Career
In 1903 Gertrude Hoffman was hired as a rehearsal director at Hammerstein’s club working with the sixty member "Punch and Judy Co." shows and other vaudeville routines performing at the venue. Three years later she replaced an ill performer in Ziegfeld’s "The Parisian Dancer" and became a hit imitating Anna Held singing "I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave". Over her career, Gertrude also did impersonations of various other performers, such as Eva Tanguay, Eddie Foy and Ethel Barrymore.
Her choreography and special dance effects brought her high praise and rebuke. Her role as Salome in "Vision of Salome" which she introduced around 1908 caused scandal at many theatre houses around the country. On several occasions her suggestive dance style in scant costumes would lead to her arrest by local police. Eva Tanguay, Vera Olcott and Lotta Faust would also find success with the Salome dance.
Later in her career she became manager and choreographer of the Gertrude Hoffman Girls. Reminiscent of the Tiller Girls, her dancers used a type of athletic acrobatic transformation of the chorus girl with kicks, leaps etc. The Gertrude Hoffman Girls performed in the Shubert review Artists and Models that ran for the entire 1925-26 season at the Winter Garden and also had long runs over the following two seasons with A Night in Paris and A Night in Spain. In 1933 she resurrected the Hoffman dancers and had some success touring America and Europe prior the outbreak of the Second World War. Not much is known of her later life other than she may have at one time operated a dance studio or club in Southern California.
In 2006 the social historian Armond Fields listed Gertrude Hoffman in his book Women Vaudeville Stars: Eighty Biographical Profiles. The Gertrude Hoffman Glide, a two step or turkey-trot dance named after her in 1913, was recorded by the Victor Military Band and sold through Sears Catalogs.
Read more about this topic: Gertrude H. Hoffman
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