Book Review

Canada and the United States

Historians of vaudeville's place in American popular culture have often recapitulated the gendered terms in which vaudeville's reigning manager, Benjamin Franklin Keith, promoted his success. They see in vaudeville a triumph of "refined" tastes among new mass audiences in which middle-class women figured crucially as entertainment consumers. While accepting this basic narrative, more recent scholars have questioned the stability of some of its basic terms of "high" and "low," "refined" and "vulgar." M. Alison Kibler contributes importantly to this line of inquiry by putting gender and its turn-of-the-century malleability at the center of her study of vaudeville's cultural hierarchies.

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To probe the gendered construction of the vaudeville audience, Kibler reconstructs and interrogates the delicate balance between vaudeville's claim to democracy and its preservation of audience heterogeneity. To do so, she mines more comprehensively than any previous scholar the reports on specific acts and their audience reception that managers of theaters on Keith's far-flung circuit supplied to one another. She shows that managers thought of acts as playing to the "high" or "low" tastes they attributed to specific audience segments, even as they congratulated themselves for assembling a democratic "mass" audience. But they were often surprised when specific audience sectors embraced acts unsuited to their expected "tastes"—as when gallery patrons applauded a classical cello recital or middle-class ladies evinced interest in acrobats or strong-men. Such unpredictable "ladies" are particularly revealing of wrinkles in the gender expectations managers had of their audiences. They relied on the "ladies" to enforce the general tone of democratized decorum they claimed for their theaters, yet were repeatedly flummoxed by female patrons' predilection for rippling muscles and ribald humor.

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