Topsy and Eva Play Vaudeville
BY JOHN SULLIVAN, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
In 1923 Topsy and Eva first wandered on the stage in a musical comedy, brought there
by two vaudevillians in their early twenties, Rosetta and Vivian Duncan. By 1927, as
they were preparing for the silent movie version of their "travesty" of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Rosetta claimed that they had already played the roles 1872 times, four years
worth of nine performances a week. After 1927 there would many more. Topsy and
Eva became part of their vaudeville act. They revived the play twice in the Thirties. At
the end of that decade they appeared in their now familiar roles on television in one of
the first musical comedies produced there. In 1942 they were back on the boards as
Topsy and Eva again. Their work as a team would end with Rosetta's death in 1959. At
the time they were playing at Mangam's Chateau outside of Chicago in an act built
around nostalgia for vaudeville.
It may well be impossible to make complete sense out of the nonsense Rosetta and
Vivian brought to generations of audiences given the documentary fragments left to tell
the story. Still, enough can be pieced together using reviews, records, sheet music, film,
playbills and the few articles about their work that remain to make a preliminary map.
Like all early maps what follows may prove in time to have fanciful figures on the fringe
and to get proportions out of size. It at least will provide yet another piece of evidence
about what happened to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in the twentieth century.
Topsy and Eva Reborn
Very few, if any, of the thousands who brought Uncle Tom's Cabin to the stage did so
to promote Stowe's message. When the Duncans discovered the possibilities of using the
novel to expand their own career, surely they had neither the proper role for Christians
nor the horrors of slavery in mind. The stories they told about how they became Topsy
and Eva are all tempered by the fact that they appeared in response to press interviews.
The most broadly distributed version appeared in The American Magazine in August,
1925. The sisters were established vaudeville stars by that time. "A little more than two
years ago," Rosetta told an interviewer, "a man came to us to see about doing something
in motion pictures." After several ideas were broached and dismissed, "finally he said . .
. 'I guess we'll have to black you up.'"
"We'll do Uncle Tom's Cabin," Rosetta recalled exclaiming, "but we'll make Topsy and
Eva the central figures, instead of Uncle Tom." In this version of the story the sisters
were at a public library within an hour checking out an old copy of the book. They put
the film project on hold and began to work on what they knew best, a mix of vaudeville
and musical comedy. "Our manager got Catherine Chisom Cutting [sic] to write the
book for our plan." The Duncans did the music. The show opened "four weeks later" in
San Francisco.
That interview suggests that the Duncans knew something about
Uncle Tom's Cabin, enough to see the possibilities Topsy and
Eva provided the pair. What they produced, however, indicates
that they knew the symbols, but not what Stowe crafted them to
stand for. For vaudevillians the word association game prompted
by "I guess we'll have to black you up" surely linked the sisters
to a world they knew well. The long tradition of blacking up
would last for much of their career. In the Twenties their
relatives would be named Jolson, Cantor, Moran and Mack,
Gosden and Correll.
When Rosetta again told the origin story during a 1931 revival of Topsy and Eva in Los
Angeles, the shifts were subtle but meaningful. Now the tale ran that the sisters were
clowning around with their manager at their summer home in Manhattan Beach when "a
crazy stunt" prompted him to shout "You ought to be Topsy and Eva." As in the earlier
version, a musical quickly won out over a movie. This time, as Rosetta told it, she
"bought an old copy of the play manuscript of Uncle Tom's Cabin from the Redondo
Public Library." Her three dollar investment proved to be a wise one. "All through the
script it kept saying 'music here' 'chorus here,'" Rosetta recalled. The transition from a
Tom Show to Topsy and Eva is a more likely one than from the book itself. Here was a
routine which would change forever the lives of "The Song and Patter Kids." It would
also affect the telling of Stowe's story.
"The Romper Team"
At five feet two and under 120 pounds, the Duncans came prepared
to play Topsy and Eva. Part of the business they used was already in
their routine. They were twelve and fourteen when they first hit the
boards at the Pantages in Los Angeles in 1914. By the time they
became Topsy and Eva, vaudeville had been their life for nine years.
Starting as a small-time act on a small-time vaudeville circuit in the
west, they moved to the midwest joining the "Revue de Vogue"
where they played cheap houses in Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa.
