Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890 - 1939

This book offers the first full historical treatment of a music theatre that was once at the centre of London's West End. From the late Victorian period to the early 1920s, musical comedy was the single most popular form of 'legitimate' theatre entertainment. This lively account establishes musical comedy as one of the first industrial cultures and offers fascinating insights into how it functioned ideologically as a celebrated embracing of the modern condition.

'Musical comedy generated huge audiences, and thus can rightly be viewed as culturally and socially significant. Yet too frequently it and other 'middle-brow' cultures still remain beyond the cusp of scholarship. Len Platt's book rightly redresses this imbalance...It will remain a defining text for many years to come.' - Nick Hayes, Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University

Autorentext
LEN PLATT is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published widely on literary and musical cultures of the early twentieth-century. He is the author of Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (1998), Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literatures (2001) and American Culture and Musical Theatre (2003).

Inhalt
List of Illustrations Preface Themes and Approaches Our Sickly Age's End: Musical Comedy and Modernity Chin Chin Chinaman: Doing Other Cultures Aristocracy and the Cultural Politics of Modernity Interventions in the Politics of Gender and Sexuality The Decline of West End Musical Comedy, 1912-1930 Notes to Appendixes 1, 2 and 3 Appendix 1: Selected British Musical Comedies, 1892-1920 (London, West End) Appendix 2: Selected 'Imported' Musical Comedies, 1898-1920 (London, West End) Appendix 3: Selected Musical Comedies, 1921-1939 (London, West End) Selected Bibliography Index