Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Nineteenth-century American variety amusements are far less simple and comprehensible than they might seem. Understanding “variety” and other amusement forms—largely aimed at urban, working-class, white male audiences—provides windows onto a changing society impacted by class, ethnicity, gender, and economics. In Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (1991), Robert C. Allen demonstrates how American burlesque (pre-striptease)—first performed for middle-class audiences—served as a “complex and transforming cultural phenomenon” (back cover). He does so despite the fact that burlesque was essentially a marginal, degraded, and modestly documented phenomenon. But if burlesque seems obscure, variety (pre-vaudeville) entertainment of the 1840s–1880s, which was a far more ephemeral form, is almost invisible in the historical record because working-class entertainments received little press and left few archives. Nevertheless, Gillian M. Rodger, a musicologist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, takes on the task of defining and clarifying what variety actually was and how these amusements in their various venues—ranging from free-and-easies and concert saloons to more formal, established theater structures—evolved from “sexualized entertainment” to the more family-friendly vaudeville.