B. F. Keith Circuit
The B. F. Keith Circuit was a chain of vaudeville theaters in the United States and Canada owned by Benjamin Franklin Keith for the acts that he booked. Known for a time as the United Booking Office, and under various other names, the circuit was managed by Edward Franklin Albee, who gained control of it in 1918, following the death of Keith's son Andrew Paul Keith. History In 1928 the theaters owned by Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee and Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit merged to form the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit. The combined theater chain now had over 700 theaters in the United States and Canada. They had a combined seating capacity 1.5 million. 15,000 vaudeville performers will be booked through the new entity. Notable performers * Rita Bell (1893-1992), singer, entertainer See also * Orpheum Circuit * Chitlin' Circuit *Borscht Belt The Borscht Belt, or Jewish Alps, is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vaudeville Theater
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs or ballets. It became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, but the idea of vaudeville's theatre changed radically from its French antecedent. In some ways analogous to music hall from Victorian Britain, a typical North American vaudeville performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts have included popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, clowns, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and movies. A vau ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Benjamin Franklin Keith
Benjamin Franklin Keith (January 26, 1846 – March 26, 1914) was an American vaudeville theater owner, highly influential in the evolution of variety theater into vaudeville. Biography Early years Keith was born in Hillsboro Bridge, New Hampshire. He joined the circus (as a "candy butcher") after attending Van Amburg's Circus and then worked at Bunnell's Museum in New York City in the early 1860s. He later joined P.T. Barnum and then joined the Forepaugh Circus, before he opened a curio museum in Boston, in 1883, with Colonel William Austin. In 1885 he joined Edward Franklin Albee II, who was selling circus tickets and operating the Boston Bijou Theatre. Their opening show was on July 6, 1885. The theatre was one of the early adopters of the continuous variety show which ran from 10:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night, every day. Previously, shows ran at fixed intervals with several hours of downtime between shows. With the continuous show, you could enter the theatr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Edward Franklin Albee II
Edward Franklin Albee II (October 8, 1857 – March 11, 1930) was an American vaudeville impresario. Early life Albee was born on October 8, 1857 in Machias, Maine to Nathaniel Smith Albee and Amanda Higgins Crocker. Career He toured with P. T. Barnum as a roustabout, then, in 1885, he partnered with Benjamin Franklin Keith in operating the Bijou Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts. With the success of their business, it grew into the Keith-Albee theatre circuit of vaudeville theatres. Albee gradually took managerial control of Keith's theatrical circuit. They were the first to introduce moving pictures in the United States. In 1900, Pat Shea of Buffalo proposed to Keith and Albee that they should set up a shared booking arrangement for vaudeville similar to the Theatrical Syndicate. They called a meeting in May 1900 in Boston of most of the major vaudeville managers, including Weber & Fields, Tony Pastor, Hyde & Behman of Brooklyn, Kohl & Castle, Colonel J.D. Hopkins, and M ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Anthony Slide
Anthony Slide (born 7 November 1944) is an English writer who has produced more than seventy books and edited a further 150 on the history of popular entertainment. He wrote a "letter from Hollywood" for the British ''Film Review'' magazine from 1979 to 1994, and he wrote a monthly book review column for ''Classic Images'' from 1989 to 2001. He is a member of the editorial board of the American Film Institute Catalog. Biography Born in Birmingham, England, on 7 November 1944, Slide began his professional involvement with the cultural and historical field of films in the mid-1960s, serving as honorary secretary of the Society for Film History Research and co-founding and serving as the first editor of the newsletter of the still-active Cinema Theatre Association. In 1968, he became assistant editor of ''International Film Guide'' and editorial assistant on the film publications of Tantivy Press. That same year, he co-founded ''The Silent Picture'' a quarterly devoted to the art and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Martin Beck
