The
All-Colored Vaudeville Show
Hall, Adelaide
performer
The Three Whippets
performer
Nicholas Brothers
performer
Nicholas, Harold
performer
Nicholas, Fayard
performer
Film
1935-09-06
Vitaphone/Warner Brothers
Short subject musical film featuring the Nicholas Brothers. Filmed on the stage of a Warner Brothers theatre in Brooklyn, structured as a variety show, with each of the specialty acts introduced on a placard carried onstage by a chorus girl. Adelaide Hall singing sedately, "To Have You, To Hold You" surprises the audience by lifting her long gown in the middle of the song to buck-and-wing in her high-heeled shoes. The Nicholas Brothers open their act to a late Dixieland /early Swing Swing style tune, moving in single file as a one-man machine; their second number recreates the Shim Sham , a four-part routine from the twenties invented by Leonard Reed and Willie Bryant consisting of shuffle steps, cross-over steps, the tack-Annie, and a half-break with a tagged-on walk-off.
Performing Arts Encyclopedia
http://www.loc.gov/performingarts
Hill, Constance Valis: Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers. New York: Oxford University Press (2000).
Tap Dance America
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html
Nicholas Brothers (biography)
loc.music.tdabio.144
tda
IHAS
151216
loc.music.tda.3