VAUDEVILLE was for many years the major entertainment business in Cleveland. It was essentially, "variety theater" and it was the dominant form of entertainment in the nation before cinema, radio, and television. In 1900 there were more than 2,000 vaudeville houses in the US. The industry employed tens of thousands of performers, and the only events people attended more frequently were school and church. Cleveland was no exception: Between 1885 and 1930 (the genre’s approximate lifespan) the city sported more than 60 theaters featuring vaudeville.
Think of vaudeville (loose French translation: “voice of the city”) as potpourri entertainment: compendia of 8-10 separate, unrelated, and widely disparate 10-20-minute acts. A typical show, for example, might open with an animal act featuring trained birds, snarling tigers, or a mélange of monkeys. A 1913 event at the Cleveland’s HIPPODROME THEATER included Charles Swain’s “Rats and Cats Show,” which featured the rodents dressed as jockeys riding on the backs of the felines. BALTO, the canine hero of Alaska’s diphtheria epidemic, visited the STATE THEATER in 1925. Next on a typical bill might be acrobats—bicyclists, trapeze artists, contortionists, tightrope walkers, tumblers, and so forth. Archibald Leach was a vaudeville unicyclist before becoming the Hollywood luminary we remember as Cary Grant. Radio icon Fred Allen originally was a juggler, as was red-nosed comic W.C. Fields. Bobby May—a native Clevelander—wowed audiences by (among other things) juggling upside down. Comedians (monologists, sketch comics, ventriloquists) also were regular vaudeville performers. The famous team of Weber & Fields performed at Cleveland’s COLONIAL, COLUMBIA, and Hippodrome theaters, as well as GRAY’S ARMORY and the EUCLID AVENUE OPERA HOUSE between 1888 and 1914. Legendary monologists Will Rogers and Fanny Brice visited Cleveland more than one dozen times. Musical acts—singers, dancers, instrumental bands—were equally big: Ballroom icons like Vernon and Irene Castle and Fred and Adelle Astaire scorched Cleveland stages on multiple occasions. As a child, Margarita Carmen Cansino—we remember her as Rita Hayworth—joined her family of Spanish dancers, who frequently played Cleveland venues. Bill (Bojangles) Robinson— the highest paid African-American entertainer in America—smoked the PALACE THEATER stage several times in the 1920s. Hippodrome audiences also swayed in their seats to the sounds of John Phillip Sousa in 1911. Magicians and illusionists were popular vaudevillians: Houdini, Thurston, Blackstone, and Adelaide Hermann (“The Queen of Magic”) performedat many Cleveland theaters in the early 20th century. Still, the vaudeville sky was the limit: Audiences also could enjoy everything from flexing and female impersonators to boxing, pyrotechnics, and one-act plays.
In Cleveland and elsewhere, variety shows were usually staged multiple times per day, six days a week. Spectators could sit through a whole show or take in only those acts that interested them. To keep audiences returning regularly, programs (known as “bills”) usually changed every week, which meant that most performers would have to spend their only day off (Sunday) traveling. Over time, as vaudeville became more corporatized, big-money syndicates like Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Follies,” Earl Carroll’s “Vanities,” George White’s “Scandals,” and Lee and Jacob J. Shubert’s “Passing Show” carved out a huge niche. With complete productions booked into different venues and cities over consecutive weeks, the syndicates provided performers with the showbiz equivalent of a full-time job.
Given its large population and relative equidistance to other big cities, Cleveland was a must-stop on the vaudeville circuit. Accordingly, vaudeville venues sprouted like weeds around the turn of the century. Euclid Ave. alone was home to the Euclid Avenue Opera House (1875-1922), the Columbia/Star/Cameo/Embassy (1887-1977), the People’s (1885-1892), the Bijou Dream (1904-1916), the Euclid Garden (1904-1911), the Hippodrome (1907-1981), the METROPOLITAN (1913-present, now the AGORA Theater), the Knickerbocker (1913-1952), the Duchess (1913-1926), Loew’s Park (1921-1957), the Hoffman/Circle (1921-1958), and KEITH’S 105TH (1921-1968). Two of Playhouse Square’s magnificent theaters—the State (1921) and the Palace (1922) were built for vaudeville. Another four dozen venues could be found around or near downtown.
Native Clevelanders also helped make the city a prime-time stop on the vaudeville circuit. First among these was JOHN ELLSLER, founder and manager of The Academy of Music on Bank (now West 6th St.) and the Euclid Avenue Opera House. Ellsler and his daughter, EUPHEMIA “EFFIE” ELLSLER, also starred in numerous theatrical productions. Effie later appeared on Broadway and in more than 20 motion pictures. Most prominent after the Ellslers were Clevelanders BOB HOPE, the aforementioned Bobby May, and the internationally popular singer, songwriter, and mimic Elsie Janis. Others included musician Gertrude Hitz; comedian Charles Bigelow; opera singer Eleanor Painter; singer/songwriter Ernest Ball; and actress Laura Nelson Hall. Long before TV, Cleveland’s own GENE CARROLL was a vaudeville song & dance man.
Despite its role as the nation’s preeminent form of live theater, vaudeville succumbed with surprising speed. Many factors contributed to its demise, but the advent of sound motion pictures probably sealed vaudeville’s doom. From a business standpoint, talkies were less expensive to develop and circulate than a live show. Moreover, talkies were wildly attractive not just to theater goers but road-weary vaudevillians. Hundreds of performers—from Jack Benny and Fanny Brice to George Burns and Gracie Allen—happily traded a life on the road for a simpler career on a soundstage. Long before talkies, however, RADIO—consumers’ first chance to enjoy live entertainment in their own homes—had begun to destabilize vaudeville. Demographics and social mores also hastened vaudeville’s passing: After WORLD WAR I, the country’s acceptance of non-white, non-American others plummeted. Fear and exclusion became dominant themes. Diversity—although never fully embraced—was increasingly vilified. The final coffin nail was likely the Great Depression. For millions of citizens, disposable income for “frivolities” (like entertainment) dried up.
Thus by the 1930s, large-scale variety theater mostly vanished from the local and national scene. Live Broadway-type musicals remained attractive; but most theaters that had not already been demolished (as well as those built since about 1930) were—and still are—all about the movies. With only a scant few exceptions, live variety was dead.
Christopher Roy