Although the earliest extant vaudeville handbill dates to 1840, vaudefille became the nation's premier form of popular entertainment only in the 1880s. For the next fifty years vaudeville employed tens of thousands of performers, agents, bookers, theater owners, and impresarios. At its peak from roughly 1905 to 1925, vaudeville reached into every corner of the country, from the big-time circuits playing the majuor urban vaudeville palaces to the small-time chains and neighborhood houses serving small towns across the West, Midwest and South.

Vaudeville performances were structured as a series of unrelated acts, offered either in a repeating cycle ("continuous vaudeville") or on a bill of eight or nine acts typically offered twice a day as matinee and evening performances. Acts were performed by comedy monologists, comedy teams, singers, dancers, blackface comedians and vocalists, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, contortionists, and animal trainters. Eventually booking agencies and theater chains joined together to form geographically based circuits, providing performers with regular travel routes and steady work, and theater owners with a continuous supply of performers.

Competition from radio and sound film in the late 1920s; among other factors, led to the decline of vaudeville. Countless vaudevillians ended up in Los Angeles in the late 1920s and early 1930s hoping to break into motion pictures, but relatively few performers were successful at practicing their art in nightclibs and in the film industry, and the majority were absorbed into the local economy.

Further reading:

• Vaudeville Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America, Frank Cullen (New York: Routledge, 2007).
• Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, Robert W. Snyder (New York: Oxford, 1989).
• Vaudeville wars: How the Keigh-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-time and Its Performers, Arthur Frank Wertheim (New YOrk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
• Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American VaudevilleM. Alison Kibler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
• Blue Vaudeville: sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915Andrew L. Erdman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).