The Earl Carroll Vanities

[4] One critic in the New York Times described the show's comedy bits, which featured burlesque-styled dancers and minstrel-styled blackface comics,[2] as "The same old stuff".

[7] Also in that year, the comic Milton Berle played a number of eccentric characters, as he would frequently do in his television show three decades later.

[8] Of course, not all of the revue's contributors went on to become household names; lesser-known alumni included Joe Cook, Lillian Roth, Ted Healy, David Chasen,[9] George Moran, Charles Mack, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Kathryn Reed Altman, Faith Bacon, Will Mahoney, Frank Mitchell,[10] Yvette Rugel, Geneva Duker, Jean Tennyson, and Beryl Wallace.

When they realized that they were rehearsing a revue, they demanded that Carroll either hire an all-Equity cast or join the Producing Managers' Association.

[12] Bankruptcy prompted Carroll to take his operation to Los Angeles, where his spacious theatre drew appreciative crowds, especially among soldiers on leave during World War II.

The new venue, with its table-and-chair seating arrangement, had the cabaret atmosphere he had once hoped to achieve in New York, notably with the fourth edition of the Vanities.