The Music Hall

I was pretty much brought up on musicals and old Hollywood movies that featured musical numbers. My dad has a soft spot for Lerner and Loewe, Rogers and Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, etc…and it’s funny because he seems so serious and stereotypically male, but I totally caught him singing and dancing to Jesus Christ Super Star once upon a time. And as a family we were always watching movies starring Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Donald O’Connor, Ethel Merman, and so on.

The whole point of this is that Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor stared together in No Business Like Show Business, a movie about a family who makes a living doing Vaudeville shows and eventually Broadway. With all of the articles we’ve been reading for class I keep thinking of this movie as I try to trace the evolution of the Victorian Music Hall. And I think Vaudeville is probably the most direct link between the English Music Hall and America, but from there, its influence spreads out in so many different directions.

The Music Hall progressed to film, but it also remained a form of live entertainment with night clubs and dance clubs. Today we see comedy clubs; someone mentioned last class or two classes ago about the Cirque du Soleil. Having been to the Cirque du Soleil I can attest to that fact that it is live, there is often singing and other forms of music, acrobatics, a comedic portion to the show, it uses live animals and special effects; many of the same things included in the Victorian Music Hall shows. I don’t think there is really one performance venue that can be looked at as the final descendant of the Music Hall.

The more I read the more I realize what a huge cultural entity the Music Hall was to the English, and as such, I think it evolved in a multitude of different directions. But it is just so incredibly fascinating to me that I can look at these movies I have loved for so long and see a the influence of the Music Hall tradition. And it doesn’t end at movies, as I mentioned above, it’s theater, the circus, night clubs, comedy clubs, etc…I actually thought that this was more of an American art form, but I clearly stand corrected.