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The Victorian Music Hall Lives
| Article
# : |
18096 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
2,562 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Americans tend to think of British theater in terms of a great tradition crowned by Shakespeare, cherished and maintained today mostly in the gray bunkerlike monstrosity on Thames' South Bank Known as the Royal national Theatre. Those with light-weight tastes in plays and players - preferring, perhaps, the kitsch musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, or an undemanding Broadway-type show - are catered to by what is called "the West End," a complex of theaters scattered form Shaftesbury Avenue in the skuzzy heart of Soho, eastward to the lower fringe of Covent Garden, along Drury Lane, the Aldwych, and the strand.
But there is another historical stream of stage entertainment in Britain, a species of performance which flourished as long ago, and as far away as the old imperial city of Byzantium. By and off coincidence, this type of amusement achieved its greatest British triumphs at the end of the last century, when the empire had reached its under Queen Victoria. It celebrated not only the usual subjects of licit and illicit love (on a moon-and-June level), low-life heroes, clowns and the London scene, but also played on popular patriotic feelings about the empire. One of its songs, written when war with Russia was on the horizon, gave the English language the term jinigoism. This garish, slightly scruffy, exuberant (and sometimes bawdy) tradition was known as "music hall.”
Large Noisy Audiences
In Britain the Victorian music hall is not remembered with a great deal of respect; it was much too popular, and much too ephemeral, for that. But the memory is strong nevertheless, and charged with immense affection. "Straight" theater has for
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