"Vaudeville" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... early eighties, in the quiet, sleepy, bloody old town of San Antonio, there was a dance hall, gambling resort and vaudeville theater, in which the main proprietor was one Jack Harris, commonly known as Pegleg Harris. Thompson frequently patronized this place on his visits to San Antonio, and received treatment which left him with a grudge against Harris, whom he resolved to kill. He followed ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... the Royal Academy were engaged to execute new dances; a full and effective band performed the most fashionable airs, and new figures were at length introduced and announced as a source of attraction; but this place was soon pulled down, and re-built on the ground now occupied by the Theatre du Vaudeville. The establishment failed, and the proprietor became a bankrupt. A short time after, it was re-opened by another speculator; but on such a scale, as merely to attract the working classes of the community. The band was now composed of a set ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... had together! The gathering of the clans, the big dinner, and the play at night. Not exactly a play, was it, Mate f More of a vaudeville performance with you as the stage manager, and I as the soubrette. Do you remember the last reunion before I was married? I mean the time I was Lady Macbeth and gave a skirt dance, and you did lovely stunts from Grand Opera. Have you forgotten Jack's famous parody ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... that he gave as an encore: "Mother, Bring the Hammer, There's a Fly on Baby's Head." This "went great," as they say in vaudeville, but despite uproarious applause, the "Sweet Singer of the Wabash" declared that that was ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... easier, and the public conveniences and utilities lend themselves to the designs of evil-intentioned and loose-moraled women. The ease of travel, the laxity of laws, the theater, with its unchaste and indecent plays, the moving picture snows, the vaudeville resorts, whose highest priced "talent" is some voluptuous female, who has cultivated the art of draping nudity with suggestiveness and singing immoral songs, all tend to give youth a false impression of the reality of life and to make the path ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... through the nose, or drinking—or anything else. Any man can see with half an eye how drinking, for example, is hurting Jones; but he always argues that his own personal drinking is of a different variety and is doing him no harm. The best illustration of it is in the old vaudeville story, where the man came on the stage and said: "Smith is drinking too much! I never go into a saloon ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... supreme contempt. He told the pleased and unsuspicious lady that he went to parties because it was right for him to see the world: he told her that he went to the French play because he wanted to perfect himself in the language, and there was no such good lesson as a comedy or vaudeville,—and when one night the astonished Lady Agnes saw him stand up and dance, and complimented him upon his elegance and activity, the mendacious little rogue asserted that he had learned to dance in Paris, whereas Anatole knew that ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Chatelet took his guests to the Vaudeville. Lucien, in his heart, was not over well pleased to see Chatelet again, and cursed the chance that had brought the Baron to Paris. The Baron said that ambition had brought him to town; he had hopes of an appointment as secretary-general to a government department, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Plaza Hotel facing them from across the square. When the St. Regis was first opened popular fancy ascribed to it a scale of prices crippling to the average purse. The idea was the subject of derisive vaudeville ditties. When a "Seeing New York" car approached the Fifty-fifth Street corner the guide invariably took up his megaphone and called out, "Ladies and gentlemen! We are passing on the right the far-famed St. Regis Hotel! If you order beefsteak it will ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... His characters, with few exceptions, are extremes, caricatures. Even his shop girls, in the limning of whom he did his best work, are not really individuals; rather are they types, symbols. His work was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, and yet vaudeville."[9] The Duplicity of Hargraves, the story by O. Henry given in this volume, is free from most of his defects. It has a blend of humor and pathos that puts it on a plane ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... going over had prepared for it as they would for a vaudeville; they all had their faces blackened so they could know one another in the dark, and they were all allowed to arm themselves in any way they wished. Some carried revolvers, others the handles of our entrenching tools (these had small iron cog wheels at one end and they made ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... was thinking at the moment that the family baby was very cunning, with her bright eyes and indignant mouth. He stopped her before a vaudeville house, in a flare of ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... opinion the idea of the dignity of theatrical art was pedantic nonsense, and he thought light serio-comic vaudeville the only class of performance worth considering. Serious opera, rich musical ensemble, was his particular aversion, and my demands for this irritated him so that he met them only with scorn and indignant refusals. Of the strange connection between this artistic bias and his ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... as water adapts itself to the shape of the vessel in which it is placed. She dare not assert herself or be herself, lest, in some way, she should lose her tentative grasp upon the counterfeit which largely takes