Editing Vaudeville (section)

== Beginnings ==
{{See also|Comédie en vaudevilles{{!}}''Comédie en vaudevilles''}}
[[File:Character comedian charles e grapewin.gif|framed|From newspaper promotional for vaudeville character actor [[Charles Grapewin]], {{circa|1900}}]]
With its first subtle appearances within the early 1860s, vaudeville was not initially a common form of entertainment. The form gradually evolved from the [[concert saloon]] and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This more gentle form was known as "Polite Vaudeville".<ref>{{cite book| first1=Frank| last1=Cullen| first2=Florence| last2=Hackman| first3=Donald| last3=McNeilly| chapter=Vaudeville History| title=Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America| pages=xi-xxxii| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XFnfnKg6BcAC| location=London| publisher=Routledge| date=8 October 2006| isbn=978-0-415-93853-2}}</ref>

In the years before the [[American Civil War]], entertainment existed on a different scale. Similar variety theatre existed before 1860 in Europe and elsewhere. In the US, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatergoers could enjoy a performance consisting of [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]] plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing, and comedy.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Browne |first=Ray B. |date=1960 |title=Shakespeare in American Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2710096 |journal=American Quarterly |volume=12 |issue=3 |pages=374–391 |doi=10.2307/2710096|jstor=2710096 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |date=2024-11-23 |title=Vaudeville {{!}} Definition, History, & Facts {{!}} Britannica |url=https://www.britannica.com/art/vaudeville |access-date=2024-12-14 |website=www.britannica.com |language=en}}</ref> As the years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found an increasing number of ways to be entertained. Vaudeville was characterized by traveling companies touring through cities and towns.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia| url=http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1513870/Television-in-the-United-States/283603/Variety-shows?anchor=ref1053883| title=Television in the United States| first=Robert J.| last=Thompson| encyclopedia=[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]| date=4 February 2014| access-date=2015-10-26}}</ref> A handful of [[circus]]es regularly toured the country; dime museums appealed to the curious; amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls often featured "cleaner" presentations of variety entertainment; compared to saloons, music halls, and [[American burlesque|burlesque]] houses, which catered to those with a taste for the ''risqué''. In the 1840s, the [[minstrel show]], another type of variety performance, and "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture", grew to enormous popularity and formed what [[Nick Tosches]] called "the heart of 19th-century show business".<ref>{{cite book |title=Where Dead Voices Gather |last=Tosches |first=Nick |year=2002 |publisher=Back Bay Books |location=Boston |isbn=0-316-89537-7 |page=11}}</ref> A significant influence also came from "Dutch" (i.e., German or faux-German) minstrels and comedians.<ref>{{cite book| editor1-first=Nils| editor1-last=Grosch| editor2-first=Tobias| editor2-last=Widmaier| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ObeD10YDRU0C&pg=PA233| title=Lied und populäre Kultur/ Song and Popular Culture| language=de| page=233| publisher=Waxman Verlag GmbH| year=2010| location=Münster| isbn=978-3-8309-2395-4| quote= ... the widespread influence Dutch minstrels and comedians had with their musical and dramaturgical idiom on vaudeville, the circuit of traveling tent shows.&nbsp;... The Black Crook of 1866&nbsp;... already displayed a mixture of "ersatz German romanticism" ([[Gerald Bordman]]) and burlesque elements inherited from the Dutch character shows&nbsp;...}}</ref> [[Medicine show]]s traveled the countryside offering programs of comedy, music, [[Juggling|jugglers]], and other novelties along with displays of tonics, salves, and miracle elixirs, while "[[Wild West]]" shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing frontier, complete with trick riding, music and drama. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America's growing urban hubs.<ref>{{Cite web |last=cofresi |first=diana |date=1999-10-08 |title=Vaudeville ~ About Vaudeville {{!}} American Masters {{!}} PBS |url=https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/vaudeville-about-vaudeville/721/ |access-date=2024-12-14 |website=American Masters |language=en-US}}</ref>

From the mid-1860s, [[impresario]] [[Tony Pastor]], a former singing circus clown who had become a prominent variety theater performer and manager, capitalized on [[middle class]] sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in his [[New York City]] theatres.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.britannica.com/art/vaudeville|title=vaudeville {{!}} entertainment|work=Encyclopedia Britannica|access-date=2017-08-11}}</ref> Pastor opened his first "Opera House" on the [[Bowery]] in 1865, later moving his variety theater operation to [[Broadway theatre|Broadway]] and, finally, to Fourteenth Street near [[Union Square, Manhattan|Union Square]]. He only began to use the term "vaudeville" in place of "variety" in early 1876.<ref>Armond Fields, Tony Pastor, Father of Vaudeville (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2007), p. 84.</ref> Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic [[Upper Manhattan|uptown]], Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated bawdy material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.<ref>{{Cite web |title=archives.nypl.org -- Tony Pastor collection |url=https://archives.nypl.org/the/21700 |access-date=2024-12-14 |website=archives.nypl.org}}</ref>