Even in the old music hall days, when a patron strolled in from a hard day’s work and sat down to enjoy an even harder evening’s entertainment, the skit or sketch or short play which eventually drifted upon the boards—­where it was seen through the mists of tobacco smoke and strong drink—­was the thing.  The admiration the patrons had for the performers, whom they liberally treated after the show, did not prevent them from actively driving from the stage any offering that did not possess the required dramatic “punch.” [1] They had enjoyed the best of everything else the music hall manager could obtain for their amusement and they demanded that their bit of a play be, also, the very best of its kind.

[1] It is worthy of note in this connection that many of the dramatic and particularly the comedy offerings seen in the music halls of twenty years ago, and in the “Honkitonks” of Seattle and other Pacific Coast cities during the Alaskan gold rush, have, expurgated, furnished the scenarios of a score of the most successful legitimate dramas and comedies of recent years.  Some of our greatest legitimate and vaudeville performers also came from this humble and not-to-be-boasted-of school.  This phase of the growth of the American drama has never been written.  It should be recorded while the memories of “old timers” are still fresh.

No matter what this form of entertainment that we now know by the name of vaudeville may be called, the very essence of its being is variety.  “Topical songs”—­we call their descendants “popular songs”—­classic ballads, short concerts given on all sorts of instruments, juggling, legerdermain, clowning, feats of balancing, all the departments of dancing and of acrobatic work, musical comedy, pantomime, and all the other hundred-and-one things that may be turned into an amusing ten or twenty minutes, found eager welcome on the one stage that made it, and still makes it, a business to present the very newest and the very best of everything.  To complete its claim to the title of variety, to separate itself from a likeness to the circus, to establish itself as blood brother of the legitimate stage, and, most important of all, to satisfy the craving of its audiences for drama, vaudeville tried many forms of the short play before the playlet was evolved to fill the want.

Everything that bears even the remotest likeness to a play found a place and had a more or less fleeting—­or lasting—­popularity.  And not only was every form of play used, but forms of entertainment that could not by reason of their very excellencies be made to fill the crying want, were pressed into service and supplied with ill-fitting plots in the vain attempt.

Musical acts, whose chief appeal was the coaxing of musical sounds from wagon tires, drinking glasses, and exotic instruments, were staged in the kitchen set.  And father just home from work would say, “Come, daughter, let’s have a tune.”  Then off they would start, give their little entertainment, and down would come the curtain on a picture of never-to-be-seen domestic life.  Even today, we sometimes see such a hybrid act.