the place of love. If he prefers it, she will expatiate upon her fondness for vaudeville and musical comedy until she herself begins to believe that she likes it. With tears in her eyes and her throat raw, she will choke upon the assertion that she likes the smell of smoke; she will assume passion when his slightest touch makes her ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... continuous change of amusements, each noisier and duller than the one before. Now in the theatre, now in the open, they played a stupid but obscene vaudeville piece, and vicious topical songs were sung (a thunder of applause); an animated chansonnette-singer screeched and pulled about with her naked, excessively whitened shoulders, and winked with her exaggeratedly painted eyes; a woman acrobat, raising her legs, attired in pink tights, ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against the finest ruin you ever saw—solid stone with trees and vines and under-brush all growing up against it and in it and through it. All over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people that would have been arrested if they'd ever come out in vaudeville that way. We approached it ...
— Options • O. Henry
... a dirty trick that they played Stent and Brown—the three Mysterious Sisters, Fate, Chance, and Destiny. But they're always billed for any performance, be it vaudeville or tragedy; and there's no use hissing them off: they'll dog you from the stage entrance if they ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... teachers believe that a clear pronunciation helps greatly to establish the correct vocal action. Some even go so far as to say that a clear delivery of the words will of itself insure a correct tone-production. But this theory calls for only passing comment. One has but to turn to the vaudeville stage to see its falsity. For singers of that class, the words are of the utmost importance, while the tone-production is usually ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... is the fact that magnetism is by no means confined to those who have finely trained intellects or who have achieved great reputations. Some vaudeville buffoon or some gypsy fiddler may have more attractive power than the virtuoso who had spent years in developing his mind and his technic. The average virtuoso thinks far more of his "geist," his "talent" (or as Emerson ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... pianist will now oblige with something very refined. When in the name of 750,000 gods of reason will I ever learn enough to stay at home and go to bed instead of searching kittenishly for diversion in neighborhood movie and vaudeville houses? ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... explained. "The lattice at the end of the porch is loose, and he crawls under and comes out all bugs. He's been having a dreadful singing fit lately—running away to picture shows and vaudeville, ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... pockets, seeing her face—the tears on her cheek—feeling the texture of her dress against his lips. Barely two hours ago! No doubt she had confided all to Maxwell in the interval. The young fellow burnt with mingled rage and shame. This interview with the husband seemed to transform it all to vaudeville, if not to farce. How was he to get through it with any dignity and self-command? Moreover, a passionate resentment towards Maxwell developed itself. His telling of his secret had been no matter for a common scandal, a vulgar jealousy. She knew that—she could not have ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 1845, was one pregnant with fate where Dujarier was concerned. He had received, and accepted, an invitation to a supper-party at the Freres-Provencaux restaurant, given by Mlle Anais Lievenne, a young actress from the Vaudeville company. Among the other convives gathered round the festive board were a quartet of attractive damsels, Atala Beauchene, Victorine Capon, Cecile John, and Alice Ozy, with, to keep them company, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... exhibition of that mocking smartness of youth which often hides a childish heart. It was because he was so excessively sentimental and feared to betray his real physiognomy that he cut these excruciating capers. His other alternative would have been mawkishness. His vaudeville, "Love on the Nicholas Tower," which satirizes the drama of chivalry, is in the same vein and made a similar hit. A volume of "Poems" was also well received. But in 1831 he met with his first literary reverse. A second collection ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... performed for the first time at the Vaudeville Theatre in London on the 18th November 1913, with Gertrude Kingston as Catherine, Miriam Lewes as Yarinka, Dorothy Massingham as Claire, Norman McKinnell as Patiomkin, Edmond Breon as Edstaston, Annie Hill as the Princess Dashkoff, and Eugene Mayeur and F. Cooke Beresford ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... children. He was a dignified man and a proud one. Born in Munich he had begun his American career as a peanut vender with a travelling circus. At eighteen he was a side show ballyhoo; later, the manager of the side show, and, soon after, the proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the dinner in the small cabinet at the Trois Freres, or the Cadran Bleu, and the evening climax of the theater on the Boulevard, where Philippe, or Leontine Fay, or Poitier and Brunet, made a school of dramatic art of the small stages of the Porte St. Martin, the Varietes, and the Vaudeville. