Burlesque

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

Nor was such entertainment limited to the East Coast. Burlesque prospered at such houses as the Mutual Theater in Indianapolis, the Star and Garter in Chicago, and the Burbank Theatre in Los Angeles. The Columbia Amusement Company, under the leadership of medicine-show veteran Sam Scribner, operated a circuit called the Eastern Wheel whose chief rival, the Empire Circuit or Western Wheel, it absorbed in 1913. Scribner managed to balance business instinct and a personal goal of creating a cleaner act, and for a time the Columbia Wheel offered what it called "approved" burlesque while competing with upstart organizations (such as the short-lived Progressive Wheel) with its own subsidiary circuit called the American Wheel, whose "standard" burlesque featured cooch dancers, comic patter laced with double-entendre, and runways for the chorus line extending from the stage out into the audience (an innovation first imported to the Winter Garden by Abe Minsky, who had seen it in Paris at the Folies Bergère). The American Wheel offered 73 acts a year, playing to a total audience of about 700,000 in 81 theaters from New York to Omaha.

Though Scribner's quest for clean burlesque ultimately proved quixotic, he was neither hypocritical nor alone. The founding editor of Variety, Sime Silverman, took burlesque shows seriously as an art form, though he too recognized that this was an uphill fight at best, writing in a 1909 editorial that "Were there no women in burlesque, how many men would attend? The answer is the basic principle of the burlesque business." (Billboard's Sidney Wire concurred, flatly asserting in 1913 that "Ninety percent of the burlesque audiences go to burlesque to see the girls.") This fact was not lost on the Mutual Circuit, which arose to put Columbia Entertainment out of business in the 1920s, nor on the Minskys, whose theaters flourished until the final crackdown on New York burlesque under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and License Commissioner Paul Moss in 1937.

Although the leggy chorus line was an indispensable element of burlesque shows from the start (and would survive them by a half-century with the perennial Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall) the cooch dance became a burlesque standard only after promoter Abe Fish brought Little Egypt and Her Dancers, a troupe of Syrians specializing in the sexually suggestive "awalem" dances performed at Syrian weddings, to the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. The transition from cooch dancer to striptease was gradual. Soubrettes in the earliest days of burlesque often showed off their youthful bodies even as they sang and danced in solo numbers, but some, like Rose Sydell of the Columbia Wheel, were star clotheshorses instead, displaying breathtakingly elaborate costumes on stage.

Still, as the public responded favorably to more flesh and less clothing as the years wore on, the soubrette's song-and-dance role came to be supplanted by the striptease artist. By 1932, according to Zeidman, there were "at least 150 strip principals, of whom about 75 percent were new to the industry." The sudden rise in demand for strippers was partly a corollary of rising hemlines on the street, so that, as one writer for Billboard pointed out, "leg shows lost their sex appeal and, in self-defense, the operators of burlesque shows introduced the strutting strips ... as far as the police permitted." (Ironically it was one police raid in 1934, at the Irving Palace Theatre, that eliminated runways in New York, somewhat to the relief of theater owners, for whom they were ill suited to the innuendo and soft lighting effects that were part and parcel of an effective strip act.)