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The Legacy of Variety Theater:
In the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression, many stage artists found a level of support through the federal government's Federal Theatre Project (FTP), administered through the Works Progress Administration during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration. The FTP included "units" for staging almost all forms of theater. Many scenic artists who found work through the program went on to fame in some of the nation's greatest theaters. Among these were James Morcom and Nat Karson, both of whom later worked on productions at Radio City Music Hall in New York's Rockefeller Center in addition to other venues.
In the aftermath of World War II the variety stage and theater came to reflect on its own past. Irving Berlin's This Is the Army (1943) used variety theater to take an irreverent look at the burdens of the war. Director and choreographer Bob Fosse relied on the motifs of vaudeville and burlesque to create the atmosphere of the roaring 1920s in John Kander and Fred Ebb's musical Chicago (1975), with stage design by Tony Walton. Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) and James Goldman's musical Follies (1971) reflected on stage life and its vicissitudes, entwining memories of the heyday of variety theater as a commentary on the present. This glamour and nostalgia was enhanced by Florence Klotz's costumes for Follies. |