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... restaurant to the theatre, is, in Paris, a most natural transition; and the play and players of the day will be found far more closely representative of the social tone, the political creed, the artistic tastes of the hour, than elsewhere. The drama, for instance, in vogue not long since at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Place de la Bourse, is one we can scarcely imagine successful in another city, at least to such a degree. It was Les Filles de Marbre; and this is the plot. The opening scene is at Athens, in the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the little platform outside the side-show tent had all the fascination of the unknown for Jerry and Chris and Celia Jane and Nora, but not for Danny, who had been to the vaudeville theater twice and who knew that this outside sample never could come up to the glories to be revealed inside for fifty cents, or a dollar and a half for reserved seats in the boxes, ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... crowds and stone-throwing by excited youths and women, one saw only a few citizens walking slowly along. One group of policemen took shelter from the intermittent showers under the marquise of the Vaudeville Theater, and other detachments were in readiness at corners all along the line of the boulevards, which were dotted ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... contest," put in another student. "Flapp took lessons from a man who used to do bag-punching on the vaudeville stage." ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer
... establishment to the Metropolitan Opera House. After two weeks, within which he produced "Boabdil," "Fidelio," and some light-waisted spectacular things, he turned his theater over to Koster & Bial, who ran it as a vaudeville house until the end of its short career. There were English performances of the customary loose-jointed kind in the summer at the Grand Opera House, the first series of which, beginning in May, 1893, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... dame the size of that gal?" A short laugh issued from the driver. "She'd clean up in vaudeville, wouldn't she? Why, she could lift a ton, in harness. And hoein' the garden, with their coin! It's like a woman I heard of: they got a big well on their farm and she came to town to do some shoppin'; somebody told her she'd ought to buy a present ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... general channels. The topics of the day's light talk were absolutely unknown to him. The plays, the new books, the latest popular songs, jokes depending for their point on an intimate knowledge of the prevailing vaudeville mode, were as unfamiliar to him as Miss Alice Southerland's guest. He had thought pine and forest and the trail so long, that he found these square-elbowed subjects refusing to be jostled ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... intriguing little women who chatter incessantly. Everything begins and ends with a laugh. This recalls some of the early works of Gogol, but, we repeat, one finds no moral element in this laughter, and these tiny comedies are in reality no more than simple vaudeville sketches. Once in a while we find a sad note; less frequently, we find the sadness accentuated in order to present a terrible drama. Such, then, are the contents of the first two volumes which came from the pen ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... body into weird, outlandish contortions." There have been vigorous crusades against dance halls. And all because a few ill-bred, fun-loving, carefree young people wrongly interpreted the new dances in their own way and gave to the steps the vulgar abandon appropriate only to the cheap vaudeville stage ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... at Buenas Tierras, was not yet drunk. It was only eleven o'clock; and he never arrived at his desired state of beatitude—a state wherein he sang ancient maudlin vaudeville songs and pelted his screaming parrot with banana peels—until the middle of the afternoon. So, when he looked up from his hammock at the sound of a slight cough, and saw the Kid standing in the door of the consulate, he was still ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... months' lecturing tour on the McGinnis circuit. It was to him, too, that Joe Brown, who could eat eight pounds of raw meat in seven and a quarter minutes, owed his first chance of displaying his gifts to the wider public of the vaudeville stage. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... the moving-picture man was Harry Stetson. He had been a newspaper reporter, a press-agent, and an actor in vaudeville and in a moving-picture company. Now on his own account he was preparing an illustrated lecture on the East, adapted to churches and Sunday-schools. Peter and he wrote it in collaboration, and in the evenings ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... story of Pierrot married to one woman and wishing to marry another; a farce mingled with passion, which had been discovered by a vaudeville-writer, aided by a poet, among the stock-pieces of the old Italian theatre. Renee took the part of the deserted wife, this time, appearing in various disguises when her husband was love-making elsewhere. ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... from ape-like or monkeyish beings. Being of simian stock, we had simian traits. Our development naturally bore the marks of our origin. If we had inherited our dispositions from eagles we should have loathed vaudeville. But as cousins of Bandarlog, we loved it. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... You'd be splendid in vaudeville," she mocked from her saddle, where she had got with all the ease of a cowboy, without any help from me. "Black velvet mask and gadzooks, madam—I must certainly tell Edith. It will ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... haven for the oppressed and suppressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national or personal freedom they have found a refuge here, and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district, while he listens through his left ear to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity of his proteges. Italy, Poland, the former Spanish possessions and the polyglot tribes of Austria-Hungary have spilled here a thick lather of their effervescent sons. