It began during a conversation between Broadway Center Executive Director David Fischer and entertainment company, EnJoy Productions cofounder, Kevin Joyce.

 

“We were discussing another project,” Joyce recalls, “and we were talking about the Pantages Theater and its history.” Between them, Fischer and Joyce hatched the idea for a vaudeville-style show to help the Pantages and Rialto Theaters celebrate their 90th birthday. The celebration comes to the Pantages Saturday, Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m., with the premiere of A Salute to Vaudeville: Voice of the City.

 

Joyce and EnJoy productions are themselves a part of the theater’s history. Joyce created a live production to mark completion of the restoration of the Pantages lobby several years earlier. The production was a kind of variety show.  “It had struck me that the theater’s history was really lending itself to that kind of variety show format,” Joyce says.

 

Variety style entertainment is part of Joyce’s daily life. He is the creator and host of the television show aired on the City of Seattle’s cable channel 21, the Seattle Channel. The show is titled Big Night Out, a monthly variety showcase that is taped before a live audience.

 

“I began thinking about the Pantages as a venue when it was functioning as a venue during the heyday of vaudeville. And it’s still operating,” Joyce says. “Its structure and its form remain intact, and it’s really unique in that regard.”

 

Seattle’s Moore Theater and the Pantages are the “oldest extant vaudeville houses in the area,” Joyce explains. “And the Pantages in particular, because of its heritage and the way it has been maintained, make it a perfect, incredible venue. It’s like going back in time.”

 

The Pantages Theater opened to the public in early 1918. Its original role was as a link in a national chain of vaudeville theaters in various parts of the country. The theaters were owned by Greek-born theater entrepreneur Alexander Pantages. When the Pantages served as a vaudeville venue it was part of the largest such circuit west of the Mississippi.

 

The theater hosted vaudeville acts and other live, often famous, performers until it was converted to a movie theater in the 1930s. But there was a time when performers ranging from WC Fields, to Charlie Chaplin, to Harry Houdini, to Sarah Bernhardt, and Edgar Bergen stood on the Pantages stage.

 

According to Joyce, there has been a resurgence of what can best be described as vaudeville in the past 20 years, that is, of variety entertainment featuring eclectic collections of short acts, what Joyce describes as “highly specialized entertainment.” 

 

Where does one go to look for “highly specialized entertainment?” Fortunately, creator and show host Kevin Joyce has his sources. “We’ve had connections to a lot of different types of performing groups over the years,” he explains.

 

Many of them have come to Joyce’s attention via his Big Night Out TV vehicle. The show’s guests have represented “a huge number of variety acts,” including yo-yo artists, jump rope performers, and folk musicians, as well as an assortment of onstage standards like comedians and magicians.

So, when the Broadway Center asked EnJoy productions to produce A Salute to Vaudeville, Joyce and Company were ready. “We compiled regionally what we thought were the most stellar representations of the current expression of vaudeville and what we thought would be a great show.” The result is a mix of acts and personalities running the gamut from the “beautiful and serene,” to the “little bit strange,” to the “funny and hilarious,” to the slightly risqué, according to the show’s producer/host.

 

Joyce describes the process of creating the assemblage of acts that make up the show as a simple one, a kind of “blank slate” approach. The goal, he says, is to “present various types of talent and people who, on their own merit and through their own incredibly hard work and dedication and their really idiosyncratic approach to performance, they’ve developed a niche and performed in that niche in a way that serves the public good for delight, awe, and entertainment in its most basic way.”

 

And what is that basic way? Joyce describes it as the “ancient way,” one that relies on skills like storytelling, “and of someone standing in front of an audience with nothing but their own skills and a couple of props.”

[Pantages Theater, Saturday, Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m., $25-$65, 901 Broadway, Tacoma, 253.591.5894, www.broadwaycenter.org]