Writing for Vaudeville
by Brett Page
Chapter III - The Vaudeville Stage and Its Dimensions
To achieve success in any art the artist must know his tools and for what purposes they are designed. Furthermore, to achieve the highest success, he must know what he cannot do as well as what he can do with them.
The vaudeville stage–considered as a material thing–lends itself to only a few definite possibilities of use, and its scenery, lights and stage-effects constitute the box of tools the vaudeville writer has at his command.
I. THE PHYSICAL PROPORTIONS OF THE VAUDEVILLE STAGE
The footlights are the equator of the theatre, separating the “front of the house,” or auditorium, from the “back of the house," or stage. The frame through which the audience views the stage is the “proscenium arch.” Flat against the stage side of the arch run the “house curtain” and the asbestos curtain that are raised at the beginning and lowered at the end of the performance.
That portion of the stage which lies between the curving footlights and a line drawn between the bases of the proscenium arch is called the “apron.” The apron is very wide in old-fashioned theatres, but is seldom more than two or three feet wide in recently built houses.
1. One
Back of the proscenium arch–four feet or more behind it–you have noticed canvas-covered wings painted in neutral-toned draperies to harmonize with every sort of curtain, and you have noticed that they are pushed forward or drawn back as it is found necessary to widen or make narrow the stage opening. These first wings, called “tormentors,” [1] extend upward from the floor–anywhere from 18 to 25 feet,–to the “Grand Drapery” and “Working Drapery,” or first “border,” which extend and hang just in front of them across the stage and hide the stage-rigging from the audience. The space lying between the tormentors and a line drawn between the bases of the proscenium arch is called “One.”
[1] No one of the score I have asked for the origin of the word tormentor has been able to give it. They all say they have asked old-time stage-carpenters, but even they did not know.
It is in One that monologues, most “single acts"–that is, acts presented by one person–and many “two-acts"–acts requiring but two people–are played.
Behind the tormentors is a curtain called the “olio,” which fulfills the triple purpose of hiding the rest of the stage, serving as scenery for acts in One and often as a curtain to raise and lower on acts playing in the space back of One.
2. Two
Five, or six, or even seven feet behind the tormentors you have noticed another set of wings which–extending parallel with the tormentors–serve to mask the rest of stage. The space between these wings and the line of the olio is called “Two.”
In Two, acts such as flirtation-acts–a man and a woman playing lover-like scenes–which use scenery or small “props,” and all other turns requiring but a small playing space, are staged.
3. Three
An equal number of feet back of the wings that bound Two, are wings that serve as boundaries for “Three.”
In Three, playlets that require but shallow sets, and other acts that need not more than twelve feet for presentation, are played.
4. Four or Full Stage
Behind the wings that bound Three are another pair of wings, set an equal number of feet back, which serve as the boundaries of “Four.” But, as there are rarely more than four entrances on any stage, Four is usually called “Full Stage.”
In Full Stage are presented all acts such as acrobatic acts, animal turns, musical comedies, playlets and other pretentious acts that require deep sets and a wide playing space.
5. Bare Stage
Sometimes the very point of a playlet depends upon showing not the conventional stage, as it is commonly seen, but the real stage as it is, unset with scenery; therefore sometimes the entire stage is used as the playing stage, and then in the vernacular it is called “Bare Stage.” [1]
[1] The New Leader, written by Aaron Hoffman and played for so many years by Sam Mann & Company, is an excellent example of a Bare Stage act.
On the opposite page is a diagram of the stage of Keith’s Palace Theatre, New York City. A comparison of the preceding definitions with this diagram should give a clear understanding of the vaudeville playing stage.
II. THE WORKING DEPARTMENTS OF THE VAUDEVILLE STAGE
At audience-right–or stage-left–flat against the extended wall of the proscenium arch in the First Entrance (to One) there is usually a signal-board equipped with push buttons presided over by the stage-manager. The stage-manager is the autocrat behind the scenes. His duty is to see that the program is run smoothly without the slightest hitch or wait between acts and to raise and lower the olio, or to signal the act-curtain up or down, on cues. [2]
[2] A cue is a certain word or action regarded as the signal for some other speech or action by another actor, or the signal for the lights to change or a bell to ring or something to happen during the course of a dramatic entertainment.
