Burlesque and Vaudeville in Milwaukee: 100 Years Ago and Its Current Revival

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It's 1922, and you head downtown in Milwaukee to find yourself with no shortage of live entertainment options. If you have a hunger for vaudeville, you can go to the Miller Theatre, which stood at the spot now occupied by the blue 310W building on Wisconsin Avenue and played shows daily. There was also the Majestic just a stone’s throw away, which stands to this day and now houses a Walgreens drug store.

You could also head the other way to reach the Palace Theatre right down the block. It was an ornate venue of nearly 2,500 seats and was among those on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, an organized 40-week-long tour route. At these vaudeville theaters you would pay 30 or 40 cents or so for entry and watch a variety of several short acts ranging from song-and-dance, to comedy, magic, feats of strength and more. If it could captivate an audience, it was worth putting on stage. These venues more often than not remained clean—an affair for the whole family.

If burlesque was more your style, you could stay in the same neighborhood and attend a show at the Gayety, which at the time just signed onto the Columbia Amusement circuit. Just a short stroll would bring you to the Empress Theater. Burlesque, like vaudeville, was another style of variety entertainment. At that time, it had developed into a standardized format and made use of tried-and-true joke routines. It was tailored more for working class men, emphasizing bawdy humor. It poked fun at the expense of higher social classes and featured scantily clad women. Show standards varied, with major circuits offering respectable shows and small local venues having more subversive content.

Perhaps you were more excited for cabaret performances, which were growing in popularity at the time. stay up late with your life-partner and catch and show act put on specially at a variety of establishments such as the Milwaukee Athletic

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You could catch the dinner and show acts put on specially at a variety of establishments such as the Milwaukee Athletic Club.

Of course, other options included legitimate dramatic theater and opera held at spaces like the Pabst Theater.

Change in Motion

The exhibition of moving pictures was already a force to be reckoned with in 1922. The film industry was poaching comedians from vaudeville, such as Charlie Chaplin, and the cheap price point was drawing patrons away from live entertainment. In only a decade’s more time, vaudeville theaters will have either shut down or been repurposed completely as movie palaces. Burlesque nearly suffered the same fate but survived by shifting focus to the part of its programming that it did better than movies: the near-naked women. Titillating outfits worn by dancers were always part of the burlesque experience, but the end of the 1920s brought a new kind performance in what is called the striptease.

In the 1930s, performers like Gypsy Rose Lee perfected the new art of the striptease. Extravagant chorus girls and strip artists were now the main selling point, with most of the good male comedians having finally moved on or retired. These women cultivated newfound fame, and artists like Sally Rand, famous for her fan dance, and Lili St. Cyr were able to become celebrities in their own time.

With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, nightclubs and cabaret became more wide spread. These spaces were able to shed some of the stigma of the old blue-collar burlesque theaters. It was a different experience, even though the performances were sometimes the same. Cabarets also featured other acts, like Milwaukee’s own Hildegarde, a pianist and singer who became internationally famous. By the late ‘30s she was a huge hit on the radio and hired to sing for royalty across Europe. She would serve as an influence and inspiration for a later Milwaukee entertainment virtuoso, Liberace.

By the end of the ‘50s, the burlesque of extravagant production and tasteful striptease would begin to fizzle out. Popular as they were, the stars were still frequently arrested on charges of obscenity, and transition to other industries like Hollywood proved difficult for most. Competition was killer.

Pornographic material proliferated, offering accessible and completely nude bodies to those that wanted it. And in live entertainment, rock concerts were exploding onto the scene much like movies did earlier in the century.

21st Century Revival?

Alex McCall spoke about all of this and more at a lecture she recently gave at the Women’s Club of Wisconsin. McCall, who also goes by the name Frenchie, successfully produced burlesque shows in Denver and now wants to do the same here. But she’s not the first person with a desire for old school live entertainment in Milwaukee.

Professor Pinkerton Xyloma introduced the Dead Man's Carnival in 2007. Pinkerton, in true vaudevillian and renaissance fashion, is an entertainer of many talents. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, singer and magician—and between sets his quick-wit will have you giggling in your seat. The lively shows he puts on also feature performers that dance, do acrobatics, comedy and burlesque.

There’s also the Brew City Bombshells, a troupe that has been performing in Milwaukee since 2009. They’re part of what’s called neo-burlesque—the 21st century interpretation of the old art form. It pulls from a wide history of comedy, parody, striptease, dancing and singing. Neo-burlesque has also led to the creation of new subgenres like boylesque and nerdlesque, and national interest in the movement made stars out of artists like Dirty Martini and Dita Von Teese.

McCall, who performs in addition to producing, was excited to talk about the inclusiveness and empowering nature of neo-burlesque. In the past, the spectacle of the womanly form was sold by men for men. Nowadays, shows are produced by women, with the performers creating their own unique artistic voice. It’s invigorating for the artist, and the audience as well. The crowd more than ever is largely populated by other women, who express admiration for the performers of various body types, ages and ethnicities. It’s no longer about selling a body to look at but about expressing bodily autonomy and personhood.

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McCall’s dream, as she explained, is to open a cabaret in Milwaukee fashioned after the famous clubs of a past generation. The idea is to offer dinner and a lively atmosphere, playing host to artists such as Professor Pinkerton and the Brew City Bombshells. She wants to call it Hildy’s named after Milwaukee’s Hildegarde.

The idea of such a club is born from a strong passion for the arts. When asked whether burlesque entertainment should be considered high-art or low-art, given its long history and multiple transformations, she said, “I think it's very high-art ... the highest expression of art, because it's individual. And it’s whatever your imagination, whatever your heart wants to do. What could be higher than that?”