V. said: I don't think current drama, or at least the best of current drama, is inherently any less literary than in prior eras. After all, things like vaudeville and burlesques were big business in much the same way that things like big-budget Broadway works like "The Lion King" are today. We don't hear many questions about that kind of thing because their value is more historical than literary. --- Even so, it's not that easy to decide offhand that big budget broadway or whichever is ephemeral. I don't keep up with broadway, so I won't defend anything in particular, you really never know what's going to stick without careful study. You're right, vaudeville is generally consigned to merely historical importance. But that doesn't imply that none of the work had any lasting merit; in fact, an awful lot of vaudeville acts *are* remembered, watched, and asked about in quiz bowl; it's just that what survived were translations and adaptations of their acts to movies. When we have 13 hilarious Marx brothers films, we don't dwell on "Fun in Hi Skool" and "Home Again", or on the work Buster Keaton or W.C. Fields did before films. I'd certainly be sad if, had film never came around to preserve their work, if they and others ended up forgotten as ephemeral old popular theater.
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