A Fictionalized History of Popular Theater - David Hajdu and John Carey. A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 176 pp. $19.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0231191821. - Volume 22 Issue 1

A Revolution in Three Acts is an entertaining graphic novel about three prominent performers who appeared in vaudeville in the early twentieth century. The three characters it presents, Eva Tanguay, Bert Williams and Julian Eltinge

Reviewed by: Selling Out or Buying In?: Debating Consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945-1985 by Michael Dawson Vicki Howard Dawson, Michael – Selling Out or Buying In?: Debating Consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945-1985. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. 224. North Americans, today, shop around the clock, every day of the week. The internet has of course made almost every retail service or outlet available 24-7. Before the rise of e-commerce, however, consumers came to expect to be able to visit shopping malls, supermarkets, or big box stores whenever the need arose, every day of the week, if not at any time. And retail employees expect, and often have no choice but to work on holidays, weekends, and evenings. Michael Dawson's [End Page 221] timely book reminds us that this was not always the case. This well-researched, engaging monograph uncovers the complex debates over store-hour restrictions that shaped the retail landscape of Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, in the post-Second World War period. In 1946, the regulatory regime banned Sunday sales, forced Wednesday shop closures, and prohibited evening shopping in Victoria and Vancouver. By the late 1980s, seven-day shopping dominated both cities and stores largely set their own hours, outside of statutory holidays. Drawing largely on newspaper evidence, Dawson explores the vivid and sometimes heated debate over opening hours during this period. In doing so, he argues for and successfully demonstrates both the contingent and contested nature of the rise of Canadian consumer culture. One of the book's strengths is the diversity of voices included throughout, each weighing in at different historical moments on the issue, first on Wednesday half-day or full-day closures, then Sunday shopping. Thematically organised chapters incorporate a wide range of historical actors, including store proprietors but also city officials, merchant associations, clerk unions, and the retail workers and shoppers themselves. The book reveals a debate not clearly determined by retail size or organizational type. Big retailers, for example, like Woodward's and Sears, might come down on the side of traditional Wednesday closure and Sunday closure, respectively, whereas small, family-run businesses in tourist districts like Vancouver's Gastown and Chinatown wanted wide open hours. Although chains generally called for liberalization, Dawson sees no clear fault lines in the debate. Consumers were even divided at different points in time, with some favouring workers' right to leisure and family time, while others the right to shop (and sell) freely. Even employees of a firm advocating one position might support the opposing view. Mining City Councillors' Offices documents, for example, Dawson found evidence of a Woodward's store employee writing to lobby against the retailer's opposition to six-day shopping in 1969. Indeed, Dawson argues that it is the lack of consistent divisions among his historical actors that accounted for the longevity of the store-hours conflict. Another strength is the monograph's use of gender as a category of analysis. One chapter focused on the gendered moral arguments deployed in the debate over store-hour restrictions. Appeals, for example, were made to "the community's sense of duty to protect women and the institution of the family" (p. 70). Extended shopping hours could infringe upon the home and women's domestic duties. Conversely, evening hours were framed as beneficial, encouraging "family togetherness" (p. 81). Selling Out or Buying In? fits into a body of literature that considers the role of the state in the evolution of consumer society. Legislation with quite limited scope is shown to act as an entering wedge, opening the door to future liberalization of shopping regulations—and greater consumerism. The normalization of extended Christmas shopping and with it, extended hours of work for retail workers, for example, was the result of a successful 1950 bill suspending the current governing Shops Regulations and Weekly Holiday Act for the seven days prior to Christmas. The debate over hours also intersected with larger political and ideological forces [End Page 222] during this period, as both sides drew on the Cold War for justification of limits, as well as liberalization of restrictions. A legislative turning point came in 1980 with the passage...

Douglas A. Guerra is good at asking unusual questions and looking for answers in unexpected places. The strength of Slantwise Moves lies in its discussion of several of the games that were played in mid-nineteenth century America. Guerra is keenly attentive to the mechanics of game play and meditates on what these tell us about minds and manners. Game design, like architecture, clothing, or etiquette, reflects values and thought patterns. Guerra takes the insights he gains from his investigation of games and analyzes some well-known works of literature. The games provide new readings of the literature, and the print texts reinforce the conclusions he draws from game mechanics. As cultural historians know, one of the problems with studying historical texts and artifacts is coming to grips with the relationship between authors, works, and audiences. Authorial intent, genre, media, and reception aren’t mechanically or predictably related, even if we successfully figure out what audience reactions might have been or what ideas authors tried to communicate. It is as misleading to present audiences as having “free interpretive agency” as it is to argue that works determine their own reading. Guerra presents the playing of a game as an act, one that is partly determined by the rules but through which players express their individuality. The analogy to reading is obvious, and Guerra recognizes that the freedom to play or read is relative by comparing individual games and books. It’s a neat idea, even if it is needlessly complicated by the way Guerra tells it.

