travsd

Of Queen Victoria and Vaudeville

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Rule, Britannia! Britannia, Rule the Waves!

That’s not how I feel necessarily…it’s just the music that goes with this picture.

Today is Queen Victoria’s Birthday (1819-1901). I thought I’d give the old gal a shout-out today because she plays such a large part in both of my books. What’s the  Monarch of the United Kingdom and the Empress of India got to do with vaudeville, music hall, theatre, and silent film comedy in the United States, you wonder? Ladies and gentleman, her shadow was wide and dark across the entire English-speaking world. There’s no way to talk about culture in America in the 19th and early 20th century without touching on her influence. Well you can, but you will be missing the boat…a little boat I like to call the H.M.S. Victoria. At any rate, it wasn’t until the 1960s really that the last vestiges of Victorianism truly went into retrograde. For a fuller explication, you’ll need to consult…

No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

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as well as my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

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Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.

3 comments

  1. Here’s Queen Victoria enjoying a stogie (sp?) on an old cigarette card from the late 1800s:  It is a scarce collectable I own myself…don’t forget to notice the stylized Mohawk… (open in Paint for best view!) LeanneP (no I will not stalk you with hundreds of e-mails)

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      • HAHAHA – just read your reply – years later! You still at it? I’m in Ontario now…things resolved quite a bit–I had no computer for some time, plus concentation problems keep me from keeping up, sometimes. Hope you are having awesome holidays! Cheers! Happy 2015

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