Martin Beck is a fictional Swedish police detective and the main character in the ten novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, collectively titled ''The Story of a Crime''. Frequently referred to as the Martin Beck stories, all have been adapted into films between 1967 and 1994, six of which were included in a series featuring Gösta Ekman as Martin Beck. Between 1997 and 2018 there have also been 38 films (some released direct for video and broadcast on television) based on the characters, with Peter Haber as Martin Beck. Apart from the core duo of Beck and his right-hand man Gunvald Larsson, the latter have little resemblance to the original series, and feature a widely different and evolving cast of characters, though roughly similar themes and settings around Stockholm. Series During the 1960s and 1970s Sjöwall and Wahlöö conceived and wrote a series of ten police procedural novels about the exploits of detectives from the special homicide commission of the Swedis ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Keith-Albee-Orpheum
The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation was the owner of a chain of vaudeville and motion picture theatres. It was formed by the merger of the holdings of Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II and Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit. History The company was incorporated in Delaware on January 28, 1928, to acquire the stocks of the B.F. Keith Corporation; Orpheum Circuit, Inc.; Vaudeville Collection Agency; B.F. Keith-Albee Vaudeville Exchange; and Greater New York Corporation. The company operated a chain of vaudeville and motion picture theatres in the United States and Canada with a seating capacity of 1,500,000 persons. The combined theater chain then had over 700 theaters in the United States and Canada. A total of 15,000 vaudeville performers were booked through the new entity. In May 1928, a controlling portion of stock was sold to Joseph P. Kennedy, from whom it was purchased in October by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as part of the deal, along with Film ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rita Bell
Rita Bell (, Bell; after first marriage, Crittenden; after second marriage, Redlich; December 16, 1893 – January 8, 1992) was an American lyric soprano and entertainer in vaudeville, musical theatre, radio, and "talkies". She was the principal actress of several Broadway musicals, such as "The Gingham Girl" and "Spice of Life". During her world tour, her singing voice and personality were broadcast from radio stations in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cape Town, and London. A singer-songwriter, Bell wrote many of her songs. Early life and education Marguerite (nickname, "Rita") Hughes Bell was born in Stratton, Nebraska, December 16, 1893. Her parents were S. Warren Bell and Alice Hughes. Her early education was in the public schools of Nebraska and Iowa. Bell sang her first part in an amateur performance in Iowa City, Iowa. From the time when she was a child in grade school, she liked to sing the popular songs which her uncle, Winfield Hughes, had in his music store in Iowa City. Bell ca ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Chitlin' Circuit
The Chitlin' Circuit was a collection of performance venues throughout the eastern, southern, and upper Midwest areas of the United States that provided commercial and cultural acceptance for African American musicians, comedians, and other entertainers during the era of racial segregation in the United States through the 1960s. The Chitlin' Circuit was considered to be by, for, and about black people. There is debate as to when the Chitlin' Circuit peaked. Some say its peak was in the 1930s, some say it was after World War II, and others say it was the time of the blues. Etymology The name derives from the soul food dish chitterlings (boiled pig intestines). It is also a play on the term "Borscht Belt", which referred to particular resort venues (primarily in New York State's Catskill Mountains) that were popular with Jewish performers and audiences during the 1940s through the 1960s. Chitterlings are part of the culinary history of African Americans, who were often limited to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Borscht Belt
The Borscht Belt, or Jewish Alps, is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in parts of Sullivan, Orange, and Ulster counties in the U.S. state of New York, straddling both Upstate New York and the northern edges of the New York metropolitan area. A source interviewed by ''Time'' magazine stated that the visits to the area by Jewish families was already underway "as early as the 1890s ... Tannersville ... was 'a great resort of our Israelite brethren'...from the 1920s on here werehundreds of hotels". A 2019 review of the history is more specific: "in its heyday, as many as 500 resorts catered to guests of various incomes". These resorts, and also the Borscht Belt bungalow colonies, were a popular vacation spot for New York City Jews from the 1920s through the 1960s. By the late 1950s, many began closing, with most gone by the 1970s, but some major resorts continued to operate, a few into the 1990s. Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel clos ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |