Mutual Burlesque Association

Comedians Bud Abbott, Lou Costello (not yet a team), Harry Steppe, Joe Penner, Billy Gilbert, Rags Ragland, and Billy Hagan, as well as stripteasers Ann Corio, Hinda Wausau, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Carrie Finnell, performed in Mutual shows.

David Krause (a theater owner), Dr. George E. Lothrop (a physician who operated Boston's Howard Athenaeum), and Al Singer (who mounted shows on the Columbia wheel) incorporated the MBA in 1922.

[4] Most of the franchisees and producers came from the American Wheel, a subsidiary of the Columbia circuit that played less prestigious venues and went bankrupt.

[5] Isidore Herk, who had been president of the American Wheel, left to establish a vaudeville circuit with the Shubert organization.

When that failed, Herk returned to burlesque the following year, replaced Singer, and eventually became Mutual's president.

[6] Many performers and producers abandoned Columbia, which was seen as behind the times, for the new wheel, which took inspiration from fast-paced and sometimes risque Broadway revues like Earl Carroll's Vanities and the Ziegfeld Follies.

This was a typical company of the day: a striptease star, a prima donna, a soubrette, a talking woman, a boy and girl dance team, two comics, a straight man, a singing juvenile, twelve or fourteen chorus girls, a musical conductor, three stage hands, and an assortment of cats, dogs, monkeys etc.

Herk joined forces with the Minskys and organized a new wheel of 25 shows and theaters called the New Columbia Burlesque Circuit, but it, too, eventually crumbled.