| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers. By Arthur Frank Wertheim. (New York: Palgrave, 2006. xviii, 332 pp. $69.95, ISBN 1-4039-6826-8.)

The behind-the-scenes business of vaudeville was as dramatic as the daredevil acrobats, risqué comedians, and fashionable divas on stage. Arthur Frank Wertheim's business history of vaudeville, Vaudeville Wars, vividly captures the personalities, achievements, and tragedies behind the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment industry in the early twentieth century. Vaudeville's leading promoters, Benjamin Franklin Keith, Edward Albee, Morris Meyerfeld Jr., and Martin Beck, took variety shows from dime museums, concert saloons, and beer halls to the pinnacle of respectable American popular culture by appealing to families and offering opulent theaters and high-class acts at affordable prices. The engine that drove that "mass" culture phenomenon was a national vaudeville empire that crushed the vaudeville performers' union and overtook independent theater owners and agents.

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