Talk:Revue

Old comments
This page is in need of major re-working. First, a great deal of material is missing. (A revue page without mention of George White?) Second, the revue was a live show, but this page currently gives great weight to filmic revues, a separate subject. Next, there's a muddling of critical terminology right now. Why speak of a "mass audience" in minstrelsy, for example, when most scholars view minstrelsy's heydey as prior to the massification of the American audience? "Pastiche" is similarly mis-employed. Does someone have time for a full clean-up?. A lot of this appears to be based on Davis' not-very-good book on the subject. --Patchyreynolds 19:02, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

If you want to change the vaudeville page that's fine but I have never heard anyone call a revue a low-class affair. Most of the items offered on revues would have not been appreciated by conservative rural or low class/uneducated audiences.AllTalking 19:46, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

A few things. First, it's not about changing one page but about knowledge being in accord with itself. It makes no sense to let stand erronious claims about one subject simply because they exist on a different page. Vaudeville was not a "lower-class" entertainment, but instead featured a wide range of styles, entertainments and costs. Yes, the genre featured jugging dogs and roistering comedians. At the same time, programs advertised fur coats, performers sung opera and Shakespeare monologues, and audiences were able to reserve plush seats in advance. Second, I never called revues a "low-class affair," and in fact, if you'll notice, added a notation of the revue's higher prices. Also, what do you mean by the term "class?" Are you employing it in as an economic distiction (and if so, based on the audience members salary or the ticket prices?) or one distinguishing between taste cultures (e.g., the perceived difference between the symphony and country music)? And does paying more money to watch glitzy revues make them "higher class" than paying less money to watch a classical harpist? Also, I never argued that revues audience were not urban or upper class; I simply noted that vaudeville audiences were not rural or lower class. Next, what evidence do you have that the rural population was "conservative"? And about what? Politics? Economics? Obscenity? Religion? We're talking, in part, about an era in which rural populations often had terribly radical social agendas (e.g., your Black Crook takes place during Populism's heyday). Finally, and again, unless you make a firm historical comparison--one that would probably link revue's cost-structure and star systems to those of vaudeville and cinema--there's no reason to even compare the two genres in the way you do. And if it's a formal argument concerning the evening's structure, the relative prurience of the material is not a topic.--Patchyreynolds 21:30, 30 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I frankly don't know why you are trying to rewrite history and why you are dismissing the facts. In case you didn't know there have always been uneducated conservative people out there and they have always attended different types of entertainment from those who are educated and liberal. I suggest you read some newspapers and magazines from the 1920's to see what people really thought of your beloved vaudeville. The fact that you actually wasted your time editing an article on Jerry Falwell explains a lot though...there is no use providing facts to conservative/religious people as they believe just what they want to believe.AllTalking 04:58, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Number one, Wikipedia isn't the place for personal politics. They don't belong in articles or on the talk pages, and you shouldn't presume you know mine by the subject matter I choose to edit. (I would suggest, in fact, since you have now demonstrated an interest in my past edits, you actually examine the effects of these edits on the articles.) By your suggested schema, any figure beyond a given cultural pale would receive either no attention or attention only from those who agree with his or her espoused point of view. Would you leave the Hitler page to neo-Nazis alone, rather than include historians of modern Germany? (Nor should you assume that vaudeville is any more "beloved" to me than any other subject.) Next, personal attacks rarely produce good scholarship. Third, I have indeed read countless scores of newspaper reviews, memoirs, personal letters, and business reports concerning vaudeville, from its birth in the mid-1880s to the fitful attempts at its resurrection in the 1930s and 1940s. (The 1920s period you mention is, of course, the period of its rapid decline. Are you basing your knowledge off this?)  Yes, many in the era, particularly those trumpeting the rise of high modernism, found vaudeville to contain a great deal of frippery. Yet when we study the material today we find a great deal of commentary on women's suffrage, labor conditions, politics, capitalism, modern industrialism, etc. Additionally, the bills and business records tell us that classical string quartets joined tap dancers on the bill, demonstrating a breadth of taste cultures. Following your suggested historiographical method, one would simply report the views of some living at the time as correct or capable of producing inerrant knowledge. We would therefore have a "history" of the United States in which persons of African descent were less than human at one point and than equal with other citizens later on, hardly an accurate picture. Most modern scholars of vaudeville argue that the form had a great deal of cultural significance and often employed subtleties in the pursuit of its agendas. If you wished to contend, "Many proponets of what Lawrence Levine has termed 'sacred culture' (e.g., ballet) found vaudeville trivial and aesthetically degraded," you would have made a defensible, appropriately qualified, and historically situated claim. Finally, my questioning of your statements about what "conservatives" thought or did was provoked by what I see as the vagueness and non-historicity of your claims. What does "conservative" mean for you? When? If it means an adherant to a particular strain of dogmatic Christianity, for example, is Samuel Adams, on the whole, conservative? After all, he simultaneously sought armed rebellion against the government (traditionally, not the most conservative of missions) while hoping to turn Boston into a "Christian Sparta." Are Kansas farmers in the 1880s "conservative"? They attended church regularly and loathed public drunkenness, profanity, and nudity, but also tried to take the nation off the gold standard and proposed means of property distribution that sounds pretty socialist to modern ears. On the other hand, President Bush went to two Ivy League schools, appears to have not exactly rushed to serve in a combat zone during Vietnam, and by many accounts, had a fair familiarity with drugs at some point in his life. I'm noting that we need to be precise and historically grounded in our employment of terms. You appear to conflate "liberal" and "educated" as if going to Harvard in 1908 made one more likely to embrace public nudity than one with a grammar school education. What is your proof for this? What do you make of the fact that many proponets of conservative Americanization went to Harvard or Yale? What do you make of vaudeville being the favorite entertainment of Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton, and boxing of Teddy Roosevelt, a Harvard alum? Or of most of the early twentieth-century anarchists having quite little formal education? The argument to be made along these lines, it would seem, might be that revues cost more, meaning the audience had to be able to afford the ticket. You might then make a demographic link between income and education, though again, proving political persuasion remains pretty tough. (For example, a wealthier revue audience member enjoys public nudity but opposes the minumum wage. Liberal or conservative?)  In any case, that link doesn't mean that folks with more money didn't consume the less expensive fare of the movie houses or vaudeville theatres. Just because one can afford champaigne doesn't mean one doesn't choose milk. --Patchyreynolds 14:21, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Post-war revues in Sweden
I can't speak for Europe at large, or even Scandinavia, but the revue was a thriving genre of entertainment way up until the 1960s in Sweden, attracting some of the most famous actors and singers of that time. I don't know if that's too marginal to offset the Golden Age as defined by US standards, but as far as I can tell, this article is written entirely from an American perspective.

Peter Isotalo 13:23, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

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'Origin' section
"Minstrelsy's olio section provided a structural map of popular variety presentation, while literary travesties highlighted an audience hunger for satire."

This needs rewriting to clarify the point being made. Presumably reference to Olio (musical number) is occurring? Harfarhs (talk) 08:59, 21 August 2020 (UTC)