Finally with the help of a third sister, Evelyn, they made their way to
New York and to the stage at Coney Island. From there they moved
to the Hotel Martinique in one of Gus Edward's kiddie reviews and then on to a small
role singing "I'm So Glad My Momma Don't Know Where I'm At" in Doing Our Bit at
the Winter Garden in 1919. In Fred Dillingham's She's A Good Fellow (1918), they
were "the terrible infants of the boarding school." Tip Top (1920) found them cast as
two sisters named "Bad" and "Worse." Looking younger and acting older, the Duncans
frequently appeared in "short frocks and half length hose" in a routine featuring childish
voices, close harmony and plenty of mischief. Theirs was an "original act," they claimed,
drawn from things done as children, things natural to them, things they loved to do, and
they loved to laugh and make others do so too. Even after their early success with Topsy
and Eva, Variety called them a perenial romper team. "The sisters know their baby stuff
to and from Babyville," a reporter noted after a turn at the Palace in 1927. Rosetta had
part of Topsy within her even then. Vivian brought a sense of coyness and a willingness
to support mischief as the team's ingenue. The Duncans indeed had thought of "baby
stuff" as a route to musical fame before Topsy and Eva hit the boards. Before blackface
they had been working on a show to be called "The Heavenly Twins," a story about
"two orphans in a home." From it came the signature song for Topsy and Eva --
"Rememb'ring."
Fragments of their vaudeville act remain in newspaper accounts
and in rare interviews. It seemed to feature slapstick, close
harmony and comedy songs plus a sprinkling of satire. What
ever it was that they did, joking around while singing "She Fell
On Her Credenza" or tossing vegetables into the audience or
mocking current musical stars, it worked. While performing in
England in the early Twenties, they met the Prince of Wales and
soon were harmonizing with him on the party circuit. They even
taught him to do "The Chicago." On stage there their usual high
jinks drew audiences. Their "out of the mouths of babes" antics
were typified when the Queen of Spain appeared one evening in the Royal Box. Rosetta
came on stage with a skinned knee and immediately went to the side of the stage where
the Queen sat "and did what any child would do," she pointed to her knee and said: "I
skinned my knee Princess Mary! Can you see my skinned knee?" So much for
decorum, the audienced howled. The skinned knee bit had been part of the routine from
the days of Tip Top. Rosetta and Topsy were already sisters in spirit. That was the
Duncan's act, an innocent imp harmonizing with a pretty blond little sister who behaved
like an unchurched Eva. Topsy and Eva would provide them a vehicle which would
allow for old routines in new costumes coupled with fresh possibilities to be developed.
Their presence, their style, both had been established before what would become years
in burnt cork.
Uncle Tom's Cabin In A Fun House Mirror
The Duncan Sisters' Topsy and Eva first premiered at the Alcazar in San Francisco in
July, 1923. It would remain there eighteen weeks, though for the final two, because of a
dispute between the Duncans and producer Thomas Wilkes, the White Sisters took over
the lead roles. Despite talk of an immediate move to New York following the run and
rumors of producers including Ziegfeld trying to place the Duncans under contract, the
show shifted to Los Angeles for a month. The Whites took the lead for the first two
weeks. The Duncans, having settled their contract dispute, returned to the show for the
final two weeks. The much vaunted next stop in New York, however, would be
delayed. Sam Harris had a hit on his hands there in the same theatre where Topsy and
Eva was to be staged. So it was Chicago instead for the sisters, a way stop which would
postpone an East Coast appearance for almost a year.
PLAYABLE SONG
PLAYABLE SONG
What audiences in America and England would see for the decade of
the Twenties and again in the Thirties and finally the Forties "just
growed" in San Francisco and at every stop along the way. Before
post-modernism the Duncans had learned to violate form and to
commercialize a classic. The book by Catherine Cushing left no room
for tragedy. "Topsy and Eva is abreast of the times," Los Angeles
columnist Grace Kingsley wrote on December 9, 1923. The "old
revue," she argued, "seems to be dying a slow death through
starvation." Even Ziegfeld's Follies was "in poor health." "Nowadays
shows . . . with a story are the ones that are going over and lasting,"
Rosetta told her. But what a story as the Duncans told it! In San
Francisco the production opened with a cast of sixty, a featured
dancer, Harriet Hoctor, an opera star, Basil Ruysdael, as Uncle Tom,
a host of pickaninnies, and a male quartet. Uncle Tom's Cabin
became a musical comedy, bewildering some critics and delighting
audiences. Upon seeing an early San Francisco performance, Variety's
critic labeled it "a musicalized version of Uncle Tom's Cabin' with
plenty of liberties taken." Liberties indeed: there would be no whipping
of Uncle Tom by Simon Legree, no death of Little Eva, or any other
"sad or tear-inspiring situation." Eliza crossed the ice only during the
West Coast shake down. There never were any bloodhounds. The
