My Vaudeville Man

My Vaudeville Man! puts a boy who can dance and the mother who does not want him to on the same small stage for an evening, and lets them argue about it in song. Jack Donahue wants the circuit, the billing and the applause. Mud has seen what the circuit does to people and is not persuaded.

He goes anyway, and the show follows the climb: the small-time bookings, the acts he learns from and steals from, the partner he marries, the years of unglamorous touring that come before the good billing. Mud narrates a good deal of it from home, keeping accounts of a career she is not present for, and the distance between them widens exactly as fast as his name gets bigger.

Jeff Hochhauser wrote the book and, with Bob Johnston, the music and lyrics, drawing on the real Donahue's life and his own written account of it. It reached the stage in 2008 and has been produced by small companies since, always in the form it was built for: two performers, playing everybody.

The score is period pastiche done straight, and the dancing is the argument. Tap is what Jack has instead of vocabulary, so the numbers get more elaborate as he becomes less able to explain himself, and the show's best-known routine is a drunk dance that doubles as a piece of characterisation.

It is a small piece about a big career, and it ends where the audience already knows it must, with the mother right about the cost and the son right about the talent, and no way for either of them to have had both.