When an act is ready to begin, the stage-manager pushes a button to signal the olio up or raises it himself–if, that drop [1] is worked from the stage–and on the last cue he pushes another button to signal the curtain down, or lowers it himself, as the case may be. He keeps time on the various acts and sees that the performers are ready when their turn arrives. Under the stage-manager are the various departments to which the working of scenery and effects are entrusted.
[1] A drop is the general name for a curtain of canvas–painted to represent some scene and stretched on a batten–a long, thick strip of wood–pocketed in the lower end to give the canvas the required stability. Sets of lines are tied to the upper batten on which the drop is tied and thus the drop can be raised or lowered to its place on the stage. There are sets of lines in the rear boundaries of One, Two, Three and Four, and drops can be hung on any desired set.
1. The Stage-Carpenter and His Flymen and Grips
As a rule the stage-manager is also the stage-carpenter. As such he, the wizard of scenery, has charge of the men, and is able to erect a palace, construct a tenement, raise a garden or a forest, or supply you with a city street in an instant.
Up on the wall of the stage, just under a network of iron called the “gridiron"–on which there are innumerable pulleys through which run ropes or “lines” that carry the scenery–there is, in the older houses, a balcony called the “fly-gallery.” Into the fly-gallery run the ends of all the lines that are attached to the counter-weighted drops and curtains; and in the gallery are the flymen who pull madly on these ropes to lift or lower the curtains and drops when the signal flashes under the finger of the stage-manager at the signal-board below. But in the newer houses nearly all drops and scenery are worked from the stage level, and the fly-gallery–if there is one–is deserted. When a “set” is to be made, the stage-carpenter takes his place in the centre of the stage and claps his hands a certain number of times to make his men understand which particular set is wanted–if the sequence of the sets has not yet been determined and written down for the flymen to follow in definite order. Then the flymen lower a drop to its place on the stage and the “grips” push out the “flats" that make the wall of a room or the wings that form the scenery of a forest–or whatever the set may be.
2. The Property-Man and His Assistants
Into the mimic room that the grips are setting comes the Property-man–"Props,” in stage argot–with his assistants, who place in the designated positions the furniture, bric-a-brac, pianos, and other properties, that the story enacted in this room demands.
After the act has been presented and the curtain has been rung down, the order to “strike” is given and the clearers run in and take away all the furniture and properties, while the property-man substitutes the new furniture and properties that are needed. This is done at the same time the grips and fly men are changing the scenery. No regiment is better trained in its duties. The property-man of the average vaudeville theatre is a hard-worked chap. Beside being an expert in properties, he must be something of an actor, for if there is an “extra man” needed in a playlet with a line or two to speak, it is on him that the duty falls. He must be ready on the instant with all sorts of effects, such as glass-crashes and wood-crashes, when a noise like a man being thrown downstairs or through a window is required, or if a doorbell or a telephone-bell must ring at a certain instant on a certain cue, or the noise of thunder, the wash of the sea on the shore, or any one of a hundred other effects be desired.
3. The Electrician
Upon the electrician fall all the duties of Jove in the delicate matter of making the sun to shine or the moon to cast its pale rays over a lover’s scene. Next to the stage-manager’s signal-board, or in a gallery right over it, or perhaps on the other side of the stage, stands the electric switch-board. From here all the stage lights and the lights in the auditorium and all over the front of the house are operated.
From the footlights with their red and white and blue and vari-tinted bulbs, to the borders that light the scenery from above, the bunch-lights that shed required lights through windows, the grate-logs, the lamps and chandeliers that light the mimic rooms themselves, and the spot-light operated by the man in the haven of the gallery gods out front, all are under the direction of the electrician who sits up in his little gallery and makes the moonlight suddenly give place to blazing sunlight on a cue.
It is to the stage-manager and the stage-carpenter, the property-man and the electrician, that are due the working of the stage miracles that delight us in the theatres.
III. THE SCENERY OF THE VAUDEVILLE STAGE
In the ancient days before even candles were invented–the rush-light days of Shakespere and his predecessors–plays were presented in open court-yards or, as in France, in tennis-courts in the broad daylight. A proscenium arch was all the scenery usually thought necessary in these outdoor performances, and when the plays were given indoors even the most realistic scenery would have been of little value in the rush-lit semi-darkness. Then, indeed, the play was the thing. A character walked into the STORY and out of it again; and “place” was left to the imagination of the audience, aided by the changing of a sign that stated where the story had chosen to move itself.
