A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance and sketches. The revue has its roots in nineteenth-century American popular entertainment and melodrama, but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from ca. 1916-1932. Though most famous for their visual spectacle, revues frequently satirized contemporary figures, news, or literature. Due to high ticket prices, ribald publicity campaigns, and sometime embrace of prurient material, the revue was typically patronized by audience members who earned more and felt less restricted by middle-class social mores than their contemporaries in vaudeville. Like much of its era's popular entertainments, revue often featured material based on sophisticated, irreverent dissections of topical matter, public personae, and fads, though the primary attraction was found in the frank display of the female body.

Etymology

George Lederer's The Passing Show (1894) is usually held to be the first successful American "review." The English spelling was used until 1907 when Florenz Ziegfeld popularized the French spelling. "Follies" is now sometimes (incorrectly) employed as an analog for "revue," though the term was proprietorial with Ziegfeld until his death in 1932. (Other popular proprietorial revue names included George White's "Scandals" and Earl Carroll's "Vanities.")

Origin

Revues are most properly understood as having amalgamated several theatrical traditions within the corpus of a single entertainment. Minstrelsy's olio section provided a structural map of popular variety presentation, while literary travesties highlighted an audience hunger for satire. Theatrical extravaganzas, in particular, moving panoramas, demonstrated a vocabulary of the spectacular. Burlesque, itself a bawdy hybrid of various theatrical forms, lent to classic revue an open interest in female sexuality and the masculine gaze.

Golden age

Revues enjoyed great success on Broadway from the World War I years until the Great Depression, when the stock market crash forced many revues from cavernous Broadway houses into smaller venues. (The shows did, however, continue to infrequently appear in large theatres well into the 1950s.) The high ticket prices of many revues helped ensure audiences distinct from other live popular entertainments during their height of popularity (late 1910s-1940s). In 1914, for example, the Follies charged $5.00 for an opening night ticket; at that time, many cinema houses charged a $0.10-0.25, while low-priced vaudeville seats could be had for $0.15. Among the many popular producers of revues, Florenz Ziegfeld played the greatest role in developing the classical revue through his glorification of a new theatrical "type," "the American girl." Famed for his often bizarre publicity schemes and continual debt, Ziegfeld joined Earl Carroll, George White, and the Shubert Brothers as the leading producing figure of the American revue's golden age.