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... here almost three years ago. He was engaged in one of the vaudeville theaters near here—in the orchestra—and he rented my second story front at six dollars a week. Except for the fact that he would play awfully shivery music at all hours of the night, I was glad to have him. He was quiet and polite; he paid regularly and," smoothing back the untidy ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... himself that one little bit of datum, one little phrase, carelessly heard now, might mean his success or failure. Didactic pedantry has its place in science, and these were scientists, not vaudeville performers. Silently, he apologized to ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... hand on the door. "Kitchen? Oh, no. I could sleep through a vaudeville china-juggling act. But—what an extraordinarily unpleasant-looking man that housekeeper's ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... might be appropriately adopted as the motto of the Vaudeville Theatre during the run of Clarissa. She does run, too, poor dear—first from home, then from Lovelace's, and then "anywhere, anywhere, out of the world!" By the way, is it quite fair of Mr. THOMAS THORNE, in the absence of a friend and brother ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... illustrated articles describing it. The man who played the part of Christ was idealised, everybody who had seen him liked him, respected him and admired him. Thousands had said that somehow a person felt better after he had seen Anton Lang. As a supreme test of his popularity, American vaudeville managers asked him to name his own terms ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... I was at the Vaudeville. Never had I gone to a theatre so early. The boxes filled one after another. Only one remained empty, the stage box. At the beginning of the third act I heard the door of the box, on which my eyes had been ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... it and read while he watched her with twinkling eyes. They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... most distinguished vaudeville artist in France and who is certainly funnier than any woman on earth—had got herself up in horizon blue, and was the hit of the afternoon. The men forgot war and the horrors of war and surrendered to her art and her selections with an abandon which betrayed ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... expected to dinner with one of the most lovely of foreign Ambassadresses, and was to go with her afterward to the Vaudeville, at the pretty golden theater, where a troupe from the Bouffes were playing; but he felt anything but in the mood for even her bewitching and—in an marriageable sense—safe society, as he stopped his horse at his own hotel, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... esthetic critic, a physician, or a natural scientist, or a surveyor, or — a diplomat. From about 1824 he studied and adopted the Hegelian philosophy, on which based his esthetics, and for which he was the first spokesman in Denmark. In the years 1825 to 1836 he founded the Danish vaudeville, in which his aim was to recreate the national drama. His vaudeville was a lighter musical-dramatic genre, a situation-play with loosely-sketched characters and the addition of music to concentrate the mood. In it he ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... with Mr. Dixey turned me to the vaudeville stage. I could write playlets, I thought. So while Mother was busy sewing at nights I devoted myself to writing. And at last the first sketch was finished. At the Temple Theatre that week was the popular character actor, ...
— Making the House a Home • Edgar A. Guest
... Vaudeville Education and a small Tenor Voice, with the result that many a fluttering Birdie regarded ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... is less generally satisfied now than in former times—the youth and workingman from farming communities go to the towns and larger villages for amusement. These centers of population have a disproportionate burden therefore of cheap vaudeville shows, saloons, professional baseball games, ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... the steps of the palace out into the faint ruddy sunlight of the afternoon. A few names, Napoleon, Josephine, the Empire, that had never had significance in his mind before, flared with a lurid gorgeous light in his imagination like a tableau of living statues at a vaudeville theatre. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... breakfast,—I'm afraid I haven't any temperament in my appetite, you know—and sped off for atmosphere and ozone, far below the Square, on a two-mile tramp, and now I'm about to write. Rodney Harrison, who knows everybody who is anybody, has introduced me to some vaudeville-powers-that-be and I am encouraged to try my hand at what they call a sketch—a one-act play. It seems that they are in need of something a little less thin than the usual article they've been serving up to their patrons,—more of a playlet; something, ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... examination first. You had at least to show that you "caught on." They were high-brow enough to permit themselves sudden enthusiasms that would have damned a low-brow. You mustn't like "Peter Pan," but you might go three nights running to see some really perfect clog-dancing at a vaudeville theatre. Do you see what I mean? They were eclectic with a vengeance. It wouldn't do for you to cultivate the clog-dancer and like "Peter Pan," because in that case you probably liked the clog-dancer for the wrong reason—for something other than that sublimated skill which is art. Of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... know it sounds comic," he acknowledged wryly. "Sounds like something out of a summer vaudeville show or a cheap Sunday supplement. But I don't suppose it sounded so specially blamed comic to the widow. I reckon she found it plenty-heap indiscreet enough to suit her. Oh, of course," he added hastily, "I