vaudeville

Stage entertainment popular in the USA from the 1890s to the 1920s, featuring a variety of acts such as comedy sketches, song-and-dance routines, and so on. Vaudeville is in the same tradition as music hall in Britain.

The forerunners of vaudeville, variety shows held in cities and frontier settlements, were often coarse and lewd and intended largely for male audiences. By the 1890s these shows had become suitable family entertainment. Many performers who later became famous for their stage and screen work – George Burns, W C Fields, and Will Rogers, for instance – began their careers as vaudeville artists. Vaudeville declined during the 1930s because of the economic hardships of the Depression and the growth of radio and motion pictures. It all but disappeared by the end of World War II, with the advent of television.

vaudeville

Form of light music stage entertainment. In 18th-century France, vaudevilles were at first satirical songs, then songs with words set to popular tunes used in comedies with music (comédies mélées de vaudevilles), as in the English ballad opera (songs specially composed being called ariettes). In time vaudevilles in France became songs sung at the end of spoken stage pieces, taken up verse-by-verse by all the characters and sometimes by the chorus, and this device was sometimes introduced into opera in France and elsewhere, as for example at the end of Rousseau's Devin du village and Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail. The next step from this was to call a whole light music stage entertainment a vaudeville.

The term has various meanings and is of uncertain origin. The French composer and publisher Adrien Le Roy, in his Airs de Cour of 1571, said that such songs were formerly called voix de ville, ‘town voices’; but the form vau de Vire is also known, and may have referred to the valley of Vire in Normandy, the home of Olivier Basselin (c. 1400–50), a composer of such songs.