“Here we are again!” – Dan Leno, in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
"God bless the music halls." — Sir Edward Elgar to Francis Colvin, letter of 14 March 1912.
This course will take you deep into the wonderful world of the late-Victorian Music Hall, a world of popular entertainment often mixed with subversive class and sexual critique. This is the world wherein drag performances and comic musicals use ribaldry and gallows humour to poke fun at – if not outright challenge – the stuffy conventions of dominant middle-class morality. In this course, we will also consider how those middle-class values (via investors and managers) do eventually make their way into, and perhaps foretell the decline, of this once immensely popular form of entertainment.
The course will approach the Victorian Music Hall from a variety of angles or avenues, so to speak. In order to learn about the different venues as well as the class and social dynamics within this culture, we will begin by introducing ourselves to some of the legendary actors within this history, including Arthur Lloyd, Harry Champion, Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilly, and Dan Leno. Some of the scripts we will read and compare concern figures who continue to be popular today (such as Sweeney Todd ; Aladdin; Beauty and the Beast ; and Christmas Carol) while others will be new and Victorian-specific (including The Phantom ; Jesse Brown ; Animal Magnetism or Barnby Rudge). We will also spend time listening to and unpacking original recordings of Victorian Music Hall songs, such as “Boiled Beef and Carrots” performed by Champion, “The Tower of London” performed by Leno, and “Burlington Bertie from Bow” performed by Ella Shield, etc. We will also consider the legacy of the Victorian Music Hall, from its transformation into more vanilla-ish variety acts, as well as its visible presence in inheritors like modern drag shows and pantomime theatre.