know, and Martha knows that Thomkins ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... afterwards; of course this prohibition makes him fall in love with her. Of this we have many edifying examples besides Fanchette, who, though she was so beautiful, and a tolerable actress, would never have drawn all Paris to the Vaudeville if she had not been a divorcee, and if it had not been known that her husband, who played the lover of the piece, was dying to marry her again. Apropos, Mad. St. Germain is acting one of her own romances, in the high sublime style, and threatens to ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... World's Unparalleled Upside-Down Man! He Doesn't Know Whether He's On His Head Or His Heels. He's Always Up In The Air About Something, But You Can't Upset Him! Vaudeville To-night—The Bodongo Brothers, Brilliant Burmese Balancers—Arctic Annie, the Prima Donna of Sealdom, and Tristan LeHuber, The Balloon Man—He Uses An Anchor For A Parachute!" At last indeed the LeHuber family will have arrived sensationally in ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... shortly to himself as he opened a bureau drawer and selected a clean white shirt. The touch of the clean linen encouraged him a little. He began to whistle. He had a "date on" with Mary Louise. He had asked her to go to the vaudeville. Two or three hours of pleasant forgetfulness, anyway. Mary Louise—the thought of her brought a vague feeling of unrest. For over two weeks he had tried to get her over the 'phone. She had either been out when he ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... skates. Here I've been hunting a job until I wore out two pair of these Sorosis things and not a bush shakes. Can't even sign a contract for a Friday night amateur contest. By gum, I'd take a job barking for a snake race. I had an offer to go into vaudeville. What do you know about that? The act hasn't any time yet, but it will get time as soon as it makes good, and to make good all its needs is a trial performance, and the backer thinks he knows where he can get a trial performance, and to get ready ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... please," said he, in answer to the expression. "He's discharged this case as not serious enough for him, and left it to Red Pepper to administer a few gentle stimulants on the quack order. Come! You can do a cake walk! Forget you're a graduate of any training school but the vaudeville show!" ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... were the sweetest boy in the world and I was only the garbage-man's daughter," she whispered. "There's a ridiculous song about the garbage-man's daughter. I heard it once, in vaudeville—in San Francisco." ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... other end, chews with her lips and of course I'm always excited for fear her dinner will fall overboard. The way she juggles food would get her a job in the vaudeville game any day. She sits up as tho' she'd been impaled, and the shaft ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... his accents to low music as is the custom of vaudeville—"scene represents the young Lawrenceville boy, exhausted by the preparation of the next day's lessons, seeking to rest his too conscientious brain. The night passes, the wind rises. It grows cold. Hark the rising bell. He hears it not. What now? He ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... the construction of his plays, one must criticize him and rank him on a very different basis than if his main, and often his sole, object was to amuse the groundlings. If he often took himself and his art with hardly more seriousness than does the writer of the vaudeville skit or musical comedy of to-day, if he often wished primarily to gain the immediate laugh, then much of Langen's long list of the playwright's dramatic delinquencies is ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... cannot be classed as literature: all that really remains of the old French genius is its vaudeville. Great dramatists create great parts. One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have accepted, I have not seen in the dramas ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cheatery and ugly methods; the man with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many noble and Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator with more than a soupcon of the vaudeville favorite in him: a Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... caricatures of the beauty they have sought, so only artists can handle the feature story. The difficulty lies chiefly in the temptation to overemphasize. In striving to make the story humorous, one goes too far, oversteps the limits of dignity, and like the ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville actor, produces an effect of disgust. Or in attempting to be pathetic, to excite a sympathetic tear, one is liable to induce mere derisive laughter. And a single misplaced word or a discordant phrase, like a mouse in a Sunday-school class, will ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... to induce us to come back as soon as possible. They give us all kinds of entertainment, free of charge. Three times a week we have some sort of a show, generally a band concert, a movin' picture show and a vaudeville show. Then, once a month they bring up some crackin' good show right out of a Broadway theater to make us forget that it's Sunday and we'll have to go to work the next morning. Scenery and costumes and everything ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... clever thing was that Mrs. Pitchley had done, there was no longer a question of her being kept out from the Pink Ball, or anything else. People were charming to her, and we met Mrs. Van der Windt herself at the Chateau at a luncheon party with a vaudeville entertainment afterwards, and also at a dinner. Mrs. Van der Windt seemed to like my cousin, Mohunsleigh, very much, too, and gave a moonlight motor car picnic especially for him, with only a few people