Duncan Sisters

They were twelve and fourteen when Rosetta and Vivian first hit the boards at the Pantages in Los Angeles in 1914. Starting as a small-time act on the vaudeville circuit in the west, they moved to the midwest & joined the "Revue de Vogue" where they played theatre houses in Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa. With the help of their third sister, Evelyn, they made their way to New York and to the stage at Coney Island. From there they moved to the Hotel Martinique in one of Gus Edward's kiddie reviews and then on to a small role singing "I'm So Glad My Momma Don't Know Where I'm At" in Doing Our Bit at the Winter Garden in 1919. In Fred Dillingham's She's A Good Fellow (1918), they were "the terrible infants of the boarding school." Tip Top (1920) found them cast as two sisters named "Bad" and "Worse." Looking younger and acting older, the Duncans frequently appeared in "short frocks and half length hose" in a routine featuring childish voices, close harmony and plenty of mischief.Theirs was an "original act," drawn from things done as children, things natural to them & things they loved to do. They loved to laugh and make others do so too. By the time they became Topsy and Eva, vaudeville had been their life for nine years. After their early success with Topsy and Eva, Variety called them a perenial romper team. "The sisters know their baby stuff to and from Babyville," a reporter noted after a turn at the Palace in 1927. Rosetta had part of Topsy within her even then. Vivian brought a sense of coyness and a willingness to support mischief as the team's ingenue.By 1927, as they were preparing for the silent movie version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Rosetta claimed that they had already played the roles 1,872 times...four years worth of nine performances a week.Topsy and Eva became part of their vaudeville act. They revived the play twice in the Thirties. At the end of that decade they appeared in their now familiar roles on television in one of the first musical comedies produced there. In 1942 they were back on the boards as Topsy and Eva again. Their work as a team ended with Rosetta's death in 1959. At the time they were playing at Mangam's Chateau outside of Chicago in an act built around nostalgia for vaudeville.It may well be impossible to make complete sense out of all the performance work that Rosetta and Vivian brought to generations of audiences given the documentary fragments left to tell the story. Still, enough can be pieced together using reviews, records, sheet music, film, playbills and the few articles about their work that remain to make a preliminary map.This page is a tribute to Rosetta and Vivian Duncan.....{} MyGen Profile Generator