Abstract
In May 1907, vaudeville manager Percy Williams left New York for Europe on board the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. “He is taking his large automobile and his chauffeur along,” the New York Dramatic Mirror disclosed, “and in the machine, will visit the principal cities of Europe, and many of the smaller places, keeping his eyes open all the time for novelties to be secured for next season.”1 Williams’s departure came at a critical moment in the “vaudeville wars,” during which US managers looked beyond North American borders for acts that would propel them past their local rivals. As a member of the United Booking Office (UBO), vaudeville’s leading “trust,” Williams represented his own interests as well as those of his associates. But he was not alone. The previous month, Clifford C. Fischer and Alfred E. Aarons, agents for the newly formed United States Amusement Company (USAC), had begun a similar European scouting mission, threatening the UBO’s dominance by quickly signing several British headliners. In traveling to Europe with his automobile and chauffeur, then, Williams showcased his privileged hyper-mobility, projecting an image of constant readiness and speed.
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Notes
Robert Lewis, ed., From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 198–9.
Margaret Werry, “‘The Greatest Show on Earth’: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific,” Theatre Journal 57.3 (2005): 355–82, at 355.
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See also John Frick, “A Changing Theatre: New York and Beyond,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. 2, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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A full-scale analysis of these rivalries is beyond the scope of this book. For a detailed analysis of vaudeville rivalries, see Wertheim, Vaudeville Wars. On the Syndicate/Shubert rivalries, see Peter A. Davis, “The Syndicate/Shubert War,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 147–57.
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Schweitzer, M. (2015). Introduction. In: Transatlantic Broadway. Transnational Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437358_1
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