150-lb Chorines

BURLEYCUE--Bernard Sobel--Farrar & Rinehart ($5).*

The old commedia dell'arte, the drama hat set the patterns for Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot and Pantaloon, is a favorite subject for romantic poets, water color painters, and lecturers on The Drama. They are apt to forget that there exists in the U. S. a lusty native parallel of the commedia to teach esthetes what a real old Harlequinade was like: the Burlesque Show. Like the commedia before the days of the great Debureau, Burlesque is vulgar entertainment catering to the masses, often frankly obscene. Like the commedia, Burlesque is based on "bits" that have been handed down from one troupe to the next for generations. The Jew and the tramp comedians wear costumes that have become as standardized, as remote from ordinary life as the costumes of Harlequin the beggar and Pierrot the peasant. Finally the Burlesque Show gave birth to the richer, more respectable Revue, just as the commedia became the sentimental fantasy of the 19th Century. It is high time that a really good book on the Burlesque Show was written. When it is, Burleycue will be a help.

The Author. Bernard Sobel is at present press agent for Showman Florenz Ziegfeld. He once held the same position for lean Earl Carroll and gained a good deal of his knowledge of Burlesque in the employ of the Brothers Minsky (Abraham, Billy, Herbert & Morton), New York's best known Burlesque impresarios. He was once, his publishers insist, an instructor in English at Purdue University. In the present thick quarto he has assembled a number of photographs of oldtime Burlesque Queens and comedians, larded them with reminiscences of the days when hefty May Howard would not hire any girl who weighed less than 150 lb., when chorus girls in the West were expected to "work the boxes" between numbers, when the customers rolled beer bottles down the aisles.

*Published Nov. 16.

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