Around the turn of the century many artists, architects and designers adopted a new sensibility which we call modernist. Modernism questioned ideas about the solidity of material existence and saw reality as something defined by perspectives and feelings. Modernists wanted to make people experience their world in new ways. This chapter looks at ideas in modern art such as the indeterminate nature of the self and the “liberation” of sexuality. It also explores a range of vaudeville acts – mind readers, illusionists, impersonators, comedians and dancers – to show how vaudeville contributed to the creation of a modernist cultural moment in the early twentieth century.

The editors of Over Here, Over There have done what editors rarely succeed in doing: to provide interpretive unity and context for the disparate articles they have assembled. I was impressed by thi...

UNGIRDING THE LOINS OF SAINTS - Mary Campbell. Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xiv + 211 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-2263-7369-0. - Volume 17 Issue 1

What can popular song tell us about American attitudes to the First World War? One of the hit songs of 1915, Al Piantadosi and Alfred Bryan's I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier', appears to support the idea that the American public was in a pacifist mood prior to 1917. But the success of the song provides misleading evidence of public sentiments. Far from opposing war, the entertainment business between 1914 and 1917 can be said to have prepared the way for US intervention by promoting a militarized form of patriotism, by linking soldiering to manliness, and by offering aural and visual imagery favourable to the Allies.

Broadway is at once a place, an amusement, and a commodity. In the twentieth century, the aura of Broadway added value to the commodity (the theater), not just as a location, but also as a materialization of labor. As Timothy R. White shows, the backstage work of the people who made the costumes and sets and operated the electrical systems provided the tangible labor that crafted Broadway’s glitter. This is a fine illustration of the spatial approach to commodities and the idea that things, and the consumption of them, can be understood through what Michael K. Goodman, David Goodman, and Michael Redclift call “a place theory of value” (11) in their 2010 edited volume, Consuming Space: Placing Consumption in Perspective. Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater traces the ups and downs of the midtown theater (White focuses on musical comedy, but includes other forms here and there) over the course of the twentieth century. It is very much a geographical history that measures the growth and decline in the entertainment industry through its physical dispersal. While ostensibly dealing with labor, it does not devote much attention to working people: their backgrounds, their racial and ethnic loyalties, their culture or lifestyles, their leisure activities, their work and its evolution, or their pay. Although White does offer well-chosen anecdotes, these mostly concern bosses and theater personalities rather than workers. The blue-collar aspect is largely covered through an institutionally focused discussion of labor organization.

Double-voiced singing was a popular form of variety show entertainment from the 1860s through to the 1920s. Double-voiced performers were able, through intonation and tone, to sound as though they had at least two separate and distinct "voices," generally one soprano and one baritone. But as Claire Rochester, a double-voiced singer of the early twentieth century made clear, their act was more than just a matter of a woman singing low notes or a man singing high ones; it was all about a performer adopting the "voice" of the other sex. The unusual practice of these singers was to sing duets (and sometimes as much as quartets) to themselves and by themselves, flipping back and forth between their male to female "voices." I place this strange form of entertainment in the context of changing attitudes to gender and sexuality and suggests that conventional interpretations of "freak" performances as "transgressive" fail to account for these vocal wonders. Double-voiced singers shunned the "transgressive" billing, especially when their own sexual identity was called into question. In making this argument, I suggest that we need to widen our understanding of "freakery," imposture and the meaning of "nature" and "truth," as they were revealed both on stage and off.

From its premiere in 1935 to the recent Diane Paulus production, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess has challenged its critics' conceptual categories. For musical columnist and composer Virgil Thomson, it was a “grand opera,” albeit a uniquely American one; for others, it was a “folk opera” (meaning a work relying on traditional musical forms and somehow distinguished from “art music”); for still more it was a work of musical theater. Gershwin did not make the taxonomist's job easier by calling his great work an opera but then staging its premiere in a Broadway theater. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that Ellen Noonan's study is also hard to classify. The book offers a history organized around Porgy's stagings from the release of the DuBose Heyward novel in 1925 through the Houston Grand Opera production of 1976. To document the various interpretations, Noonan relies largely on newspaper reviews, which makes this a study of the perceptions and interpretations of critics rather than a conventional production history. But as its title suggests, the book also presents Porgy as an indicator of and contributor to changing approaches to race and the civil rights struggle. Noonan reads the history of Porgy and Bess criticism in terms of changing attitudes toward race.