Vaudeville Show Featuring Sandow the Strongman and the Tracadero Vaudevilles

Vintage 1884 poster advertising a vaudeville show called the Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles featuring the marvelous Jordan Family and Dunham, astonishing aerial artists performing unbelievable feats. This show was the creation of the famous Florenz Ziegfeld, one of the greatest show business impresarios who ever lived.

The Trocadero Vaudevilles toured the United States throughout the 1890s and enjoyed enormous success and popularity. The highlight of this show were the 5 Jordans, all aerial performers, and Sandow the Strongman. Eugene Sandow, the stage name of Wilhelm Muller, was billed as “physically perfect. Acknowledged by anatomists to be the strongest man in the world.” He performed legendary feats of strength including allegedly juggling with one hand while holding a grown man in the palm of his other hand. He was known to have carried a live horse across the stage, juggled nearly 300 pound dumb bells effortlessly. Sandow is today regarded as the father of modern bodybuilding.

Ziegfeld’s genius for promotion and public relations turned Sandow into a 1890s sex symbol. Women paid extra to be allowed backstage to feel his muscles. In the staid and socially conservative America of the 1890s these peaks and touches of Sandow must have felt especially risque. Interestingly videos and pictures of Sandow do not show an overly impressive physique, perhaps because we have become accustomed to today’s steroid monstrosities.