Vaudeville

Before the American civil war theatre in America was dominated by burlesque and acts that featured many risqué things. People mainly go there to drink and the acts were more for middle class men.

In 1881, Tony Dastor wanted to create a more family show featuring a wide variety performances in one night. He removed all the bad language and risqué to to make the target audience open. He banned drinking in theatre to make it more family orientated.

He found out that they could make lots of money with cleaner productions and kept on putting performances like this. As the years went on, more and more amusements became available.

The purpose of these performences were so that they don't get any emotional attachment. The sole purpose was to  entertain. Even though there were new acts available, most of them were slapstick comedy.

As the years went on, Vaudeville became more and more popular appealing to many different audiences and featured a variety of performers. However these were stereotypical performences make them look bad. Although it was popular, the competition was from silent movies. A lot of the Vaudeville theatres As it became less common.

Vaudeville had been re-born as New Vaudeville from shows like Royal Variety and Britain's got talent. The presenters are stars stars that are funny to keep the comedy element.

What makes it New Vaudeville:

Voices

Over the top physicality

Comedy sketch

No character relationship with the audience

Often recognises that the audience is there (breaks the fourth wall)

Evaluation:

We did 39 steps and our piece was set at a theatre. I liked it because it's fast paced and there's no pauses. We had a piece from 39 steps. Our piece was wait two performers 

Our piece was about people in a theatre putting on a show. I like that everything is also over the top and big so I think that the audience would enjoy it more. I also like the while idea of the slapstick comedy so that people can really relate to the subjects and still laugh at what's going on.