A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music , dance , and sketches . The revue has its roots in 19th century popular entertainment and melodrama but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from 1916 to 1932. Though most famous for their visual spectacle , revues frequently satirized contemporary figures, news or literature. Similar to the related subforms of operetta and musical theatre , the revue art form brings together music, dance and sketches to create a compelling show. In contrast to these, however, revue does not have an overarching storyline. Rather, a general theme serves as the motto for a loosely related series of acts that alternate between solo performances and dance ensembles.
28-526: Hot Chocolates is a musical revue with music by Fats Waller and Harry Brooks and book by Andy Razaf . It was originally titled Tan Town Topics in hopes it would be picked up by Broadway. Performed at the Hudson Theater in New York City, it was directed by Leonard Harper and ran for 219 performances from June 20, 1929, to December 14, 1929. It is also referred to as Connie's Hot Chocolates . It
56-539: A competing revue to the undergraduates, called variably Revue and Integration or Revue and Imitation. The Moira Stuart Cup is competed for annually at the United Hospitals Comedy Revue, by all five of the University of London Medical Schools . It has been won by all medical schools at least once, with RUMS (UCL Medical School) and St George's Hospital Medical School achieving the most victories, winning
84-638: A continued embrace of a unifying authorial presence in this seemingly scattershot genre, much as was earlier the case with Ziegfeld, Carrol, et al . With different artistic emphases, the revue genre is today above all upheld at traditional variety theatres such as the Le Lido , Moulin Rouge and Friedrichstadt-Palast Berlin, as well as in shows in Las Vegas. It is a current and fairly longstanding tradition of medical, dental, engineering, legal and veterinary schools within
112-504: A party he threw in honor of Harry Kendall Thaw , who 20 years earlier had murdered Stanford White . During the private party, a bathtub was brought out in which reposed a nude young woman, Joyce Hawley, bathing in illegal liquor, described in a news story of Carroll's death as champagne. One of the guests was Philip A. Payne , editor of the New York Mirror . Although Carroll expected his guests would be circumspect about what happened at
140-413: 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
168-412: A traveling caravan of musicians, headed by Bob Dylan , that took place in late 1975 and early 1976. Towards the end of the 20th century, a subgenre of revue largely dispensed with the sketches, founding narrative structure within a song cycle in which the material is culled from varied works. This type of revue may or may not have identifiable characters and a rudimentary storyline but, even when it does,
196-409: Is now sometimes (incorrectly) employed as an analog for "revue," though the term was proprietary to Ziegfeld until his death in 1932. Other popular proprietary revue names included George White's "Scandals," Earl Carroll 's "Vanities" and John Murray Anderson 's Greenwich Village Follies . Revues are most properly understood as having amalgamated several theatrical traditions within the corpus of
224-684: The Atlanta Federal Penitentiary . Carroll wrote the scores for Broadway shows, including So Long Letty , Canary Cottage , and The Love Mill , for which he also wrote the libretto . As a writer of popular songs, his credits include Isle d'Amour , So Long Letty , Dreams of Long Ago , Give Me All of You , Just The Way You Are , and Dreaming , for which he supplied lyrics to the waltz by Archibald Joyce . A pair of mid-1940s musical comedy films, Earl Carroll Vanities and Earl Carroll Sketchbook , both starring Constance Moore , were inspired by Carroll's stage revues. Carroll died in
252-624: The Follies charged $ 5.00 for an opening night ticket ($ 130 in 2020 dollars); at that time, many cinema houses charged from $ 0.10 to 0.25, while low-priced vaudeville seats were $ 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 , John Murray Anderson , and
280-687: The Marx Brothers and the Fairbanks Twins found great success on the revue stage. One of Cole Porter 's early shows was Raymond Hitchcock 's revue Hitchy-Koo of 1919 . Composers or lyricists such as Richard Rodgers , Lorenz Hart , Irving Berlin , and George M. Cohan also enjoyed a tremendous reception on the part of audiences. Sometimes, an appearance in a revue provided a key early entry into entertainment. Largely due to their centralization in New York City and their adroit use of publicity, revues proved particularly adept at introducing new talents to
308-611: The Shubert Brothers as the leading producing figure of the American revue's golden age. Revues also had a presence in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, with films such as "Frau meiner Träume" being made. Revues took advantage of their high revenue stream to lure away performers from other media, often offering exorbitant weekly salaries without the unremitting travel demanded by other entertainments. Performers such as Eddie Cantor , Anna Held , W. C. Fields , Bert Williams , Ed Wynn ,
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#1733092311269336-562: The American theatre. Rodgers and Hart , one of the great composer/lyricist teams of the American musical theatre , followed up their early Columbia University student revues with the successful Garrick Gaieties (1925). Comedian Fanny Brice , following a brief period in burlesque and amateur variety, bowed to revue audiences in Ziegfeld's Follies of 1910 . Specialist writers and composers of revues have included Sandy Wilson , Noël Coward , John Stromberg, George Gershwin , Earl Carroll , and
364-605: The British team Flanders and Swann . In Britain predominantly, Tom Arnold also specialized in promoting series of revues and his acts extended to the European continent and South Africa. With the introduction of talking pictures, in 1927, studios immediately began filming acts from the stage. Such film shorts gradually replaced the live entertainment that had often accompanied cinema exhibition. By 1928, studios began planning to film feature-length versions of popular musicals and revues from
392-628: The Festival, with St. George's Medics Revue having been performing annually at the Fringe for 18 years and have sold-out their show for the last nine years. The BSMS Medic Revue has performed sellout shows in the Brighton Fringe Festival since 2008. The MDs Comedy Revue performed at the Fringe for the first time in 2015, to a sell-out audience, repeating this feat their second show in 2016 and their third in 2018. The Cambridge clinical school also now run
