There is vaudeville, Orpheium circuit and burlesque, what else was there? Was it only in the big cities?

I thought there was another one besides vaudeville, and the others I have listed above, but I can't remember. I wonder if there was any in Indiana or Kentucky, or just the big cities only.

Public Comments

1. i dont know....
2. Vaudeville and burlesque houses existed in large and medium-sized cities, not just places like Chicago and New York City. The Orpheum Circuit Inc. was a company that started a series of vaudeville houses and movie theatres across the country (it eventually morphed into RKO Studios). The other major organization was the Theater Owners Bookers Association (TOBA), which handled black vaudeville acts. The life was so hard that many performers felt the acronym stood for "Tough on Black Asses."
3. First of all the Orpheum was a circuit (a group of theatres, sometimes regional sometimes national, that were all booked from the same talent pool of acts) while Vaudeville and Burlesque were genres. Other popular genres include Minstrel Shows -the one where men in a semi circle played banjo, told jokes and dressed in blackface and occaisionally had a guest perform in front of them and another is the Pantomimes which is the British version and was rather over the top humor. The Pantomimes are considered the precurser to Burlesque. Burlesque was the earliest of these in America and was rather bawdy. Then a theatre owner by the name of Tony Pastor (in San Francisco) decided that it needed to be cleaned up and available to families so he started a cleaner version of Burlesque which became known as Vaudeville in the 1880's. Basically they were both forms of variety shows. As far as locale, it was everywhere! Just about every city from small ones like Rockville Indiana and Bowling Green Kentucky on up to "the big time" . The biggest time of all was in NYC at "The Palace" a theatre that is still in operation today on Bway in NYC. It is also the place that is considered to be the place that Vaudeville died. The last perfromance of what was considered to be vaudeville was held there in the 1960's and it was the famous Judy Garland (with guest appearance by a teen daugter Liza) Although this is considfered the official end to vaudeville it was actually in a coma for quite sometime before that having started its decline after the introduction of "the Talkies" sound movies in 1927.