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Show THE VbY H.I.PHILLIPS WWII Foarur VAUDEVILLE'S RETURN fyWO-A-DAY vaudeville came back to the American amusement world. And this time it wasn't so hard to convince the audience that there was a time when they put movies on just to chase the customers custom-ers out with a clear indication that the real entertainment was over. The movies drove, the audiences out of the vaudeville house. They may now have driven them back. With a lot of help from video. Video is responsible re-sponsible in two ways. First, it has really revived the versatility once found in the vi.udevi'Je theater. Second, it has shewn the tremendous tremen-dous video audience a place to go where it can see an occasional act without a BALLET PRELUDE! Vaudeville reminds us of television. tele-vision. It's so different. The old time variety show had Its faults, but the performer had to be good, not merely daring. It wasn't enough to be photogenic, well groomed and noisy. Charm helped, but the vaudevillians had to have good material, a style of their own, and genuine ability plus intestinal fortitude ... and have them all In the tough days when nobody got a pot of gold for a night's work. The act had to be tood everywhere, every-where, not just pleasing to hard-boiled hard-boiled audiences, to some soap-powder soap-powder executive, advertising agency agen-cy whizz boy or video vice-president. The audience, having ' taken the trouble to travel through a blizzard bliz-zard and paid in to see your act, said, "Now gwan and make me laugh!" And the performer didn't live who could offset a chilly reaction re-action at the Palace by whistling for applause or motioning for the audience to come up with warmer approval. m m Nobody ever saw a vaudeville performer try to 30 over a little bigger by pronouncing a benediction, benedic-tion, pulling a tear-jerker about his love for the kiddies and thanking all Americans everywhere for letting let-ting him into their hearts. That was away back when people looked for benedictions from the church and settled for good fun from the comedians. come-dians. There was a recognized barrier bar-rier between the performers and the audience and you were never supposed sup-posed to have taken any stranger into your family circle just because you applauded his act. A comedian could be great and still not be your living-room pal and your fireside buddy. The vaudeville lads and lassies las-sies were an able, resolute rugged rug-ged and independent crew, willing will-ing to stake their routines on your judgment without closer sentimental ties if not all-out love. They professed no immense im-mense satisfaction that an audience audi-ence had permitted them to appear ap-pear on the program. Some of the greatest comedians ever known to the stage never gave a darn whether they came into your home or not, or cared especially es-pecially whether your kiddles ate their cereaL With Judy Garland as the top dish, the Palace show seemed to put vaudeville back into the picture. The opening night build-up and the frenzied emphasis on the.presence of notables could be taken with a grain of salt. Most of the first-aighters first-aighters were those "biggies" who would rather die than miss an occasion oc-casion which promises personal publicity pub-licity and another photograph. The audiences from now on will tell the story, and our guess is that this time vaudeville is back for quite a stay. The country is video conscious and when you're video conscious you're vaudeville conscious. Then, too, video has brought out thousands of new performers, and certainly revived plenty of old ones. "Direct "Di-rect from .the Palace" was once a great help. And it may be again. |