| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Arthur Frank Wertheim. Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers. (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. Pp. xvii, 332. $69.95.

Recognized as an important site of cross-class entertainment that brought "respectable" audiences to acts once relegated to "lowbrow" variety houses and appreciated for its important role in introducing moving pictures to U.S. audiences and routinizing entertainment formulae that became the basis for early radio and television, vaudeville has proven a seemingly inexhaustible source of insight into cultural experiences and contests ranging across lines of class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, "respectability," and just plain fun. As recent historians have mined vaudeville's varied performances for illumination of these dimensions of everyday life, however, they have focused primarily on the performative strategies of vaudeville artists and the even more elusive and contradictory meanings potentially found in vaudeville by its audiences. The business of vaudeville, especially as shaped by the increasingly corporate strategies of the men who built, managed, and controlled its largest theatrical circuits, while certainly part of these cultural analyses, has tended to occupy a background that explains limits imposed on performers' creativity and sources of vaudeville formulae. In this book, Arthur Frank Wertheim brings the strategies of big-time vaudeville's most powerful magnates to the foreground.

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