Sister list: List of vaudeville performers: L–Z
This is a partial list of vaudeville performers. Inclusion on this list indicates that the subject appeared at least once on the American vaudeville stage during its heyday between 1881 and 1932. The source in the citation included with each entry confirms their appearance and cites information in the performance notes section.
Vaudeville (sometimes abbreviated as vaude) was the name used in North America and Australasia for a style of variety entertainment predominant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The same type of entertainment was known as Music Hall in Britain. Developing from many sources, including shows in saloons, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, British pantomimes, and other popular forms of entertainment, vaudeville became one of the most popular types of entertainment in America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Vaudeville took the form of a series of separate, unrelated acts each featuring a different types of performance. These performances could ranges from musicians (both classical and popular), dancers, comedians, animal acts, magicians, female and male impersonators, to acrobats, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, or even short films.
While the initial origins of vaudeville are obscure, historians acknowledge that the opening of Tony Pastor's Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City on October 24, 1881 marks the beginning of American vaudeville. Pastor had refined the rough variety acts into something wholesome enough for women and children. Other theatre owners quickly picked up on Pastor's new style of vaudeville and theatres began springing up like weeds and would continue in a quick pace until the 1920s. In Australasia vaudeville companies such as Fuller's became household names, eventually operating in several Australian and New Zealand cities at once. Vaudeville reached its height around 1915. These heights included an industrialization of the business of vaudeville. Following this climax, vaudeville began to struggle with competition from film and in the following decade, radio. These mediums competed not only for audiences, but talent as well. Towards the end of the 1920s, vaudeville theatres began to be converted to cinemas or closed altogether with entire circuits. After the blow dealt the world by the economic downturn of the Great Depression, vaudeville's pulse quickly weakened. Just as historians mark the date of the "birth" of vaude, the date of its death is marked as well. New York's Palace Theatre on Broadway, was the palace of vaudeville; a place where only the greatest of vaude's performers performed. On November 16, 1932, the last vaudeville bill was played there and the Palace became a full-time movie house. Vaudeville did continue to struggle on, but it never again reached the heights attained in 1915.