A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge

by David Hajdu, John Carey, Michele Wallace (Foreword by)

Overview

Winner - 2022 Deems Taylor / Virgil Thomson Book Awards in Pop from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers

Bert Williams—a Black man forced to perform in blackface who challenged the stereotypes of minstrelsy. Eva Tanguay—an entertainer with the signature song “I Don’t Care” who flouted the rules of propriety to redefine womanhood for the modern age. Julian Eltinge—a female impersonator who entranced and unnerved audiences by embodying the feminine ideal Tanguay rejected. At the turn of the twentieth century, they became three of the most provocative and popular performers in vaudeville, the form in which American mass entertainment first took shape.

A Revolution in Three Acts explores how these vaudeville stars defied the standards of their time to change how their audiences thought about what it meant to be American, to be Black, to be a woman or a man. The writer David Hajdu and the artist John Carey collaborate in this work of graphic nonfiction, crafting powerful portrayals of Williams, Tanguay, and Eltinge to show how they transformed American culture. Hand-drawn images give vivid visual form to the lives and work of the book’s subjects and their world.

This book is at once a deft telling of three intricately entwined stories, a lush evocation of a performance milieu with unabashed entertainment value, and an eye-opening account of a key moment in American cultural history with striking parallels to present-day questions of race, gender, and sexual identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231191821
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

David Hajdu is a professor at the Columbia Journalism School. His books include Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996); Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (2001); The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008); and Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction (2020).

John Carey is a painter and cartoonist. He was the editorial cartoonist for Greater Media Newspapers for many years.

Michele Wallace is professor emerita of English at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (1990).

Editorial Reviews

08/23/2021

Music critic Hajdu (Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction) and artist Carey recapture the bygone days of vaudeville, bringing to fresh light and life the stories of three transgressive performers in this entertaining graphic group biography. Hajdu convincingly argues that, through their individual acts, these performers “transformed themselves for the vaudeville stage and their audience was transformed in the process.” Bert Williams (1874–1922) subverted the virulent racism of the early 20th century by performing his own version of minstrel shows, determined to present his authentic Black experience to white audiences. Eva Tanguay (1878–1947) performed uninhibitedly sexual musical numbers, while her fierce rejection of “acceptable” behavior for women anticipated modern-day feminism. Rounding out the trio, the closeted Julian Eltinge (1881–1941) devised meticulous cross-dressing presentations, which mainstreamed expressions of gender fluidity (he once advertised himself as a “feminine delineator”). Though all three met with great success, the advent of motion pictures eventually killed off vaudeville and their careers. Carey’s art can be stiff, but his hand-drawn, crosshatched style ably captures the flavor of the post-Victorian era. The history is relayed via robust storytelling, combining a little-remembered piece of showbiz history with insights into the ways in which entertainment both reflects and shapes American cultural life and values. Agent: Chris Calhoun, Chris Calhoun Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Brimming with insight and graphic creativity, this is a highly engaging and informative history of three of the most transformative American performers of the early twentieth century: a Black man who subverted blackface by performing in it, a “wild woman” who “didn’t care” about social convention, and a female impersonator who provided beauty advice to multitudes of American women. Hajdu and Carey deftly show us how, rather than being consigned to the margins, they made themselves unlikely stars of the most popular entertainment form of their day: vaudeville, the voice of the city.

George Chauncey

Three amazing people—Bert Williams, a Black entertainer who pushed the boundaries of minstrelsy; Eva Tanguay, a sexually provocative and funny performer whose best-known song is about not caring what people thought of her; and Julian Eltinge, a cross-dressing vaudevillian who even had his own magazine—are the stars of this entertaining, thought-provoking work of graphic history.

Roz Chast

Hajdu offers a clear history with humor and research that makes the book fun and informative, with lovely illustrations by Carey.

San Francisco Book Review

This is an extremely remarkable comic, at once a historical look at the great and hugely popular genre of vaudeville, and a treatment of the margins, racial and gender, that pushed closer to the surface than radio or films would reach before the 1950s . . . The high spirits of these three characters, the visions they had of themselves and the crushing reality of a world unsuited for them, comes home collectively as we follow their lives.

Comics Grinder

A Revolution in Three Acts is an incredible work of historical scholarship, entertainment, and artistry.

Foreword Reviews

2021-07-15
A welcome graphic celebration of the work of three important vaudeville artists.

