American Vaudeville

MR. GILBERT gives us a glowing reminder of what amusement was in the old days, not such bad davs, when New York was New York, and the free-thinking, free-speaking, free-swearing American was yet abroad in the land — God rest his soul, we could do with a few of him in these times. Mr. Gilbert’s work deserves great praise for its thorough and attractive covering of vaudeville’s brief life of almost exactly fifty years. He brings up so many names that were music in the ears of the last generation: Francis Wilson, who passed from vaudeville to the ‘legit,’ Bernhardt and Maurice Barrymore, who passed in the opposite direction, and others as eminent who went in and out between the two. And the gals, dear, merry, wayward! The old playgoer looks over Hollywood’s best assorted, then looks again through Mr. Gilbert’s opera glasses at Lottie Collins, Tanguay, Nora Bayes, Guilbert, Anna Held, Lillian Russell, May Irwin, and he feels pretty well satisfied with what he’s had. His, of course, is the principal debt to Mr. Gilbert, but younger people also, if they read this book, will feel that they owe him a great deal for his masterly representation of an intimate and pleasing phase of earlier American life.