The musical revue Headliners & One-liners: Songs and Stories of the Catskills Resorts will be performed again on November 15 at 7:00 PM at the Doctorow Center for the Arts in Hunter, New York. The show’s authors and creators Mark Singer, Darcie Dunn, and Julia Mendelsohn (musical director), along with Emma Green and Mychal Leveridge, will take the stage. The format remains the same: a nostalgic and comedic tribute to the Catskills resort era known as the Borscht Belt.
Tickets and useful details for attendees
Admission is free, with tickets available to reserve in advance on the Catskill Mountain Foundation website. The exact venue address, attendance guidelines, and additional information about the evening’s program are also listed there.
How it began: a sold-out house at Red Barn in 2005
In May 2005, the Catskill Mountain Foundation presented Headliners as the first production created specifically for the foundation. The premiere at Red Barn drew more audience members than the hall could hold, with part of the crowd watching the show standing. The current evening continues that story, which began exactly twenty years ago.
What the show is about now: songs, stories, and comedic nostalgia
The program weaves together stories and humor about the legendary mountain resorts with the music that defined the sound of the mid-twentieth century. The creators promise “memories, laughter, and music” capable of reviving the atmosphere of an era when the Catskill Mountains were alive with energy and resort halls rang with applause.
The Borscht Belt Catskills: the scale of the phenomenon
At the height of their popularity, more than 1,000 hotels welcomed over a million guests every summer. The range of formats was enormous: from modest boarding houses with minimal amenities to sprawling luxury complexes covering hundreds of acres, offering every imaginable comfort and regarded as the pinnacle of elegance.
This phenomenon, however, unfolded in less than a century from birth to decline, leaving behind not so much buildings as a cultural legend.
From farmhouse rooms to a legendary industry
The earliest Borscht Belt hotels were simple homes with rooms rented out by Jewish farmers during the era of the First World War. Before long, owners discovered that housing sweltering New Yorkers for the summer brought in more income than working the land, and agriculture faded into the background. By the postwar decade, hotels dotted the Catskill Mountain landscape, and the largest among them ranked among the most celebrated resort destinations in the country.
The earliest entertainment: strolls, improvisations, and passing the hat
The first stage of resort leisure was remarkably simple: afternoon hayrides, horseback rides around the boarding house grounds, impromptu performances by wandering entertainers right on the lawn. By 1920, an entire class of performers had emerged, moving from boarding house to boarding house, putting on an act and passing the hat.
The tumler as the resort’s engine and a school for future stars
As hotels grew during the Roaring Twenties, audiences’ expectations grew with them. Owners built entertainment halls known as “casinos” and hired full staffs of entertainers. The central figure was the Social Director, known as the tumler — literally “one who makes a racket.” This format became the training ground for future celebrities: Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers, and Henny Youngman all began their careers as Catskills tumlers.
Comic Joey Adams, himself a former tumler, described the role this way:
> His job was to keep guests from growing bored with card games, diets, or gazing at the scenery. He had to sing, dance, tell stories, organize parlor games, plan hikes, lead campfire sing-alongs, chat with stout elderly ladies, and entertain diners right there in the restaurant.
This quote captures the workings of the daily entertainment conveyor belt on which the resorts’ reputations rested.
From staff entertainers to the booking system
The Depression hit entertainment budgets hardest of all. Maintaining permanent troupes became costly: beyond salaries, staff were owed room and board, and owners irritably referred to performers as freeloaders. The market shifted toward hiring performers for individual shows. Major booking agencies came to play a central role, with the Charles Rapp Agency standing out above the rest, its founder earning the title the King of the Catskills.
This story became a symbol of the breakneck pace at which the industry operated.
The postwar peak: stars, orchestras, and the battle for attention
In the postwar years, the Catskills reached their zenith. Elegant nightclubs with names like The Cotillion, The Imperial, The Wedgewood, and The Terrace opened within hotels, while giants like Grossinger’s and The Concord competed to attract the biggest names. Weekend shows featured comedians, singers, dance acts, and a house orchestra.
The list of stars who performed in the Catskills reads like an encyclopedia of American pop culture:
- Danny Kaye, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, Judy Garland, Sid Caesar, Eddie Fisher, Robert Merrill, Tony Bennett
- Steve and Eydie, Jerry Vale, Dean Martin, Don Rickles
- Some performers became the face of a particular resort: Eddie Fisher was associated with Grossinger’s, Jerry Lewis with Brown’s
Audiences were as demanding as they were generous. If an act fell flat, the crowd would begin leaving the hall — not one by one, but in waves. Comics measured failure by the number of doors through which the exodus flowed simultaneously. Sandra Bernhard once set a kind of record at The Concord, triggering an eight-door walkout.
Why the Borscht Belt faded
At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, the industry faced competition it could not overcome:
- Affordable air travel opened Miami and Las Vegas to American vacationers
- The legalization of gambling drew audiences away
- Later, the Caribbean and Atlantic City joined the list of rivals
By the 1970s, smaller hotels were closing en masse. Grossinger’s shut its doors in 1986, and The Concord held on until 1998. With their passing, an entire era came to a close, leaving behind a rich entertainment legacy and thousands of warm memories.
The casinos that once lured audiences away from the Catskills eventually became part of local culture in their own right. In Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Australian cities, gambling halls have long meant more to residents than mere business. They are landmarks with their own legends, performers, and weekend rituals. Yet this way of life is itself gradually receding into the past for the same reason that doomed the mountain resorts: a more convenient form of entertainment has arrived. Gambling has moved to smartphones and laptops, and making a trip for an evening at the roulette table strikes many as unnecessary. A pokies enthusiast from Perth can open a casino website offering no deposit free spins in Australia without leaving the couch. Players in Europe, America, and Asia enjoy similarly accessible starting conditions. Free spins let anyone try a game without spending money or an hour on the road, so many simply see no point in traveling to what is available with a couple of taps. History repeats itself: once, New Yorkers traded the mountains for a flight to Miami; now, audiences are trading gaming floors for a phone screen. That makes evenings that bring back the live variety stage of an era when people traveled hundreds of miles for entertainment all the more precious.
Back to tonight: music that brings history to life
Headliners & One-liners offers a chance to experience the history of the mountain resorts through humor and music. The program features works by the composers who defined the sound of the era:
- Richard Rodgers, Burt Bacharach, Cole Porter
- Kurt Weill, Harold Arlen, and others
Each number revives the atmosphere of a time when the Catskill Mountains were the epicenter of American variety stage entertainment.
Date, venue, and free tickets
The performance takes place on November 15 at 7:00 PM at the Doctorow Center for the Arts in Hunter, New York. Mark Singer, Darcie Dunn, Julia Mendelsohn, Emma Green, and Mychal Leveridge will take the stage with a tribute to the Borscht Belt era. Free tickets and full venue details are available on the Catskill Mountain Foundation website.
