Title:  Writing for Vaudeville

Author:  Brett Page

Release Date:  March, 2004 [EBook #5328] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on June 30, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of the project gutenberg EBOOK, writing for vaudeville ***

This etext was produced by Steve Bonner.

WRITING FOR VAUDEVILLE

With nine complete examples of various vaudeville forms by
Richard Harding Davis, Aaron Hoffman, Edgar Allan Woolf,
Taylor Granville, Louis Weslyn, Arthur Denvir, and James
Madison

BY BRETT PAGE

Author of “Close harmony,” “Camping days,” “Memories,” Etc.

DRAMATIC EDITOR, NEWSPAPER FEATURE SERVICE, NEW YORK

The writer’s library
edited by J. Berg Esenwein

FOREWORD

Can you be taught how to write for vaudeville?  If you have the native gift, what experienced writers say about its problems, what they themselves have accomplished, and the means by which it has been wrought, will be of help to you.  So much this book offers, and more I would not claim for it.

Although this volume is the first treatise on the subject of which I know, it is less an original offering than a compilation.  Growing out of a series of articles written in collaboration with Mr. William C. Lengel for The Green Book Magazine, the subject assumed such bigness in my eyes that when I began the writing of this book, I spent months harvesting the knowledge of others to add to my own experience.  With the warm-heartedness for which vaudevillians are famous, nearly everyone whose aid I asked lent assistance gladly.  “It is vaudeville’s first book,” said more than one, deprecating the value of his own suggestions, “and we want it right in each slightest particular.”

To the following kindly gentlemen I wish to express my especial thanks:  Aaron Hoffman, Edwin Hopkins, James Madison, Edgar Allan Woolf, Richard Harding Davis—­the foremost example of a writer who made a famous name first in literature and afterward in vaudeville—­Arthur Hopkins, Taylor Granville, Junie McCree, Arthur Denvir, Frank Fogarty, Irving Berlin, Charles K. Harris, L. Wolfe Gilbert, Ballard MacDonald, Louis Bernstein, Joe McCarthy, Joseph Hart, Joseph Maxwell, George A. Gottlieb, Daniel F. Hennessy,