Burlesque

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Nick Humez

The word "burlesque" can refer either to a type of parody or to a theatrical performance whose cast includes scantily-clad women. The second art form grew out of the first: "burla" is Italian for "trick, waggery," and the adjective "burlesca" may be translated as "ludicrous." Borrowed into French, "burlesque" came to mean a takeoff on an existing work, without any particular moral agenda (as opposed to satire). The genre enjoyed a robust life on the French stage throughout the nineteenth century, and found ready audiences in British theaters as well.

The first American burlesques were imports from England, and chorus lines of attractive women were part of the show almost from the start. In 1866, Niblo's Garden in New York presented The Black Crook, its forgettable plot enlivened, as an afterthought, by some imported dances from a French opera, La Biche au bois. Public reception was warm, according to burlesque historian Irving Zeidman: "The reformers shrieked, the 'best people' boycotted it," but the bottom line was "box receipts of sin aggregating over $1,000,000 for a profit of $650,000." The show promptly spawned a host of imitations--The Black Crook Junior, The White Crook, The Red Crook, The Golden Crook--capitalizing shamelessly, and profitably, on Niblo's success.

Two years later an English troupe, Lydia Thompson and Her Blondes, made their New York debut at Woods' Museum and Menagerie on 34th St., "sharing the stage," writes Zeidman, "with exhibitions of a live baby hippopotamus." The play this time was F.C. Burnand's classical travesty Ixion, in which the chorus, costumed as meteors, eclipses, and goddesses, thrilled the audience by flashing their ruffled underpants in the Parisian can-can style.

The Thompson company was soon hired away to play at Niblo's in an arabesque comedy called The 40 Thieves. The orientalist turn soon worked its way into other shows, including those of Madame Celeste's Female Minstrel Company, which included numbers such as "The Turkish Bathers" and "The Turkish Harem." (Even as late as 1909, Millie De Leon was being billed as "The Odalisque of the East," i.e., the East Coast.) Orientalism was just one avenue down which American burlesque in the last three decades of the nineteenth century went in search of its identity in a tireless quest for plausible excuses to put lots of pretty women on stage while still managing to distinguish itself from what were already being called "leg shows." Minstrelsy and vaudeville were fair game; so were "living pictures," in which members of the troupe would assume the postures and props of famous paintings, preferably with as little clothing as could be gotten away with. (This method of art-history pedagogy was still being presented, with a straight face, half a century later as one of the attractions at the 1939 New York World's Fair.)

By the turn of the century, burlesque shows could be seen on a regular schedule at Manhattan's London Theatre and Miner House and across the East River in Brooklyn at Hyde and Behman's, the Star, and the Empire Theatres. Philadelphia offered burlesque at the Trocadero, 14th Street Opera House, and the Arch, Kensington, and Lyceum Theatres. Even staid Boston had burlesque at the Lyceum, Palace, and Grand Theatres as well as the Howard Atheneum, where young men who considered themselves lucky to catch a glimpse of an ankle if they stood on street corners on rainy days (according to Florence Paine, then a young businesswoman in the Boston shoe trade), "could go to see women who wore dresses up to their knees." (And wearing tights; bare legs would not come until later, even in New York.)

A "reputable" burlesque show of the Gay Nineties, according to Zeidman, might have a program such as was offered by Mabel Snow's Spectacular Burlesque Company: "New wardrobes, bright, catchy music and pictures, Amazon marches, pretty girls and novelty specialty acts." By 1917, according to Morton Minsky (proprietor, as were several of his brothers, of a famous chain of New York burlesque houses) the basic ingredients of burlesque were "girls, gags, and music." Minsky describes in detail the first time he saw one of his brothers' burlesque shows at the Winter Garden that year, the first half of which included a choral number (with much kicking of legs in unison, Minsky notes), a comedy skit, a rendition of Puccini's "Un bel di," a turn by a "cooch dancer" (or hootchy-kootch, vaguely derived from Near Eastern belly dancing and the prototype of what would later be called "exotic dancing"), a serious dramatic sketch about a lad gone wrong who commits suicide, a second chorus, an appearance by the company soubrette (originally the saucy maidservant in French comedy, the term later came to mean a woman who sang such parts), another comedy skit, a third chorus, some vaudeville acrobats, and a choral finale with the entire company, reprising the earlier numbers. A similar but shorter mix followed the intermission. This would remain the structure of Minsky shows for the next two decades.