Being a web log for the observations of actor, author, cartoonist, comedian, critic, director, humorist, journalist, master of ceremonies, performance artist, playwright, producer, publicist, public speaker, songwriter, and variety booker Trav S.D.
Today is the birthday of America’s greatest philosopher/essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. His Transcendentalist writings were a major influence on my Mountebanks Manifesto. I used a quote from “The American Scholar” on the frontispiece: “Free should the scholar be — free and brave.” (Though in some versions I juxtaposed it with the motto of the title characters of W.S. Gilbert’s The Mountebanks: “Heroism Without Risk” — essentially the opposite sentiment).
My original paperback of Emerson collected works became was dog-eared, marked up and eventually fell apart. My second copy is also marked-up. Here, for your contemplation, are some favorite passages I’ve highlighted over the years:
FROM “SELF-RELIANCE” (1841)
* “Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string”
* “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”
* “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.
* “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.”
* “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think…you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it…but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
* “For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure.”
* “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
* “A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me.”
* “The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.”
* “Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
FROM “NATURE” (1836)
* “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put”.
* “We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.”
* “A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world…Art [is] a nature passed through the alembic of man.”
* “‘Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth’ — is the fundamental law of criticism.”
FROM “FATE” (1860)
* “How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times”.
***
I have also been influenced by Emerson’s more mystical writings such as “The Transcendentalist” (1842) and “The Over-Soul” (1841). These essays have inspired a song-cycle I have been working on for a number of years (and will no doubt take many more years to emerge). It is a sort of mash-up of Emerson and George Harrison. I am hoping to record it in federal prison so that it can be produced by Phil Spector. Think of the echoey, “live” sound! And it should be easy to find a harmonica player there.
May 25 of every year (Bill Robinson’s birthday) is National Tap Dance Day! And how better to observe it than by learning about many of America’s great tap dancing artists on Travalanche? Tappers (and sometime tappers) we’ve written about here have included Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Buster Brown, Gregory Hines, Ginger Jack Wiggins, Aaron Palmer, Sandman Sims, Leonard Reed, Hal Le Roy, Sammy Davis Jr, Eleanor Powell, The Nicholas Brothers, John Bubbles, Peg Leg Bates, Cholly Atkins, Marilyn Miller, Ginger Rogers, Fred and Adele Astaire, Gene Kelly, Vilma and Buddy Ebsen, the Four Step Brothers, Slow Kid Thompson, Eddie Rector, Ann Pennington, Donald O’Connor and Pat Rooney.
Now that’s way too many links for me to try to do this morning, so: if you’d like to read about these folks on the blog, there are two ways you can find them: 1) You can just type their name into the search function on the right hand column of this blog. Incidentally, many of them have more than one post. and 2) you can browse the dance section of Travalanche, which includes all of these tappers plus all sorts of other dancers from vaudeville. To do that go here.
Originally posted in 2009. This piece has special meaning for me — it’s actually the first vaudeville biography I ever wrote. I generated it as part of the book proposal for No Applause, which would make it about ten years old now.
Perhaps the best-known African-American in vaudeville (then and now), Bill Robinson left us a confusing hodgepodge of legacies. His life was a mass of contradictions perhaps best exemplified by his stage handle: “The Dark Cloud of Joy.” On the one hand, he is called by African-American scholar Donald Bogle “the quintessential Tom” for his cheerful and shameless subservience to whites in motion pictures. On the other hand, Robinson was in real life the sort of man who, when refused service at an all-white luncheonette, would lay his pearl-handled revolver on the counter and demand service. An illiterate, he was to become the unofficial Mayor of Harlem and one of the richest and best-known African Americans in the country. Even the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song “Mr. Bojangles” which everyone assumes is about him, isn’t. (The song is about a hobo; Robinson was a class act in top hat and tails).
He was born Luther Robinson in Richmond, Virginia in 1880. A perhaps apocryphal story has him beating up his brother William, two years his junior, until the latter allowed him to appropriate his name. (The real Bill was forever after known as “Percy” – it must have been a sound drubbing.) The boys were orphaned around 1885 under mysterious circumstances, and raised by their grandmother and various foster parents. Robinson was a latchkey kid, largely shifting for himself, earning his own way by shining shoes, occasional theft and dancing for tips on streetcorners. He got his famous nickname after stealing a beaver hat from a local merchant Lion J. Boujasson, whose name no one could pronounce.
In 1892, he hopped a freight train for Washington, D.C. with a white friend named Lemuel Toney (who later went on to become Eddie Leonard, a major blackface star in minstrelsy and vaudeville). His first professional gig was the part of a “pickaninny” role in the show “The South Before the War” which toured the northeast. By 1900, he had made his way to New York. The following year, he won a prestigious dance contest at a Brooklyn theatre against a man named Henry Swinton, then considered the best dancer in the business. In the audience were the likes of Eubie Blake and Walker & Williams. He began to work with various partners and rapidly became one of only six African-American acts booked regularly on the Keith circuit. In 1902 he teamed up with a successful comedian named George W. Cooper, laying aside his dancing to become the comic foil for a period of 12 years.
