8 Acts 8

Outside the theater, a loudspeaker endlessly blared There's No Business Like Show Business while cops rode herd on the crowd. Inside, with standees five deep, a frankly sentimental audience roared welcome to the ghost. Vaudeville had come back to its greatest and last stand, Manhattan's Palace Theater.

Had it come to stay? With the movie box office sagging, the RKO theater chain --parent of the Palace--fervently hoped so. The movies had done their share to kill off vaudeville, but now the exhumed variety show might be just what worried movie exhibitors needed. If the Palace's new "8 Acts 8" (featured on a bill with a cinematic weak sister called Canadian Pacific) could make the grade at the box office, the RKO chain stood ready to throw vaudeville into its movie houses around the U.S., and other chains might follow suit.

There were hopeful signs. Television seemed to have stirred a new appetite for small variety acts. For two years RKO had put on a sort of vaudeville once a week in 18 of its New York houses; in recent months, the one-night stands had caught on heavily with moviegoers.

The brightest prospect was the first response to the new policy at the Palace. The opening day's receipts came to 2 1/2 times the normal take, and the rest of the week held up as well.

Most of Manhattan's critics wrote sentimentally affectionate reviews. One dissent came from New York Times Drama Critic Brooks Atkinson, who found the new four-a-day show a pale shadow of the classic two-a-day that died at the Palace in 1932. It was true that to get a new start, the proud old Palace had humbled itself with low-budget acts and no headliners. In a famed Variety phrase, the new show's hoofers, illusionists and comics were "good for the smalltime." But Variety itself, pointing to the Palace's low admission scale (55-c- to 95-c- on weekdays), gave the ghost a good chance for survival.

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