Music hall
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Music hall is a form of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between the 1850s and the 1950s. The term can refer to
- A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts. British music hall was similar to American vaudeville, featuring rousing songs and comic acts, while in the United Kingdom the term vaudeville referred to more lowbrow entertainment that would have been termed burlesque in the United States.
- The theatre or other venue in which such entertainment takes place;
- The type of popular music normally associated with such performances.
- A similar venue in another country, see Cabaret
Origins and Development
Music hall in London had its origins in entertainment provided in the new style saloon bars of public houses in the 1830s. These venues replaced earlier semi-rural amusements provided at traditional fairs and suburban pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall Gardens and the Cremorne Gardens. These latter became squeezed out by urban development and lost their former popularity.
The saloon was a room where for an admission fee or a higher price at the bar, singing, dancing, drama or comedy was performed. The most famous London saloon of the early days was the Grecian Saloon, established in 1825, at The Eagle (a former tea-garden), 2 Shepherdess Walk, off the City Road in north London. According to John Hollingshead, proprietor of the Gaiety Theatre, London (originally the Strand Music Hall), this establishment was "the father and mother, the dry and wet nurse of the Music Hall". Later known as the Grecian Theatre, it was here that Marie Lloyd made her début at the age of 14 in 1884. It is still famous because of an English nursery rhyme, with the somewhat mysterious lyrics:Up and down the City Road
In and out The Eagle
That's the way the money goes
Pop goes the weasel.
Other such "song and supper" rooms included Evan's in Covent Garden, the Coal Hole in The Strand, the Cyder Cellars in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden and the Mogul Saloon in Drury Lane.
The music hall as we know it developed from such establishments in the 1850s and were built up in and on the grounds of public houses. Such establishments were distinguished from theatres by the fact that in a music hall you would be seated at a table in the auditorium and could drink alcohol and smoke tobacco whilst watching the show. In a theatre, by contrast, the audience was seated in stalls and there was a separate bar-room. A strange exception to this rule was the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton (1841) which somehow managed to evade this regulation and served drinks to its customers. Though a theatre rather than a music hall, this famous establishment later hosted music hall variety acts. It was destroyed by a German bombing raid in 1940.
Decline
After World War II, competition from television and other musical idioms, including Rock and Roll, led to the slow demise of the British music halls, despite some desperate attempts to retain an audience by putting on striptease acts. In 1957, the playwright John Osbourne delivered this elegy
- "The music hall is dying, and with it, a significant part of England. Some of the heart of England has gone; something that once belonged to everyone, for this was truly a folk art." --John Osbourne, The Entertainer (1957)
The final blows came when Moss Empires, the largest British Music Hall chain, closed the majority of its theatres in 1960, closely followed by the death of music hall stalwart Max Miller in 1963, prompting one contemporary to write that: "Music-halls...died this afternoon when they buried Max Miller". Stage and film musicals, however, continued to be influenced by the music hall idiom. Oliver!, Dr Dolittle, My Fair Lady, and many other musicals continued to retain strong roots in music hall. The BBC series The Good Old Days, which ran for thirty years, recreated the music hall for the modern audience, and the Paul Daniels Magic Show allowed several speciality acts a television presence from 1979 to 1994. Aimed at a younger audience, but still owing a lot to the music hall heritage, was the late '70s series The Muppet Show.
See also