When the team broke up in 1914, Robinson approached a big-time manager named Marty Forkins with a unique proposal. At the time in vaudeville the “two black rule” was in full force; African Americans were seen on stage only in pairs. Robinson proposed to become the first black solo act. In addition to being socially groundbreaking, the move had the virtue of being a very good gimmick, a must in vaudeville, and so the two forged ahead.
Robinson rapidly rose to become one of America’s best loved entertainers. His act was an amalgam of little steps and moves he had copped from others, then stitched together into a sequence that was greater than the sum of its parts. He worked his alchemy by rehearsing and performing the act so much that he could do it in his sleep, and then “selling it” through the sheer force of his infectious personality. His smile was called “a beacon”. He would intersperse his routines with little jokes and remarks, such as the famous “Everything’s copasetic!” (a word, incidentally, which Robinson invented). In 1918, Robinson introduced what was to become his signature bit, “the stair dance”, stolen of course, but thereafter irrevocably his. By 1923, he had reached the number two spot on the bill at the Palace (or next to “next to closing”) – the highest spot to which he could aspire given the prejudices of the times.
As vaudeville began to wind down, Robinson was one of the lucky and talented few who not only kept working, but who actually became more famous. He starred in a number of revues, such as “Blackbirds of 1928” and “The Hot Mikado”, performed in top nightclubs in Harlem and elsewhere, and co-starred in numerous movies with the likes of Will Rogers, Lena Horne and – most famously – Shirley Temple. A variation of his stair dance can be seen in the Temple-Robinson vehicle The Little Colonel (1934).
Robinson used his power and influence to break new ground for African Americans on several fronts: he was the first African-American solo act in vaudeville; he refused to wear blackface; he fought for (and achieved) the racial integration of countless social and cultural events in the north and the south; he was the first African American in a Hollywood movie whose character was responsible for safeguarding a white’s life.
Like all the top vaudevillians, he was an obsessed workaholic, either practicing or performing constantly, sometimes doing five shows a day by choice. He said that he danced best when totally exhausted; it took the edginess off his performance. He wore out 20-30 pairs of tap shoes a year—roughly one every two weeks. It is said that he literally danced himself to death. After a series of heart attacks, the doctor advised him to quit in 1948. Robinson maintained that though he had trouble walking, talking sleeping and breathing, when he danced he felt wonderful. He died a few months later.
And now the famous Stair Dance with Shirley Temple:
Well, the horse is already out of the barn, as they say (or do they?), since there’s only one performance left and that is unlikely not to be sold out — but I just wanted to thank Retro Productions for helping to restore my faith in theatre. Is that enough hyperbole for ya?
I think my little meltdown here a few months ago had mainly to do with the fact that I’d been doing a monthly column for four years, and the nature of a column was forcing me to focus on, and see, the shows with the noisiest angles and gimmicks. The superficiality of it all month after month had left me heartsick. But lately, I’ve been picking and choosing, seeing friends and colleagues in more substantive productions (and paying for the privilege, I think that may help as well). And, voila! Suddenly it feels like my luck has been very good…we saw and enjoyed Parade at Gallery Players, and Honeywell’s Mass and Jill Campbell’s Chemistry of Love and now A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and now I’m starting to feel better about things.
And I begin to realize that what has been missing for me through all these scores of writer/director-driven productions has been ACTING. I was sorely tempted to headline this post “Acting — The Forgotten Art Form.” Over the past several years I’ve seen plenty of blocking, and scads of performing, but precious little acting. Acting of any depth demands commitment and risk and sincerity. These are things that our superficial, fast paced, social media driven culture discourages and undermines. On to the next loud thing! On to the next splash! Thinking of the next one even as I’m in the middle of this one! Look, ma! No hands!
And I’ll confess, my only thought when I first heard about this production was “Joe Egg? That old thing from scene study class? Who wants to do that? Who wants to see that?” Not that it’s not a good, even a great play. But it’s a play one feels one has already seen, and the assumption is that (as it is the case more often than not, when companies choose such plays) that the performers will not be up to the very hard task of delivering. They will think that they are, though, and that will be all the more infuriating. It’s what I think of when I think of an “uptown showcase”. Shaky actors doing an inch-deep version of a play from scene study class.
So how much bigger the risk, and thus one all the more worth taking if you can pull it off. And this company absolutely did. I really can’t single anyone out, they were all uniformly good, which is a testament I think to Peter Zinn’s direction and Heather Cunningham’s leadership of the company. But Cunningham herself was moving as Sheila, Matthew Trumbull just dazzling as Bri, and Greg Oliver Bodine, Kristen Vaughan and Emily Jon Mitchell a solid and hilarious ensemble. And Becky Byers is so perfect and appropriate as Jo that one wondered if the entire production wasn’t devised around her (given her diminutive size and her movement training and gifts — “Who the hell else could play this part?” I wondered. Although, because she is a friend I found her performance really hard to watch, almost as though it were really happening. It was a profound relief to see her do some ballet moves and announce the intermission — I bet that’s why that’s in there).