Neither revolution nor radical are terms commonly associated with vaudeville. Yet Hajdu and Carey effectively illuminate the significance of three trailblazers who merit such rhetoric and who have been largely forgotten since vaudeville lost its audience to the movies. The best-known among them is Bert Williams (1874-1922), a Black entertainer who performed in blackface along with his longtime partner, George Walker, and who earned international renown for their “broad ‘coon’ humor.” Beneath the blackface, the Bahamian-born Williams was playing a role that was at odds with his intelligence and articulation, with a regional accent he had to learn. After Walker’s death, Williams was recruited to join the all-White Ziegfeld Follies, where he never felt like he fit in. Few comedians of the era were more talented or popular, but the racial barriers were often too much for him to overcome. As a White observer noted, “he was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” While Williams both challenged and struggled with racial stereotypes, Hajdu and Carey celebrate two entertainers who anticipated what would later be known as “gender fluidity.” Julian Eltinge (1881-1941) became a huge hit as a female impersonator, even as he projected a hypermasculine image offstage. His success helped inspire what was called the “Pansy Craze,” an “emerging phenomenon of drag performance.” Eva Tanguay (1878-1947) represented the sexually liberated “new woman,” and she “got away with promoting radical ideas by projecting a comical ‘kooky’ persona.” She was as wild as Eltinge’s depiction of femininity was refined, though their destinies were briefly entwined as they were engaged to be married. Though the title suggests a tripart structure, with capsule biographies of each artist, the narrative is characterized by jump-cuts and crisscrosses. Hajdu’s lively scholarship and critical perspective match Carey’s spirited renderings, which range from ebullience to devastation.

A sharp account that brings life and light to a period that has gone dark in popular memory.

Kirkus Reviews

[This] book serves up a fun mix of historical fact, art, and fiction.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

After this wonderfully illustrated account, you’ll . . . be able to name three of the best [vaudeville performers], each of whom grappled with Blackness, gender, or sexual identity while entertaining the greedy masses.

Neil Patrick Harris's Wondercade

A Revolution in Three Acts is a vivid window into a bygone era of American entertainment. Here is vaudeville and all its comic, dramatic, and tragic dimensions as witnessed in the lives of three of its most pivotal practitioners. David Hajdu and John Carey have not simply crafted an elegy for an art form, they have chronicled the figures whose talent made it great in the first place.

Jelani Cobb

Using a format as episodic as the unique performance tradition they are depicting, David Hajdu and John Carey introduce readers to three figures who transformed vaudeville and defied the values of their age. Giving voice and images to these remarkable performers and their social and political milieu, we see Bert Williams convert the stereotypes of Blackness in what Frederick Douglass referred to as the ‘pestiferous nuisance’ of blackface minstrelsy into performances that depicted the pathos of Black people’s experience in the racist and segregated US; Julian Eltinge’s cross-dressed delineations of femininity reveal the fluidity and performativity of gender, and Eva Tanguay’s embrace of the Salome character’s sensuality signify ‘new’ women’s rebellion against social constraints.

Lisa Merrill

A wonderful example of the ability of comics to present and bring to life little-known histories—the fact that the creators made it all feel relevant to modern times makes it downright valuable.

The Comics Journal's Best Comics of 2021 - Robert Kirby

In this fabulously illustrated graphic novel, writer David Hajdu and artist John Carey bring to life three of the most enigmatic and unique entertainers of the vaudeville era . . . Although I would say it achieves an even loftier goal — capturing the spirit of vaudeville itself, the stage as a laboratory of cultural experimentation.

Bowery Boys - Greg Young

This vivid book offers the tales and truths of pioneering performers who challenged the rules of race, gender, and sexuality. “Change the joke and slip the yoke,” as Ralph Ellison said. And so they did, remaking American art and history and culture in the process.

Margo Jefferson

David Hajdu and John Carey’s A Revolution in Three Acts offers a thoroughly engrossing, kaleidoscopic historical portrait of three landmark entertainers: Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge, artists who challenged the presumptive rigidity of racial, gender, and class categories both off the stage as well as on it. With its crisp, vivid, animated narration, it is a book that illuminates the intersecting careers of these pathbreaking performers and the electrifying ways that they each used vaudeville as the space where American identity could be radically reimagined. A page-turner.

Daphne A. Brooks

Can you name any vaudeville performers? I thought not. After this wonderfully illustrated account, you’ll at least be able to name three of the best, each of whom grappled with Blackness, gender or sexual identity while entertaining the greedy masses.

Wondercade - Neil Patrick Harris