and managers.

2. Of What a Vaudeville Show is Made

There is no keener psychologist than a vaudeville manager. Not
only does he present the best of everything that can be shown upon
a stage, but he so arranges the heterogeneous elements that they
combine to form a unified whole. He brings his audiences together
by advertising variety and reputations, and he sends them away
aglow with the feeling that they have been entertained every minute.
His raw material is the best he can buy. His finished product is
usually the finest his brain can form. He engages Sarah Bernhardt,
Calve, a Sir James M. Barrie playlet, Ethel Barrymore, and Henry
Miller. He takes one of them as the nucleus of a week's bill.
Then he runs over the names of such regular vaudevillians as Grace
La Rue, Nat Wills, Trixie Friganza, Harry Fox and Yansci Dollie,
Emma Carus, Sam and Kitty Morton, Walter C. Kelly, Conroy and
LeMaire, Jack Wilson, Hyams and McIntyre, and Frank Fogarty. He
selects two or maybe three of them. Suddenly it occurs to him
that he hasn't a big musical "flash" for his bill, so he telephones
a producer like Jesse L. Lasky, Arthur Hopkins or Joe Hart and
asks him for one of his fifteen- or twenty-people acts. This he
adds to his bill. Then he picks a song-and-dance act and an
acrobatic turn. Suddenly he remembers that he wants--not for this
show, but for some future week--Gertrude Hoffman with her big
company, or Eva Tanguay all by herself. This off his mind, the
manager lays out his show--if it is the standard nine-act
bill--somewhat after the following plan, as George A. Gottlieb,
who books Keith's Palace Theatre, New York, shows--probably the
best and certainly the "biggest" vaudeville entertainments seen