At any rate, I won’t say “a good time was had by all” because it’s not that kind of play, but a rewarding one was. I’m grateful to have seen it. And you’ll be too if they have any seats left. Find out here.
Today is the birthday of Frank “Fatty” Alexander (1879-1937).
Originally from Washington State, Alexander had worked as a cowboy and a stagecoach driver until his enormous size allowed him an entrée to an industry that might not have been otherwise available to him — the movies. Mack Sennett hired him at Keystone in 1915. Though Alexander weighed almost 90 lbs more than Sennett’s reigning fat man Roscoe Arbuckle, there was little danger of the inexperienced Alexander usurping the latter’s position. Arbuckle was a popular star; Alexander was a bit player. But it’s handy in comedy to have a heavy man for smaller roles, and Arbuckle wasn’t about to do those any more with his name on marquees all over the country. While at Keystone, Alexander appeared in the ensembles of several of Syd Chaplin’s “Gussle” pictures, among others.
After leaving Sennett in 1916 he briefly bounced around among various studios before settling in as a vital part of Larry Semon’s stock company at Vitagraph in 1917. This was such a good situation that he remained there for eight years and dozens of films. Alexander got countless opportunities to shine during these years, in a comedy company so extreme that Oliver Hardy was the lesser heavy; when the two appeared on screen together, Hardy seemed positively trim. By 1925, Semon was having serious money worries as a result of his films going so far over budget that they couldn’t turn a profit. The Wizard of Oz (1925), in which Alexander played Uncle Henry, was a downright flop. (See my description of that film here). The feature The Perfect Clown was Alexander’s last Semon comedy.
From 1926 to 1928, Alexander was part of one the silent era’s most notorious comedy teams. “Tons o’ Fun” was a project of producer Joe Rock, who cast Alexander with Hilliard “Fat” Karr and Kewpie Ross, two men of comparable size, as a trio of exceedingly large men who just happened to be best friends. Their comedy shorts would usually involve the three of them going places and doing things that three very large men shouldn’t do, thus falling through floors, getting stuck in small room and so forth.
Then sound arrived. In the talkie era, Alexander only has a handful of credits, in very small roles, which to me is an indication that the untrained Alexander couldn’t carry lines. He ended his career working for the man with whom he’d begun it, Mack Sennett, with a walk-on in the W.C. Fields short The Barber Shop in 1933.
And now, that notorious version of The Wizard of Oz:
July 20
Burlesque-a-pades
Burlesque Blitz
Kraine Theatre
July 27
Colonel Speck's 150th Birthday
Ithaca, NY
August 7
Trav S.D. & The Bathing Beauties
Coney Island USA
Sept 25
Talk on Vitagraph
Brooklyn Public Library
Who and What is TRAV S.D.
Trav S.D. n. 1. Travesty…parody, satire, burlesque and the grotesque. 2. A potent hallucinogen resembling LSD. 3. The alter ego of Donald Travis Stewart (born Westerly, Rhode Island, Nov. 8, 1965) * * * * * *
Performer, writer and producer Trav S.D. is the author of over 100 plays (for stage, screen and radio), 300 published articles, and the book "No Applause, Just Throw Money, The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (Faber & Faber, 2005). A frequent radio guest and public speaker, his voice has been heard on the Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC), The Sound of Young America (NPR), The Joey Reynolds Show (WOR), Cat Radio Café (WBAI), and a dozen others throughout the country. He interviewed over 200 artists on Indie Theatre Now, a regular podcast and tv show on nytheatre.com between 2007-2009. He has contributed to the New York Times, American Theater, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, the New York Sun, Reason, and many others, and now writes the downtown theatre column for The Villager/ Downtown Express/ Chelsea Now.
His plays include "The Fickle Mistress", recently workshopped at Dixon Place starring Molly Pope, Everett Quinton and Jan Leslie Harding, (with full production slated for 2014); "Willy Nilly" a musical about the Manson Family that was an extended hit of the 2009 NY Intl Fringe Festival and "House of Trash", published in Plays and Playwrights 2001. His works have been presented at Joe’s Pub (the Public Theatre), LaMama, Theater for the New City, NYMF, NYC Fringe, the Ohio Theatre (Soho Think Tank), HERE, Dixon Place, the Brick, Metropolitan Playhouse, and, regionally and internationally, in London, Portland, Minneapolis, Austin, Seattle, and Providence. He has also presented hundreds of New York's top variety acts through his American Vaudeville Theatre. His new book "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy & Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" will be released by Bear Manor Media in February 2014.
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