In keeping with the growing scholarly interest in popular culture over the past thirty years, Gillian M. Rodger's Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century explores the miscellaneous amusements known as variety that were “aimed almost exclusively at a working-class population” (5). Rodger argues that variety, as it developed in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, paralleled the shifting composition of its audience, which was neither stable nor cohesive. Although variety's overarching narrative was “one of class conflict and the strategies employed to head off opposition and accommodate middle-class values” (8), Rodger delineates a theatrical milieu in which working-class performers, managers, and audiences adopted and transformed elements of middle-class culture.

At the outset, Rodger asserts variety's relatively neglected position within popular culture scholarship; resisting genealogies set forth by David Nasaw and Robert Snyder, who designate vaudeville as the origin of a flourishing of commercial amusements that targeted a growing middle class, Rodger contends that “this apparently sudden flowering of nightlife was not sudden at all, but rather a result of a slow and steady growth of entertainment” over the previous decades, within which variety was central (6). Rodger's evidence ultimately suggests a nuanced and nonlinear trajectory from variety to vaudeville, in which the informal, mixed genre of variety forged in working-class milieus during the 1850s coexisted and, to an extent, transformed into more “respectable” professional vaudeville shows for middle- and upper-class patrons. However, Rodger hinders the clarity of both her argument and her scholarly contribution by waiting until the final section of the book to explain the crucial variety–vaudeville relationship thoroughly.

The book is divided into three roughly chronological parts, each composed of five or six chapters devoted to business and performance practices. Part 1, “The First Decade,” charts the models of management in New York City from 1850 to 1860, the first period in which variety existed independently, and establishes the debates that shaped variety's history. In variety's early years, saloonkeepers hosted free-of-charge gatherings known as “free and easies” that targeted workingmen, while entrepreneurial managers entered variety from business backgrounds and sought maximum profits through sexualized shows directed at men of all classes. Saloonkeepers and entrepreneurial managers were quickly challenged by performer-managers, however, who formed stock companies and attracted more highly skilled performers, generating an uneasy coexistence between spectacle-driven, sexualized shows that often functioned as background entertainment, and performance-centered shows that foregrounded theatrical skill. Importantly, Rodger outlines this early conflict while maintaining that appraisals of decency were fraught with ambiguity.

Part 2, “Entertainment Comes to the Fore,” covers the years 1860–73, in which variety performers took up central roles in cultural production following New York legislation that forbade any manager from possessing both a liquor license and a theatrical license. Rodger describes this legal struggle as “a complex dance” (61) among the civic authorities, competing reform movements, and rival managers. Managers of both strands of variety strategically accommodated the new restrictions, but Rodger argues that variety mainly thrived because performers represented the complex gender, racial, and class affiliations of their spectators.

Rodger's rigorous analysis of variety songs, two of which appear in the book's title, productively illustrates these negotiations. In songs presented by female seriocomic performers such as Jennie Engel, men were in charge but women advocated for themselves, exhibiting behavior that fell “a long way from the middle-class ideal for femininity” (87). Popular male impersonators like Annie Hindle, meanwhile, conveyed the “profound shift in theatrical culture from the province of men to that of women” (140), but also reinforced “working-class manhood” (129). Discussions of performer-manager Charley White, Irish performer Phil Gannon, and Dutch comedian Gus Williams also underscore reception; because African Americans were excluded from the variety theatre, blackface characters from minstrelsy were presented cruelly, whereas Irish and Dutch characters acquired dignity and depth due to the growing number of Irish and German immigrants in the audience. Variety songs sometimes expressed working-class solidarity, but as immigration swelled, the white, native-born, working-class audience increasingly identified with middle-class values.

In the book's final part, “Sustaining Business in Difficult Times,” Rodger attends to the years 1873–85, when variety was consolidated amid economic instability and reinvigorated anxieties over morality. While managers such as Tony Pastor increasingly catered to women and children, traditionalist managers continued to offer sexualized shows aimed at workingmen. However, outrage over the female-danced cancan illustrates the double standards within variety's intensifying cultural hierarchy. Indeed, “context was the determining factor when it came to decency” (155), and the cancan was considered daring but tasteful at some venues and obscene at others. The emergence of the term “vaudeville” similarly troubles cultural categories, as it was employed by managers in the 1870s to market both sexualized and family-oriented fare, but came to denote respectability during the 1880s. In the period under investigation, the usage and connotations of “variety” and “vaudeville” were inconsistent and contested; Rodger's conclusion suggests that by the end of the century, more rigidly defined vaudeville and modern burlesque had replaced earlier, flexible incarnations of variety.

In chapters that depart from the book's New York focus, Rodger casts perceptions of respectability as both regionally specific and part of a national pattern. In Cincinnati, for example, conflict over variety was informed by the city's particular demographics, while in East Saginaw, Michigan, sexualized shows ultimately predominated because the lumber economy relied on the patronage of seasonal workingmen. “Rough and ready” styles of variety persisted in regions reliant on temporary or unskilled laborers, whereas respectable halls prospered in cities with diversified economies. By charting the split within regional variety into sexualized and respectable strands, Rodger makes the compelling claim that “the periphery was instrumental in shaping variety entertainment at the center, New York” (157). Although this section confirms variety's national and local significance, a more thorough analysis of the correlation between “periphery” and “center” might have strengthened the significance of Rodger's case studies.

Overall, Rodger's study effectively illustrates the tensions that shaped variety. The author challenges received notions of genre and genealogy and recuperates theatre figures often absent from the historical record. The book emphasizes material conditions by showing how managers and performers employed strategies of survival in the face of economic collapse, moral reform, and shifting cultural tastes. Engaging and thoroughly researched, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima will be valued by Americanist scholars of nineteenth-century performance, musical theatre, and popular culture.