As the centuries rolled along, improvements in lighting methods made indoor theatrical presentations more common and brought scenery into effective use. The invention of the kerosene lamp and later the invention of gas brought enough light upon the stage to permit the actor to step back from the footlights into a wider working-space set with the rooms and streets of real life. Then with the electric light came the scenic revolution that emancipated the stage forever from enforced gloomy darkness, permitted the actor’s expressive face to be seen farther back from the footlights, and made of the proscenium arch the frame of a picture.
“It is for this picture-frame stage that every dramatist is composing his plays,” Brander Matthews says; “and his methods are of necessity those of the picture-frame stage; just as the methods of the Elizabethan dramatic poet were of necessity those of the platform stage.” And on the same page: The influence of the realistic movement of the middle of the nineteenth century imposed on the stage-manager the duty of making every scene characteristic of the period and of the people, and of relating the characters closely to their environment.” [1]
[1] The Study of the Drama, Brander Matthews.
On the vaudeville stage to-day, when all the sciences and the arts have come to the aid of the drama, there is no period nor place, nor even a feeling of atmosphere, that cannot be reproduced with amazing truth and beauty of effect. Everything in the way of scenery is artistically possible, from the squalid room of the tenement-dweller to the blossoming garden before the palace of a king–but artistic possibility and financial advisability are two very different things.
If an act is designed to win success by spectacular appeal, there is no doubt that it is good business for the producer to spend as much money as is necessary to make his effects more beautiful and more amazing than anything ever before seen upon the stage. But even here he must hold his expenses down to the minimum that will prove a good investment, and what he may spend is dependent on what the vaudeville managers will pay for the privilege of showing that act in their houses.
But it is not worth spectacular acts that the vaudeville writer has particularly to deal. His problem is not compounded of extravagant scenery, gorgeous properties, trick-scenes and light-effects. Like Shakespere, for him the play–the story–is the thing. The problem he faces is an embarrassment of riches. With everything artistically possible, what is financially advisable?
1. The Successful Writer’s Attitude toward Scenery
The highest praise a vaudevillian can conjure up out of his vast reservoir of enthusiastic adjectives to apply to any act is, “It can be played in the alley and knock ’em cold.” In plain English he means, the STORY is so good that it doesn’t require scenery.
Scenery, in the business of vaudeville–please note the word “business"–has no artistic meaning. If the owner of a dwelling house could rent his property with the rooms unpapered and the woodwork unpainted, he would gladly do so and pocket the saving, wouldn’t he? In precisely the same spirit the vaudeville-act owner would sell his act without going to the expense of buying and transporting scenery, if he could get the same price for it. To the vaudevillian scenery is a business investment.
Because he can get more money for his act if it is properly mounted in a pleasing picture, the vaudeville producer invests in scenery. But he has to figure closely, just as every other business man is compelled to scheme and contrive in dollars and cents, or the business asset of scenery will turn into a white elephant and eat up all his profits.
Jesse L. Lasky, whose many pleasing musical acts will be remembered, had many a near-failure at the beginning of his vaudeville-producing career because of his artistic leaning toward the beautiful in stage setting. His subsequent successes were no less pleasing because he learned the magic of the scenery mystery. Lasky is but one example, and were it not that the names of vaudeville acts are but fleeting memories, dimmed and eclipsed by the crowded impressions of many acts seen at one sitting, there might be given an amazing list of beautiful little entertainments that have failed because of the transportation cost of the scenery they required.
When a producer is approached with a request to read a vaudeville act he invariably asks, “What scenery?” His problem is in two parts:
1. He must decide whether the merits of the act, itself, justify him in investing his money in scenery on the gamble that the act will be a success.
2. If the act proves a success, can the scenery be transported from town to town at so low a cost that the added price he can get for the act will allow a gross profit large enough to repay the original cost of the scenery and leave a net profit?
An experience of my own in producing a very small act–small enough to be in the primary class–may be as amusing as it is typical. My partners and I decided to put out a quartet. We engaged four good singers, two of them men, and two women. I wrote the little story that introduced them in a humorous way and we set to work rehearsing. At the same time the scenic artist hung three nice big canvases on his paint frames and laid out a charming street-scene in the Italian Quarter of Anywhere, the interior of a squalid tenement and the throne room of a palace.
