Leaping Dog acts were all the rage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the best of the lot was said to be Meehan’s Leaping Dogs. I find many references to them and invariably with superlative reviews. It appears Meehan had a good run of it…at the Brooklyn Orpheum in 1904…Keith’s Boston 1905…the Portland Orpheum in 1910…the Pittsburgh Grand in 1912…at the Alcazar in San Francisco in 1913…the Toronto Hippodrome in 1914…in the Winter Garden show Sinbad with Al Jolson in 1918…in the Century Revue in 1920. A 1922 Variety review at Keith’s Union Square says “Meehan’s dogs came close to stopping the show…”
To find out 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.
(Travalanche) 