Vaudeville was the heart of American show business from the late 1800s through to the 1930s. A vaudevillian show was essentially a variety show, with any number of different types of entertainment, including musicians and dancers, but also a chorusline, comedians, magicians, acrobats, short plays or skits, minstrels and other specialty acts. By 1900 there were chains or “circuits” of vaudeville theatres around the country, such as Martin Beck’s Orpheum Circuit, of which New York’s Palace Theatre was the most famous (1913 – 32).
Vaudeville flourished as America’s variety theater from the 1880s to the late 1930s, when it finally succumbed to competing forms of popular entertainment, particularly “talking” pictures.
When vaudeville’s popularity began to fade, many of its stars carried vaudeville forms into the new media of radio, nightclub entertainment, films, and later, television. Entertainers you may know of, who began in vaudeville, include Mae West, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Sarah Bernhardt, Eubie Blake, Sammy Davis Jr., W. C. Fields, Cary Grant, Phil Silvers, Ethel Waters and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.
The Killer Dillers will entertain you, not only with their dance steps, but with specialty and flash acts, amusing characters and theatrical antics, in the true spirit of authentic vaudeville!