420-644: The UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia to put on revues each year, combining comedy sketches, songs, parodies, films and sound-bites. One of the most notable and funniest is the Australian National University's "Arts Revue". As well as performing at their respective universities, shows will often be performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe . The Cambridge Medics Revue, St George's Medics Revue, and Birmingham Medics Revues have all performed at
448-571: The Vanities , which was also made into a film starring Carl Brisson , Victor McLaglen and Jack Oakie . Known as "the troubadour of the nude", Carroll was famous for his productions featuring the most lightly clad showgirls on Broadway. Damon Runyon , in his short story The Brain Goes Home has the narrator remark, "Well, Mr. Earl Carroll feels sorry for Cynthia, so he puts her in the 'Vanities' and lets her walk around raw, and The Brain sees her, and
476-443: The bandwagon and produced expensive revues such as Harmony Heaven ( British International Pictures , 1929), Elstree Calling (BIP, 1930), and The Musical Revue Of 1959 (BI P, 1960). Revues are often common today as student entertainment (with strong traditions in many universities in UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Denmark). These use pastiche , in which contemporary songs are re-written in order to comment on
504-465: The college or courses in a humorous nature. While most comic songs will only be heard within the revue they were written for, sometimes they become more widely known—such as "A Transport of Delight", about the big red London bus, by Flanders and Swann , who first made their name in a revue titled At the Drop of a Hat . The Rolling Thunder Revue was a famed U.S. concert tour in the mid-1970s consisting of
532-599: The masculine gaze. 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,
560-504: The next thing anybody knows she is riding in a big foreign automobile the size of a rum chaser, and is chucking a terrible swell." In 1922, he built the first Earl Carroll Theatre in New York , which was demolished and rebuilt on a grander scale in 1931. He built a second theatre on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California , in 1938. In 1926, Carroll became involved in a scandal following
588-409: The party, Payne published a report. Federal authorities, apparently determined to learn the source of the illegal alcohol, subpoenaed Carroll to appear (with others) before a grand jury. Carroll denied the incident happened, but others at the party confirmed it. The federal government prosecuted Carroll for perjury, and he was convicted and sentenced one year and one day in prison. He served six months at
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#1733092311269616-449: The primary attraction was found in the frank display of the female body. Revue comes from the French word for "review," as in a "show presenting a review of current events." 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 Jr. popularized the French spelling. "Follies"
644-700: The song " (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue ," originally sung by Edith Wilson , for his performances decades later. This musical theatre related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Revue Owing to high ticket prices, ribald publicity campaigns and the occasional use of prurient material, the revue was typically patronized by audience members who earned more and felt even less restricted by middle-class social norms than their contemporaries in vaudeville . Like much of that era's popular entertainments, revues often featured material based on sophisticated, irreverent dissections of topical matter, public personae and fads, though
672-508: The songs remain the focus of the show (for example, Closer Than Ever by Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire ). This type of revue usually showcases songs written by a particular composer or songs made famous by a particular performer. Examples of the former are Side By Side By Sondheim (music/lyrics Stephen Sondheim ), Eubie! ( Eubie Blake ) Tom Foolery ( Tom Lehrer ), and Five Guys Named Moe (songs made popular by Louis Jordan ). The eponymous nature of these later revues suggest
700-780: The stage. The lavish films, noted by many for a sustained opulence unrivaled in Hollywood until the 1950s epics, reached a breadth of audience never found by the stage revue, all while significantly underpricing the now-faltering theatrical shows. A number of revues were released by the studios, many of which were filmed entirely (or partly) in color. The most notable examples of these are The Show of Shows ( Warner Brothers , 1929), The Hollywood Revue of 1929 ( Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , 1929), Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 ( Fox Film Corporation , 1929), Paramount on Parade ( Paramount , 1930), New Movietone Follies of 1930 (Fox, 1930), and King of Jazz ( Universal , 1930). Even Britain jumped on
728-495: The trophy six times each. The cup is not officially endorsed by Moira Stuart herself. a. In 2019, the judges ironically declared Imperial College School of Medicine the winners, because they could not decide which of The MDs Comedy Revue or The Zebraphiles were the funnier. b. The 2002 UH Revue was a showcase of each Medical School's Revue societies, with the competition element brought in from 2003. Earl Carroll Earl Carroll (September 16, 1893 – June 17, 1948)
756-648: Was an American theatrical producer , director, writer, songwriter and composer. Carroll was born in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania in 1893. He lived as an infant in the Nunnery Hill ( Fineview ) section of the North Side . Carroll later said he left the area "because there were too many tin cans and goats up there then." Carroll produced and directed numerous Broadway musicals, including eleven editions of Earl Carroll's Vanities , Earl Carroll's Sketch Book and Murder at
784-417: Was staged, directed and produced by Leonard Harper . While the revue featured music and singing, including the subsequent hit " Aint Misbehavin '," it was praised for the cast's dancing, including its male and female chorus lines. Louis Armstrong made his Broadway debut as part of the show's ensemble. Cab Calloway later joined the cast as a replacement at Armstrong's recommendation. Calloway later adopted
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