Revue
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A scene typical (from 1929) of the "Follies" of Florenz Ziegfeld, the most popular Broadway impresario of the decade. This type of scene usually featured scantily clad young men and women walking around the stage in extravagant costumes while a tenor sung. The nudity in this lavish number would have precluded its appearance in most other American theatrical entertainments. |
A
revue is a type of multi-act popular
theatrical entertainment that combines
music, dance and
sketches. The revue has its roots in nineteenth-century American popular entertainment and melodrama, but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from ca. 1916-1932. Though most famous for their visual
spectacle, revues frequently satirized contemporary figures,
news, or literature. Due to high ticket prices, ribald publicity campaigns, and sometime embrace of prurient material, the revue was typically patronized by audience members who earned more and felt less restricted by middle-class social mores than their contemporaries in
vaudeville. Like much of its era's popular entertainments, revue often featured material based on sophisticated, irreverant dissections of topical matter, public personae, and fads, though the primary attraction was found in the frank display of the female body.
George Lederer's
The Passing Show (1894) is usually held to be the first successful American "review." The English spelling was used until 1907 when Florenz Ziegfeld popularized the French spelling. "Follies" is now sometimes (incorrectly) employed as an analog for "revue," though the term was proprietorial with Ziegfeld until his death in 1932. (Other popular proprietoral revue names included George White's "Scandals" and Earl Carroll's "Vanities.")
Revues are most properly understood as having amalgamated several theatrical traditions within the corpus of a single entertainment.
Minstrelsy's olio section provided a structural map of popular variety presentation, while literary travesties highlighted an audience hunger for satire. Theatrical
extravaganzas, in particular, moving panoramas, demonstrated a vocabulary of the sepctacular.
Burlesque, itself a bawdy hybrid of various theatrical forms, lent to classic revue an open interest in female sexuality and the masculine
gaze.
Revues enjoyed great success on Broadway from the
World War I years until the
Great Depression, when the stock market crash forced many revues from cavernous Broadway houses into smaller venues. (The shows did, however, continue to infrequently appear in large theatres well into the 1950s.) The high ticket prices of many revues helped ensure audiences distinct from other live popular entertainments during their height of popularity (late 1910s-1940s). In 1914, for example, the
Follies charged $5.00 for an opening night ticket; at that time, many cinema houses charged a $0.10-0.25, while low-priced vaudeville seats could be had for $0.15.
[Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr. Show Biz: From Vaude to Video (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1951) 177.] Among the many popular producers of revues, Flornez Ziegfeld played the greatest role in developing the classical revue through his glorification of a new theatrical "type," "the American girl." Famed for his often bizarre publicity schemes and continual debt, Ziegfeld joined
Earl Carroll,
George White, and the
Shubert Brothers as the leading producing figure of the American revue's golden age.
Revues took advantage of their high revenue stream to lure away performers from other media, often offering exorbitant weekly salaries without the unrepentant travel demanded by other entertainments. Performers such as
Eddie Cantor,
Anna Held,
W.C. Fields,
Bert Williams, and the Fairbanks Twins found great success on the revue stage. Composers or lyricists such as
Richard Rodgers,
Lorenz Hart,
Irving Berlin, and
George M. Cohan also enjoyed a tremendous reception on the part of audiences. Sometimes, an appearance in a revue provided a key early entry into entertainment. Largely due to their centralization in
New York City and adroit use of publicity, revues proved particularly adept at introducing new talents to the American theatre.
Rodgers and Hart, one of the great composer/lyricist teams of the American
musical theatre, followed up their early
Columbia University student revues with the successful
Garrick Gaieties (1925). Comedian
Fanny Brice, following a brief period in
burlesque and amateur variety, bowed to revue audiences in Ziegfeld's
Follies of 1910. Specialist writers / composers of revues have included
Sandy Wilson,
Noel Coward, John Stromberg,
George Gershwin, Earl Carroll and
Flanders and Swann.
With the introduction of talking pictures, in 1926, studios immediately began filming acts from the stage. Such film shorts gradually replaced the live entertainment that had often accompanied cinema exhibition. By 1928, studios began planning to film feature length versions of popular musicals and revues from the stage. The lavish films, noted by many for a sustained opulence unrivaled in Hollywood until the 1950s epics, reached a breadth of audience never found by the stage revue, all while significantly underpricing the now-faltering theatrical shows. A number of revues were released by the studios, many of which were filmed entirely (or partly) in color. The most notable examples of these are:
The Show of Shows, (1929),
Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929),
Movietone Follies of 1929 (1929),
Paramount on Parade (1930),
New Movietone Follies of 1930 (1930) and
The King of Jazz (1930). Even Britain jumped on the bandwagon and produced an expensive revue called
Elstree Calling (1930).
Revues are often common today as
student entertainment and use pastiche, in which contemporary songs are re-written in order to comment on the college or courses in a humorous nature. While most
comic songs will only be heard within the revue they were written for, sometimes they become more widely known, such as
A Transport of Delight about the big red London bus by Flanders and Swan, who first made their name in a revue titled
At the Drop of a Hat.Towards the end of the 20th century, a sub-genre of revue largely dispensed with the sketches, founding narrative structure within a song cycle in which the material is culled from varied works.. This type of revue may or may not have identifiable characters and a rudimentary story line but, even when it does, the songs remain the focus of the show. This type of revue usually showcases songs written by a particular composer or songs made famous by a particular performer. Examples of the former are
Side by Side by Sondheim (music/lyrics Stephen Sondheim), Eubie!
(Eubie Blake) TomFoolery (Tom Lehrer), and Five Guys Named Moe'' (songs made popular by
Louis Jordan). The eponymous nature of these later revues suggest a continued embrace of a unifying authorial presence in this seemingly scattershot genre, much as was earlier the case with Ziegfeld, Carrol, et al.
