Source: Paul Morand (trans. Hamish Miles), New York (London: William Heinemann, 1931 [orig. pub. 1930]), pp. 186-188
Text: Manhattan’s taste is taking shape; the old melodrama’s life is done. The new musical comedy in the English mode, of the style of The Geisha, La Poupée, The Belle of New York, is all the rage, and will lose its pre-eminence only to the Viennese light opera. The music-hall in its turn develops, modelled on the Empire or the Alhambra in Leicester Square. They clamour for all the Parisian stars, even for Cléo de Mérode and La Belle Otéro. The music-hall adopts English workings, but remains specifically New York in tone. It springs from the downtown Jewish quarters, a sort of neo-Hebraic commedia dell’ arte, known as “burlesk.” Burlesk can still be seen in a good many humble districts, notably at the National Winter Garden or the Irving Place Theatre. Here we no longer have realistic actors surrounded by Rembrandtesque co-religionists, rolling in epileptic scenes beneath the bearded portrait of Karl Marx that hangs like an ikon on the wall; here is the original music-hall, with its audience of counter-jumpers in bell-shaped trousers, a completely masculine audience. The actresses have on no clothing except bust-supporters and drawers-costumes which are far more indecent than the “artistic nudes ” of the Casino de Paris which shock so many Americans on account of the uncovered breasts. The performers are in duty bound to perform contortions of the hips and shakings of the torso, in the “moukère” or “rumba” style, called the “kooch dance,” which is extremely pleasing to these audiences of Orientals. It was here that there began the fashion, so much favoured shortly before the war, of running a bridge out over the orchestra; when the women passed along it, above the heads of the spectators, some of the audience, inflamed by this proximity, laid their Visiting-cards along the pathway. . . . The programme is changed every Friday, before the Sabbath. Once a Week, on Wednesdays, the clothes of the prettiest actress are put up to auction; as each part of her dress is knocked down in turn, she has gradually to undress. . . . During the entr’actes, while people drink lemonade in paper tumblers, they proceed to further auctioning. This American fondness for auctions, whether in the theatre or in the smoking-room “pools” on board liners, comes direct from the synagogue, where the community proceed thus on certain days. I enjoy the vulgarity, the broad humour, the Elizabethan obscenity, of certain comedians adored by the burlesk public. It is low New York in the crude form.
Comments: Paul Morand (1888-1976) was a French author and intellectual. He held ant-Semitic views, and during the Second World War we was a supporter of the Vichy regime in France. He made trips to New York between 1925-1929, resulting in his travel book New York, published in French in 1930.
Theatregoing 