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Vaudeville: Old & New

An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America

Author: Frank Cullen
Hardback: 1375 pages
Publisher: Routledge (2006)
Avg. Rating: [ Unrated ]
ISBN: 0415938538
In Print? No

A - Z encyclopedic look at the performers who defined vaudeville, stage revues and musical/comedy Broadway in the 20th century.  Ted Healy is featured in a 5-page entry covering his life and career, including his work with the Stooges.  The historical timeline for Ted and his Stooges is largely correct, but the author also buys into untrue myths surrounding Ted's death.  Healy is also mentioned throughout the book where his career intersected with other subject performers such as Grace Hayes (A NIGHT IN SPAIN), Phil Baker (BILLY ROSE'S CRAZY QUILT, A NIGHT IN SPAIN), Hal LeRoy (THE GANG'S ALL HERE) and Julius Tannen (EARL CARROLL VANITIES OF 1925).  

Also features a 3-page entry for Joe Besser.  

From the back cover...

"Vaudeville was more than an assembly of ragtime pantaloons, topical monologists, eccentric dancers, barrel-house songbirds, magicians, tumblers and jugglers, more than a coast-to-coast network of once-gilded theatres shambling into plaster dust. Vaudeville was a people’s culture. What has remained of vaudeville is the act — a distillation of a performer’s best material into a near-perfect performance piece: the product of personality, talent and skill — the vaudevillian’s reason for living."


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