Karen Abbott Quotes

I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me.

George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

I come from a very vaudevillian family.

There are wonderful museums with lots of photographs of 1920's musicals.

I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.

I probably worked every single entertainment medium, including some that don't exist. I worked the circus, carnival, I had my own medicine show, I worked 18 years of radio.

You know what my earliest memories are? Going from one burlesque town to another. My father was in burlesque.

I don't think today's younger audience... would even know what 1920s musicals were like.

My mother worked in the old Minsky's troupe, which toured the country in the golden age of burlesque theatre.

I'm a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.

We hear about the Gershwins, the Kerns, and the Berlins, but there were some great little writers like Theodore Morse, Charles K. Harris, and Ernest R. Ball, who wrote 'Let the Rest of the World Go By.'

I've always wanted to do a cabaret.

It sounds corny, but I consider myself an old-fashioned entertainer. I could have been in variety.

I was born in Detroit, then shortly after I was born, I went on the road with my mother, who performed with Minsky's, a variety show that toured around the U.S. doing five shows a day.

So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!

We didn't know anything about comedy duos - Abbot and Costello, Martin and Lewis - we didn't know anything about that. Kim Fields showed us a tape of Martin and Lewis and their old shows and they come through the curtain so we started doing research on them.

As a kid, I remember wearing a checkered suit and appearing on-stage in the routines worked out by the 'baggy pants' comedians.

Actors didn't use to be celebrities. A hundred years ago, they put the theaters next to the brothels.

I subscribe to that school of thespian - to be a wandering minstrel or traveling player, a thing ofrags and patches, of ballads, songs and snatches.

When I started performing, there was no Internet; I didn't really have anything to copy. I kind of had to just make up what I thought burlesque was, based on photographs of Sally Rand or whatever.

There were a great many in vaudeville - people who never quite came through. But they had their place, and they filled it. They kept theatres open. Those pan-timers, those interstate-timers, those four-a-dayers, those six-a-dayers - they were an integral part of that endearing merry-go-round called vaudeville.

When my dad, Tommy Tucker Kelly, was about six, he started out with his dad on 'The Black and White Minstrel' Shows.

If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.

You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway.

I grew up with music hall and revue and was used to filling in the little gaps here and there to get bigger audience reaction.