• Irving Berlin
• Scandals & Vanities
• Raunchier Options

Producer Charles Dillingham's "syncopated revue" Watch Your Step (1914 - 175) had a wisp of a plot -- librettist Harry B. Smith's program credit read "Book (if any)" -- involving a young man and woman competing to win an inheritance by each proving they had never been in love, and (of course) falling in love as they spend a day wandering about Manhattan. The show was designed as a vehicle for the most popular dance team of the era, Vernon and Irene Castle. The Castle's brought a modern sense of intimacy and humor to ballroom-style dancing -- making them the perfect choice to bring Tin Pan Alley syncopation to Broadway. Dillingham signed up the leading proponent of that sound, the man who's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" had changed the world of popular music.

Irving Berlin had already contributed individual songs to various revues, but Watch Your Step was his first  complete stage score. The jaunty counterpoint ballad "Play a Simple Melody" became a standard, and Berlin's "Syncopated Walk" gave the Castle's a showstopping dance. Berlin found this success so satisfying that he turned out songs for several more revues, including "I Love A Piano" for Stop! Look! Listen! (1915) and "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" for The Ziegfeld Follies (1919). Although Berlin was more interested in writing hit songs than in creating theater, he continued writing for Broadway revues and book musicals into the 1960s. There is more on him in the pages ahead.

Scandals & Vanities
The Passing Show of 1913 offered chorus girls cascading down a stage-wide staircase. A serious Follies competitor, this twelve year series is almost forgotten today.

Ziegfeld's Follies (discussed in detail on our next page) were generally considered the best revues of this era, but there were several major competing series in the 1910s and 1920s  –

– George White was a featured dancer in the 1911 and 1915 editions of the Follies. Confident that he could improve on Ziegfeld's approach, White produced a series of thirteen lavish Scandals between 1919 and 1939. With music, comedy, beautiful chorus girls and top-quality dance routines, White's revues were so popular that they made Ziegfeld uneasy. White also demanded better scores, so the Scandals introduced such lasting hits as George and Ira Gershwin's "Stairway to Paradise" and "Somebody Loves Me," as well as DeSylva, Henderson and Brown's "Birth of the Blues," "The Black Bottom" and "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries." The Scandals' roster of stars included Rudy Vallee, Harry Richman, Ethel Merman and former Follies dancer Ann Pennington. White moved on to Hollywood and filmed several Scandals, but drifted into obscurity after the 1940s.

– Director John Murray Anderson initiated The Greenwich Village Follies, an intimate downtown revue that proved so popular it had to be moved to Broadway. Displaying Anderson's masterful gift for inventive, stylish staging, this series had eight successful editions between 1919 and 1928, becoming bigger and more elaborate each year. Anderson soon left the series but remained an important stage director, helming two editions of the Follies after Ziegfeld's death. His New Faces of 1952 (1952 - 365) and Almanac (1953 - 229) won acclaim long after the Broadway revue had been dismissed as a dead genre.

Raunchier Options
Long before Saturday Night Live, presidential candidates took their comic licks from Broadway revues. Here Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Charles Evans Hughes seek the hand of "Miss Nomination" in The Passing Show of 1916.

– In a blatant attempt to copy the success of the Follies, theatre owners Lee & Jacob Shubert presented lavish revues at their new Winter Garden Theatre. After several false starts, they launched The Passing Show, a series that ran irregularly from 1912 to 1924. The Shuberts' underpaid staff writers and designers turned out shows that were short on style but brimming with naked (or almost naked) chorus girls. However, the Passing Show also boasted a stellar line-up of performing talent. Headliners included comics Willie and Eugene Howard, Ed Wynn, DeWolf Hopper, Adele and Fred Astaire, Charles Winninger, and future Ziegfeld star Marilyn Miller. The most memorable songs from the series included "Smiles" and "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles." The Passing Show became the first major revue series to fade away when the Shuberts decided they could make more money by setting their sights even lower.

– Convinced that nudity could be a revue's key selling point, Jacob Shubert produced a separate series of revues entitled Artists and Models. During rehearsals, Shubert would rip material off the chorus girls' costumes until he felt sufficient flesh was showing! The resulting displays drew so much condemnation in the press that curious audiences packed the theatre for three long-running annual editions (1923-1925).

– Earl Carroll was an occasional songwriter who produced a series of popular Vanities and Sketchbooks between 1923 and 1940. He didn't settle for under-dressing his chorus girls – he often presented them stark naked, defying the law and garnering tremendous publicity. Carroll had a taste for bawdy comedy acts that would never have been allowed in a Ziegfeld show. Carroll's stars included Joe Cook, Sophie Tucker, W.C. Fields, Jack Benny and Milton Berle. Carroll's racy private life and outrageous publicity stunts landed him in jail on several occasions. When the Great Depression killed off lavish stage revues in the 1930s, he opened a popular Hollywood nightclub and produced several successful films before dying in a 1948 plane crash.

Most revues of this period were content to offer large numbers of underdressed women, with just enough comedy to keep audiences awake between production numbers. With a few exceptions, most songs in these revues were forgettable.

The most legendary revues of the 1910s were, of course, Ziegfeld's Follies -- which, in this decade, made the transition from success story to theatrical legend . . . 

Next: 1910s - Part III