Scenery, in the business of vaudeville—­please note the word “business”—­has no artistic meaning.  If the owner of a dwelling house could rent his property with the rooms unpapered and the woodwork unpainted, he would gladly do so and pocket the saving, wouldn’t he?  In precisely the same spirit the vaudeville-act owner would sell his act without going to the expense of buying and transporting scenery, if he could get the same price for it.  To the vaudevillian scenery is a business investment.

Because he can get more money for his act if it is properly mounted in a pleasing picture, the vaudeville producer invests in scenery.  But he has to figure closely, just as every other business man is compelled to scheme and contrive in dollars and cents, or the business asset of scenery will turn into a white elephant and eat up all his profits.

Jesse L. Lasky, whose many pleasing musical acts will be remembered, had many a near-failure at the beginning of his vaudeville-producing career because of his artistic leaning toward the beautiful in stage setting.  His subsequent successes were no less pleasing because he learned the magic of the scenery mystery.  Lasky is but one example, and were it not that the names of vaudeville acts are but fleeting memories, dimmed and eclipsed by the crowded impressions of many acts seen at one sitting, there might be given an amazing list of beautiful little entertainments that have failed because of the transportation cost of the scenery they required.

When a producer is approached with a request to read a vaudeville act he invariably asks, “What scenery?” His problem is in two parts: 

1.  He must decide whether the merits of the act, itself, justify him in investing his money in scenery on the gamble that the act will be a success.

2.  If the act proves a success, can the scenery be transported from town to town at so low a cost that the added price he can get for the act will allow a gross profit large enough to repay the original cost of the scenery and leave a net profit?

An experience of my own in producing a very small act—­small enough to be in the primary class—­may be as amusing as it is typical.  My partners and I decided to put out a quartet.  We engaged four good singers, two of them men, and two women.  I wrote the little story that introduced them in a humorous way and we set to work rehearsing.  At the same time the scenic artist hung three nice big canvases on his paint frames and laid out a charming street-scene in the Italian Quarter of Anywhere, the interior of a squalid tenement and the throne room of a palace.

The first drop was designed to be hung behind the Olio—­for the act opened in One—­and when the Olio went up, after the act’s name was hung out, the lights dimmed to the blue and soft green of evening in the Quarter.  Then the soprano commenced singing, the tenor took up the duet, and they opened the act by walking rhythmically with the popular ballad air to stage-centre in the amber of the spot-light.  When the duet was finished, on came the baritone, and then the contralto, and there was a little comedy before they sang their first quartet number.