaudeville). The rondel held clues to the time and place of one of the many forms of popular entertainment associated with turn-of-the-century vaudeville -- roof garden cabarets.

This blog concerns the other figure in the title banner who comes from the other end -- chronologically -- of vaudeville. Not that the model is necessarily older than the young woman on the swing, but that her form of vaudeville, Prologues, dates from much later -- the 1930s to 1950s. Prologues were short vaudeville shows that alternated with feature films in the sound film era. The image is a costume design for a Roxyette, a precision dance team at the Roxy Theater in NY. The Roxy, managed by "Roxy" Rothafel, and the Roxyettes, staged by Russell Markert, were the older siblings and direct predecessors of Roxy's Radio City Music Hall and its Rockettes. The use of music notation in costumes had been popular in designs for dance choruses since the late 19th century. This costume was probably designed by Monte Montadoro. It came to the Billy Rose Theatre Division in the collection of Albert Packer, who was business manager for the costume shop at the Roxy (1930- 1936) and Radio City Music Hall. The caption in the Vaudeville Nation web site gives the collection credit only.

The next blog will present the visual icon that inspired my curation of the exhibition, but was never featured in the gallery.

In the development stage of most exhibitions, there are a few images or artifacts that inspire the team. It can be something that impacts of the design or structure -- a color that sets a mood or a type face that defines a period.

For me, it is usually an artifact that inhabits the theme of the exhibition. So, in starting to blog about artifacts, I wanted to start with one of those pieces. It defined the theme and set one end of a chronological span.

This rondel was on the cover of the program for the Hammerstein Roof Garden, on top of the Victoria Theater at 42nd Street and Broadway. That alone puts it in the center of the performing arts universe. It served as one of the two symbolic images for Vaudeville Nation, the popular exhibitions from 2006-2007, which can still be seen in its on-line version (www.nypl.org/vaudeville).

For many modern-day visitors to the real and virtual gallery, she was a smiling, vaguely 19th century face. As with so many artifacts, the deeper you go, the more we can share what it meant to its original viewers at the turn of the last century. It is a woman because women were a targeted audience in vaudeville and women found employment in vaudeville. The leaves behind her mean that the smiling woman was at a roof garden theater -- a cabaret space on top of a theater that featured an outdoor space or a glass roof. She is wearing what we now would think of as a clown suit, but was then known as a "Yama-Yama" from the popular Bessie McCoy song "Yama-Yama Man." Most meaningfully, she has a drink with ice cubes -- clues that the roof gardens were cooled and served iced drinks.