Stars of the AVT #22: The Main Squeeze Orchestra

Photo by Hal Zhang

This post is one of a series profiling the hundreds of performers I’ve presented through my American Vaudeville Theatre in celebration of its 15th anniversary. Don’t miss the American Vaudeville Theatre’s 15th Anniversary ExTRAVaganza in the New York International Fringe Festival this August!

The Main Squeeze Orchestra was started by German-born accordion teacher and music store proprietor Walter Kuhr in 2002 after he saw a vision in a dream. When I first heard of them they were known as the Main Squeeze Pigtail Orchestra, for the members of this all-girl orchestra all wore pigtails. At any rate, can anything be more vaudevillian than the visual effect of this act — over a dozen young women with pigtails playing the accordion? They were MADE to be in a Vitaphone short. I’d wanted to book them for many years. They played a lot of dates at Galapagos, which was in my neighhborhood at the time, and they got tons of press; the New York Times wrote features on them more than once. And it turns out one of the members was one of my old girlfriends (with so many female members in the band, it was statistically bound to happen). So I did finally get to book them, and that was a proud day indeed. Here is a video of that 2008 performance, in the American Vaudeville Theatre’s show at Theater for the New City:

To learn more about vaudeville past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.