asked besides ourselves, and the Pitchleys and ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... himself, nearly always without success. Once it seemed as if his hopes were to be fulfilled. The Theatre de la Renaissance accepted his "Novice of Palermo;" but at the last moment there was the usual bankruptcy of the management,—the fourth that affected him! Then he wrote a Parisian Vaudeville, but it had to be given up because the actors declared it could not be executed. The Grand Opera, on which he had fixed his eye, was absolutely out of the question. He was brought to such straits that he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the film, movies, motion pictures, cinema, cinematography; theatricals, dramaturgy, histrionic art, buskin, sock, cothurnus[obs3], Melpomene and Thalia, Thespis. play, drama, stage play, piece[Fr], five-act play, tragedy, comedy, opera, vaudeville, comedietta[obs3], lever de rideau[Fr], interlude, afterpiece[obs3], exode[obs3], farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta[obs3], harlequinade[obs3], pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe[Fr], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame[Fr]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... here, gazing down on the crowded dance hall, from one of the curtained boxes adjacent to the stage, on which a vaudeville programme was being performed, that two men sat screened from the chance glance of the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... James Roscoe Day, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions Department of the Standard Oil Company; his function being to manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense of the Rockefeller fortune. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... therefore I was at my wits' ends to discover a subject of such exciting scientific interest that my august audience could not choose but listen as attentively as they would listen from the front row to some deathless stunt in vaudeville. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... yes. I'm much obliged to you for the permission. It's as good as any vaudeville, and it's a sight nearer home. You're bound to make money. I tell my granddaughter," with a triumphant nod to the lady in question, "to bank on brains and energy and American push. I tell her," with ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... the suspicions to which I have referred. In the character of a vaudeville agent I called at the Montmartre theatre and was informed by the management that Zara-el-Khala received no visitors, professional or otherwise. A small but expensive car awaited her at the stage door. ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... or luncheon and dinner both, according to the length of stay, could be served, and the menu should embrace a few courses of country fare. Dancing in the barn during the afternoon will be another form of entertainment, or if you wish to give an elaborate entertainment, vaudeville performers might be hired ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... for art in a society where the process of democratization should go to its extreme limit of development point to the moving picture, the cheap magazine story and novel, the vaudeville and "musical" comedy, as a hint of what to expect. These, they will say, are the popular forms of art, to the production of which the artist would have to devote his time and skill in return for subsistence. Under the present system the ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... meeting these plain, simple folk on their own ground. So I don't really approve of this plan of yours. It's a tremendous innovation. We've got on quite well enough for nearly four years without entertainments, save those which are, so to speak, indigenous and natural. I don't at all like the idea of vaudeville, and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... contact with amusements cunningly devised to excite sex impulses and at the same time to lower respect for woman. The bill-boards and the picture post-cards, the penny-in-the-slot machines and the motion pictures, the exhibits of quack doctors, vaudeville performances, many so-called comic operas, popular new songs, the dress of women approved by modern fashion,—these all help at times to prepare young people to fall before the special temptations ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... of the northwest, with jagged blades of fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds, I know all about the heart of Attila and the Vikings and tigers and Alexander the Great! So I think I grew a bit out there talking to that water-giant who does nothing at all—not even a vaudeville ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Emmett admitted frankly, because shyness and Cal were strangers. "The Happy Family sure ought to put this thing through a-whirling. We'll give 'em vaudeville till their eyes water and their hands are plumb blistered applauding the show. Happy, you're it. You've got to do a ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... so if you could have seen the old Commodore work up games to throw Babbitt off the track. I put in most of the day watchin' 'em at it, and it was as good as a vaudeville act. About a quarter of an hour before it was time for the dose the valet would come out and begin to look around the grounds. Soon as he'd located the Commodore he'd slide off after his tea wagon. That was ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... was also no less an official than Esteemed Leading Knight in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and it was rumored that at the next election he would be a candidate for Exalted Ruler. He was a jolly man, given to oratory and to chumminess with the arts. He called on the famous actors and vaudeville artists when they came to town, gave them cigars, addressed them by their first names, and—sometimes—succeeded in bringing them to the Boosters' lunches to give The Boys a Free Entertainment. He was a large man with hair en brosse, and he knew the latest ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... out in the same year in Paris and London, and two years after in English, with Malibran as Amina. The subject of the story was taken from a vaudeville and ballet by Scribe. The scene is laid in Switzerland. Amina, an orphan, the ward of Teresa, the miller's wife, is about to marry Elvino, a well-to-do landholder of the village. Lisa, mistress of the inn, is also in love with Elvino, and jealous of her rival. ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... Inquisition. On returning from Greenwich, and depositing his Frenchman in some melancholy theatre, time enough for that resentful foreigner to witness theft and murder committed upon an injured countryman's vaudeville, Alban hastened again to Carlton Gardens. He found Darrell alone, pacing his floor to and fro, in the habit he had acquired in earlier life, perhaps when meditating some complicated law case, or wrestling with himself against some secret sorrow. There are ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on my own ranch by the girl whose father stole it from me!" he murmured under his breath. "It's a scream! Darned if it wouldn't make a good vaudeville turn." ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... He comes with vaudeville, with stare and leer. He comes with megaphone and specious cheer. His troupe, too fat or short or long or lean, Step from the pages of the magazine With slapstick or sombrero or with cane: The rube, the cowboy or the masher vain. They over-act each part. But at the height Of banter and of canter ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... "Don't you like vaudeville shows better?" inquired Madeline, "and circuses, and nice little stunts? Girls can do that sort of thing a lot better than they can act regular plays. And besides it brings in a bigger cast and ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... us—it expresses itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in the uncritical theater. Every merchant has his stock of assumptions about the mental habits of his customers and competitors; the prostitute hers; the newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had a few; the vaudeville stage has a number. We test these notions by their results, and even "practical people" find that there is more variety in human nature ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... sat back and wiped his spectacles and beamed on their laughter. Then he read on down the column, through the biting satire to the bitter end, having an audience whose hilarity would have delighted a vaudeville ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... me." The mamma bear was dressed in a poke bonnet and white apron, and resembled the wolf who frightened Little Red Riding-Hood, and Ikey, the baby bear, wore rakishly over one eye the pointed cap of a clown. To those who knew their vaudeville, this was indisputable evidence that Ikey would furnish the comic relief. Nor did Ikey disappoint them. He was a wayward son. When his parents were laboriously engaged in a boxing-match, or dancing to the "Merry ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... a pass to Salisbury on Saturday and went to the local vaudeville show. In the row in front of me were several young officers of the British Army, and it was striking what a clean-cut lot they were. England is certainly giving of her best. They were not very much different from any others, but at the same time they are the type of Englishmen who have ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... achievement. For the first four or five years of its existence, the new invention had hard sailing. Bell and Thomas Watson, in order to fortify their finances, were forced to travel around the country, giving a kind of vaudeville entertainment. Bell made a speech explaining the new invention, while a cornet player, located in another part of the town, played solos, the music reaching the audience through several telephone instruments placed against the walls. Watson, also located ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... being excited," said Beth, calmly, as she kissed Uncle John and sat down by Patsy's side. "She read her letter in bed and bounced out of bed like a cannon-ball. We dressed like the 'lightning change' artist at the vaudeville, and I'm sure our ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... satisfaction, that, being a dramatic critic, and attached to a London daily paper which had decided to flatter its readers by giving special criticisms of the more important new French plays, I had come to Paris for the production of Notre Dame de la Lune at the Vaudeville. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... and applause with which this effusion of vaudeville genius was greeted, showed the cheerful spirit in which the public took the affair. No harm seemed to have come to ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... characterized as gossipy, sarcastic, ironical, scandal-mongering, dealing in satire, abuse, hitting right and left at social and personal vices—a cheese of rank flavor that is not to be partaken of too freely. It might be compared to the vaudeville in opera or to the genre picture ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... and renders it rather commonplace and meagre. Unfortunately, among many of our young people, the Bible seems to be a book to be avoided or to be treated in a rather "jocose" manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, a Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and the weary comedian, when he is at a loss to get a witty speech across the footlights, is almost sure to speak of ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... closely akin to seriousness and the lecturer who has no great and serious question to present should retire from the platform and try vaudeville. ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis |
