Owing to high ticket prices, ribald publicity campaigns and the occasional use of prurient material, the revue was typically patronized by audience members who earned more and felt even less restricted by middle-class social norms than their contemporaries in vaudeville.
Like much of that era's popular entertainments, revues often featured material based on sophisticated, irreverent dissections of topical matter, public personae and fads, though the primary attraction was found in the frank display of the female body.
Other popular proprietary revue names included George White's "Scandals," Earl Carroll's "Vanities" and John Murray Anderson's Greenwich Village Follies.
Famed for his often bizarre publicity schemes and continual debt, Ziegfeld joined Earl Carroll, George White, John Murray Anderson, and the Shubert Brothers as the leading producing figure of the American revue's golden age.
Revues took advantage of their high revenue stream to lure away performers from other media, often offering exorbitant weekly salaries without the unremitting travel demanded by other entertainments.
Performers such as Eddie Cantor, Anna Held, W. C. Fields, Bert Williams, Ed Wynn, the Marx Brothers and the Fairbanks Twins found great success on the revue stage.
Specialist writers and composers of revues have included Sandy Wilson, Noël Coward, John Stromberg, George Gershwin, Earl Carroll, and the British team Flanders and Swann.
The lavish films, noted by many for a sustained opulence unrivaled in Hollywood until the 1950s epics, reached a breadth of audience never found by the stage revue, all while significantly underpricing the now-faltering theatrical shows.
The Rolling Thunder Revue was a famed U.S. concert tour in the mid-1970s consisting of a traveling caravan of musicians, headed by Bob Dylan, that took place in late 1975 and early 1976.
Towards the end of the 20th century, a subgenre of revue largely dispensed with the sketches, founding narrative structure within a song cycle in which the material is culled from varied works.
This type of revue may or may not have identifiable characters and a rudimentary storyline but, even when it does, the songs remain the focus of the show (for example, Closer Than Ever by Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire).
It is a current and longstanding tradition of medical, dental, engineering, legal and veterinary schools within the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia to stage revues each year, combining comedy sketches, songs, parodies, films and sound-bites.