Eva Tanguay’s Legend

One hundred years ago today ...  Eva Tanguay remained the gold standard in irrepressibility. Novice vaudevillian Ann Sutter, having debuted just north of NYC at  Proctor’s Theater, Yonkers, was compared to the stage legend.

Indeed, she resembles Eva Tanguay in many ways. She has a big crop of golden hair, dancing eyes and a body that is never still a moment of her period of the program. She is expression personified. She's all alive. She is, perhaps, not as "crazy" as Eva Tanguay says Eva is, but certainly keeps moving. (Yonkers Herald, 19 April 1921, p.5. Chronicling America.)

Note: We have featured Tanguay before on this site, and I (NY1920s director Jonathan Goldman) recently published an article about her at CUNY’s Gotham Center Blog.

In 1921, Tanguay was past her heyday, but she still made the News front page when questions arose about whether she was truly married to vaudevillian Roscoe Ails, as had been rumored.

And she would make it again that August, all the way from San Francisco. 

And she was still big enough, in March of 1921, to headline the Palace, and earn this rather amazing review signed by “O’Connor” (actually Johnny O’Connor).

This week’s program at the Palace is “Pro-Tanguayized.” We cannot avoid coining words when Tanguay is among us, for she virtually forces us to. She symbolizes everything that means vaudeville progressiveness insofar as” back-stage” is concerned and she radiates originality, insofar as “front-stage’ is concerned. Tanguay is to vaudeville what Belasco is to the “legitimate.” She creates styles In dress and song and after exhibiting them once she "ash cans” them for something new to create. Her "hobby” is vaudeville surprises. Once the surprise is over it goes to the discard for another surprise.

O’Connor, Page Johnny. “Eva Tanguay at the Palace.” Dramatic Mirror and Theatre World, 5 March 1921, p. 407. Google Books.

References/further reading:

Brayshaw, Emily. “Ethnographic spectacle and trans-Atlantic performance: Unravelling the costumes of vaudeville's ‘Queen’, Eva Tanguay.” Studies in Costume & Performance, 4 (1) (2019).

Casey, Kathleen B. “Sex, Savagery, and the Woman Who Made Vaudeville Famous.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36 (1), 87-112.

Erdman, Andrew. Queen of Vaudeville. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012.

– Jonathan Goldman, April 19, 2021

TAGS: vaudeville, celebrity, women, sexuality, gender, theater