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Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

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This is the book that puts big time vaudeville in perspective.
Too often in chronicles of the golden age of vaudeville, the stars eclipse the movers and shakers around whom they revolved. Pastor, Proctor, Keith, Albee, Meyerfeld and Beck were among the vaudeville universe's few law-givers who dictated how brightly, how often and where the stars shone.
Until Wertheim's "Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and the Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers," the men who created the institution of vaudeville had remained as inscrutable as official portraits. Wertheim drags away from their ledgers, telephones and mahogany desks and places the derby-hatted, cigar-smoking barons of vaudeville downstage center under the spotlight. He invests with personality the colorless B.F. Keith, the remote E.F. Albee, the inventive Proctor, the lesser known Morris Meyerfeld and the volatile yet discerning Martin Beck. They emerge as human beings--some venomous, all ambitious and a few nearly decent.
Arthur Frank Wertheim has thoroughly researched their machinations and provided the most clear, entertaining and reliable history of the business end of vaudeville. Besides being an engrossing read, "Vaudeville Wars" makes a fine case study fit for any MBA program.