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 centuries played almost exclusively to the middle classes and a few aristocrats. But music hall did not banish the lower classes to a few distant gallery sets up in the "gods," while the respectable audience sat in the stalls and dress circle, quietly consuming what was offered onstage. The old halls were filled with large noisy audiences from all classes who smoked, chatted, ate, drank, and moved about during the show, often chiming in with the performers on the chorus of a popular song of the day. There was a bar at the back of the auditorium where patrons could stand guzzling, listening, or talking, doing business, or perhaps checking out some of the available feminine company.
The peculiar character of music hall depended - like vaudeville, its American counterpart - on individual performers or acts. Music, played or sung, was not the only turn; audiences welcomed magicians, acrobats, jugglers, and aerialists. There were specially dancers like Maude Adams, or Loie Fuller with her colored veils; monologuists and animal acts were also part of the tradition. The star system nourished the heart of music hall. Many of the greatest performers - such as the Scotsman Harry Lauder, Lottie Collins, who sang "Ta-ra-ra Boomde-ay", or the male impersonator Vesta Tilley, or the Frenchman Leotard, who was the original "Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze," or the much-loved, "naughty" singer Marie Lloyd - became international favorites.
After the First World War, music hall began a slow decline, almost exactly in step with the fading of the empire. By the end of the 1950s it had become a curiosity, and in that decade the last true music hall in London - Collins' in Islington - burned down, never to
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