From the old variety show, made up of a singer of topical songs, an acrobatic couple, a tight-rope walker, a sidewalk “patter” pair, and perhaps a very rough comedy sketch, there has developed a performance that sometimes includes as many as ten or twelve acts, each one presented by an artist whose name is known around the world.  One of the laments of the old vaudeville performers is that they have a place in vaudeville no more.  The most famous grand opera singers and the greatest actors and actresses appear in their room.  The most renowned dramatists write some of its playlets.  The finest composers cut down their best-known works to fit its stage, and little operas requiring forty people and three or four sets of scenery are the result.  To the legitimate [1] stage vaudeville has given some of its successful plays and at least one grand opera has been expanded from a playlet.  To-day a vaudeville performance is the best thought of the world condensed to fit the flying hour.

[1] Legitimate is a word used in the theatrical business to distinguish the full-evening drama, its actors, producers, and its mechanical stage from those of burlesque and vaudeville.  Originally coined as a word of reproach against vaudeville, it has lost its sting and is used by vaudevillians as well as legitimate actors and managers.

2.  Of What a Vaudeville Show is Made

There is no keener psychologist than a vaudeville manager.  Not only does he present the best of everything that can be shown upon a stage, but he so arranges the heterogeneous elements that they combine to form a unified whole.  He brings his audiences together by advertising variety and reputations, and he sends them away aglow with the feeling that they have been entertained every minute.  His raw material is the best he can buy.  His finished product is usually the finest his brain can form.  He engages Sarah Bernhardt, Calve, a Sir James M. Barrie playlet, Ethel Barrymore, and Henry Miller.  He takes one of them as the nucleus of a week’s bill.  Then he runs over the names of such regular vaudevillians as Grace La Rue, Nat Wills, Trixie Friganza, Harry Fox and Yansci Dollie, Emma Carus, Sam and Kitty Morton, Walter C. Kelly, Conroy and LeMaire, Jack Wilson, Hyams and McIntyre, and Frank Fogarty.  He selects two or maybe three of them.  Suddenly it occurs to him that he hasn’t a big musical “flash” for his bill, so he telephones a producer like Jesse L. Lasky, Arthur Hopkins or Joe Hart and asks him for one of his fifteen- or twenty-people acts.  This he adds to his bill.  Then he picks a song-and-dance act and an acrobatic turn.  Suddenly he remembers that he wants—­not for this show, but for some future week—­Gertrude Hoffman with her big company, or Eva Tanguay all by herself.  This off his mind, the manager lays out his show—­if it is the standard nine-act bill—­somewhat after the following plan, as George A. Gottlieb, who books Keith’s Palace Theatre, New York, shows—­probably the best and certainly the “biggest” vaudeville entertainments seen in this country—­has been good enough to explain.