sisters tried a little of everything as the show developed. Scottish aires
like "Ben Bolt" were replaced by a song which would become a
permanent fixture in the show, "I Never Had A Mammy." St. Claire
married Mrs. Shelby; Topsy made Legree wish Stowe had never
made him a character in the novel and Aunt Ophlia even learned how
to flirt. "It's an operatic Uncle Tom's Cabin,'" Tom Nunan told
readers of The San Francisco Examiner, "with the story turned into
fantastic vaudeville." Throughout the Twenties friends and foes alike
would use the word "travesty" to describe the production. By the time
the show reached Chicago for a Christmas season opening in 1923,
the show's format had been well established. Harriet Hoctor's "The
Bird's Dance" would draw rave reviews. The London Palace girls,
many of whom had appeared in Tip Top with the Duncans, played the
roles of pickaninnies. The show, however, was a Duncan Sister's
showcase. Rosetta ad-libbed throughout the performance. Vaudeville
bits were worked into the plot. It is hard to imagine how "Sweet Onion
Time in Bermuda" found its way into the performance in Chicago --
except that it featured things the Duncans could do best, and that was
vaudeville. One Chicago reporter recalled seeing the sisters toss onions
into the audience during the routine. Another, who saw a later
performance of the song, described it "as a comedy double with a
funny double dance idea." "The dance," he noted, "has the time
honored business of kicking each other in the posterior, Topsy losing
the duel and hanging a crepe on her rear." A 1920s recording of
"Sweet Onion Time" provides a glimpse of what the sisters could do
vocally. Edward Wagenknecht called it a burlesque of sentimentality.
Whenever they appeared the Duncan Sisters appropriated Stowe's
characters and brought them up to date. One of the more tantalizing
efforts to do so occurred on the final night of the long Chicago run
when the Duncans added an act entitled "Topsy and Eva Fifty Years
Later." Unfortunately what happened there remains to be discovered.
It is clear, however, that topicality always intruded on the story line.
The most infamous example of the way current events found their
way into the play involved the Duncans themselves. One Sunday
during the Chicago run the sisters ventured through Cicero, Illinois,
on their way back from the race track. There they were stopped by the police for a traffic
violation. The result was a broken nose for Rosetta, a traffic conviction and full press
coverage. Shortly thereafter the Duncans recorded "Mean Cicero Blues" and their
publishing house made the sheet music available. References to the incident worked their
way into Topsy and Eva and remained there during the run in New York City. When the
show shifted back to Chicago at the end of June, 1927, The Tribune noted that the
Duncans were "returning just in time to celebrate the anniversary of their famed
encounter with the comic constables of Cicero."
Certainly what the Duncans created was not Uncle Tom's Cabin. Settings and characters
were taken from the novel, but Stowe might not have recognized them. A tragedy, a
moral lesson, became a hybrid vaudeville-variety-musical-comedy. For a time a dying
medium revived a dying text. Written descriptions of what took place when the sisters hit
the boards and publicity pictures from the press remain. The available recordings of the
show tunes give an occasional glimpse of the action. In the dialogue you could play at the
beginning of this essay, recorded as part of a demo version of "I Never Had A Mammy"
the Duncans recorded at the time of the 1942 revival of the show, the voices reveal how
dynamic the duo must have been. Ironically for a musical which took such liberties with
Stowe's text, the lines we hear in this fragment are taken almost verbatim from the novel.
Rosetta's Topsy
Before she hit the vaudeville circuit Rosetta Duncan
spent four years as the protege of Ellen Beach Yaw. Her
sights, she claimed, were set on grand opera. She would
end up as a comedienne of the highest order, part of
what Anthony Slide called "one of the greatest sister acts
on the vaudeville stage." A mimic, a clown, a songster,
adept at the ad-lib, one observer saw her as "the mistress
of about every standard hoke low comedy piece of
business released in the last decade, even Joe Jackson's
mistaking the damp spot on the stage for a quarter." She
would ride the curtain to the proscenium arch in some
shows. Occasionally she took a turn at directing the
orchestra. If she spotted a bald head in the first row, one
could count on her making use of it somewhere in the
performance. During the Los Angeles run in 1931 she
was known to toss her wig to a friend in the audience at the end of the final act. Rosetta
played Topsy so entertainingly that for many she personified the character. Unlike other
comediennes, she had not developed a range of roles beyond her baby act and Topsy.
She could adapt her Topsy to the times but could not escape the character she created.
Her identity as Topsy may well be one of the reasons her career has been so sadly
neglected today.
As Topsy, Rosetta not only held her own, she bettered her black faced peers, Jolson,
Cantor, Moran and Mack and Gosden and Correll at the game. Edward Wagenknecht,
who saw the Duncans perform, put it well:
Now blackface comedians are traditionally men. To give the role instead to a