Geoffrey Hilsabeck is the author of the poetry collection Riddles, Etc. His poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Believer, Paris Review Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh.
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Foreword Creation Myths Vanishing Act Just What Was Vaudeville? At the Wonderland Dreamsweat Jacks-in-the-Pew Bright Particular Star The Jonah Man The Muting of the Strings Obituaries and Obsolescencies The Playhouse History Acknowledgments Notes Sources Illustration Credits
"Hilsabeck brings the seedy, magical world to life while unraveling its sudden death." Broadway Direct "Geoffrey Hilsabeck recounts the often bizarre details of vaudeville, the most popular live entertainment in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and, more importantly, he evokes the feeling of this eclectic, rapid-fire amusement. Hilsabeck gives vaudeville new life, from its physical immediacy to its ethereal reach." M. Alison Kibler, author of Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890-1930 "Hilsabeck's essays excavate vaudeville's archival remains, reveling in its greasepaint and slap shoes, boas and tightropes. He does not shy away from vaudeville's ranker bits--its controlling monopolies and its racism and the ways it could, and did, devour its own. But neither does he short-sell its beauty. Rather, in these pages, transcendent artifice and wonderment ride in tandem with the tragic and tawdry, and all of it is shot through with the gloriously absurd." Tina Post, University of Chicago "Hilsabeck is intuitive, canny, penetrating, and wise, and he has absorbed and can play all the tones in the vast calliope of the American language. American Vaudeville is a short book, but it is dense with evocation, each sentence expanding to fill the room. You will read it more than once." From the foreword by Luc Sante