The first drop was designed to be hung behind the Olio–for the act opened in One–and when the Olio went up, after the act’s name was hung out, the lights dimmed to the blue and soft green of evening in the Quarter. Then the soprano commenced singing, the tenor took up the duet, and they opened the act by walking rhythmically with the popular ballad air to stage-centre in the amber of the spot-light. When the duet was finished, on came the baritone, and then the contralto, and there was a little comedy before they sang their first quartet number.
Then the first drop was lifted in darkness and the scene changed to the interior of the squalid tenement in which the pathos of the little story unfolded, and a characteristic song was sung. At length the scene changed to the throne room of the palace, where the plot resolved itself into happiness and the little opera closed with the “Quartet from Rigoletto.”
The act was a success; it never received less than five bows and always took two encores. But we paid three hundred and fifty dollars for those miracles of drops, my partners and I, and we used them only one week.
In the first place, the drops were too big for the stage on which we “tried out” the act. We could not use them there and played before the house street-drop and in the house palace set. The act went very well. We shipped the drops at length-rates–as all scenery is charged for by expressmen and railroads–to the next town. There we used them and the act went better. It was a question whether the bigger success was due to the smoother working of the act or to the beautiful drops.
The price for which the act was playing at that breaking-in period led me to ponder the cost of transporting the drops in their rolled-up form on the battens. Therefore when I was informed that the stage in the next town was a small one, I had a bright idea. I ordered the stage-carpenter to take the drops from their battens, discard the battens, and put pockets on the lower ends of the drops and equip the upper ends with tie ropes so the drops could be tied on the battens used in the various houses. The drops would then fit small or large stages equally well and could be folded up into a small enough space to tuck in a trunk and save all the excess transportation charges.
Of course the drops folded up all right, but they unfolded in chips of scaled-off paint. In the excitement, or the desire to “take a chance,” I had not given a thought to the plain fact that the drops were not aniline. They were doomed to chip in time anyway, and folding only hastened their end. Still, we received just as much money for the act all the time we were playing it, as though we had carried the beautiful drops.
Now comes the third lesson of this incident: Although we were precisely three hundred and sixty-eight dollars “out” on account of the drops, we really saved money in the end because we were forced to discard them. The local union of the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees–Stage Hands’ Union, for short–tried to assess me in the town where we first used the drops, for the salary of a stage-carpenter. According to their then iron-clad rule, before which managers had to bow, the scenery of every act carrying as many as three drops on battens had to be hung and taken down by the act’s own stage-carpenter–at forty dollars a week. They could not collect from such an act today because the rules have been changed, but our act was liable, under the old rules, and I evaded it only by diplomacy. But even to-day every act that carries a full set of scenery–such as a playlet requiring a special set–must carry its own stage-carpenter.
Therefore, to the problem of original cost and transportation expense, now add the charge of forty dollars a week against scenery–and an average of five dollars a week extra railroad fare for the stage-carpenter–and you begin to perceive why a vaudeville producer asks, when you request him to read an act: “What scenery?”
There is no intention of decrying the use of special scenery in vaudeville. Some of the very best and most profitable acts, even aside from great scenic one-act dramas like “The System,” [1] would be comparatively valueless without their individual sets. And furthermore the use of scenery, with the far-reaching possibilities of the special set in all its beauty and–on this side of the water–hitherto unrealized effectiveness, has not yet even approached its noon. Together with the ceaseless advance of the art of mounting a full-evening play on the legitimate stage [2] will go the no less artistic vaudeville act. But, for the writer anxious to make a success of vaudeville writing, the special set should be decried. Indeed, the special set ought not to enter into the writer’s problem at all.
[1] See Appendix. [2] The Theatre of To-Day, Hiram Kelly Moderwell’s book on the modem theatre, will repay reading by anyone particularly interested in the special set and its possibilities.
No scenery can make up for weakness of story. Rather, like a paste diamond in an exquisitely chased, pure gold setting, the paste story will appear at greater disadvantage: because of the very beauty of its surroundings. The writer should make his story so fine that it will sparkle brilliantly in any setting.
The only thought that successful vaudeville writers give to scenery is to indicate in their manuscripts the surroundings that “relate the characters closely to their environment.”
It requires no ability to imagine startling and beautiful scenic effects that cost a lot of money to produce–that is no “trick." The vaudeville scenery magic lies in making use of simple scenes that can be carried at little cost–or, better still for the new writer, in twisting the combinations of drops and sets to be found in every vaudeville house to new uses.
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