Shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize; former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the story of the British music hall. John Major shares memories of his performer father Tom and then shines the spotlight on the story of the music hall itself, from its Victorian heyday to its demise. In this fond look back at characters such as Marie Lloyd, Little Tich and Vesta Tilley, these faded stars take their place in the limelight once more. Packed with colourful anecdotes, 'My Old Man' is a warm-hearted account of a golden and bygone age.

Bruce Forsyth is known across four generations as the face of family entertainment classics such as The Generation Game, Play Your Cards Right and The Price is Right. His is an amazing story that spans more than two thirds of the twentieth century. In the late 1950s, over half of Britain would tune in to Sunday Night at the London Palladium, making Bruce a star in a few weeks. But it had been a long slog since his debut as a fourteen-year-old 'Boy Bruce the Mighty Atom' in 1942, then wartime work for the Red Cross and National Service, and playing every theatre, concert party, summer season, double act and review known to man. Bruce's first-ever account of his whole life is chock full of anecdotes, honest appraisals of tough times, failed marriages and affairs, comments on entertainment and what it took to be a comedian at the height of his powers. 'In the gameshow of life, Brucie hasn't just won the TV, the golf clubs and the hostess trolley. He's won the cuddly toy as well' Mirror

Open from 1942 until 1945, the Hollywood Canteen was the most famous of the patriotic home-front nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations. Since the opening night, when the crowds were so thick that Bette Davis had to enter through the bathroom window to give her welcome speech, the storied dance floor where movie stars danced with soldiers has been the subject of much U.S. nostalgia about the "Greatest Generation." Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the wartime nightclub, Sherrie Tucker explores how jitterbugging swing culture has come to represent the war in U.S. national memory. Yet her interviewees' varied experiences and recollections belie the possibility of any singular historical narrative. Some recall racism, sexism, and inequality on the nightclub's dance floor and in Los Angeles neighborhoods, dynamics at odds with the U.S. democratic, egalitarian ideals associated with the Hollywood Canteen and the "Good War" in popular culture narratives. For Tucker, swing dancing's torque--bodies sharing weight, velocity, and turning power without guaranteed outcomes--is an apt metaphor for the jostling narratives, different perspectives, unsteady memories, and quotidian acts that comprise social history.

In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879 1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl" named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality.

In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star."

This is a book about a stage and screen enigma of the past. Gypsy Rose Lee was an early vaudeville, stage and screen star about which little truth has been written. This book provides a more in-depth and factual account of the well-concealed life of a legend.

A revealing portrait of Gypsy Rose Lee, the "Striptease Intellectual" of 1930s burlesque A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the first-and the only-stripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous blend of funny-smart sex symbol with the aura of high culture-she boasted that she liked to read Great Books and listen to classical music while taking off her clothes on-stage-inspired a musical, memoirs, a portrait by Max Ernst, and a species of rose. Gypsy is the first book about Gypsy Rose Lee's life, fame, and place in America not written by a family member, and it reveals her deep impact on the social and cultural transformations taking shape during her life. Rachel Shteir, author of the prize-winning Striptease, gives us Gypsy's story from her arrival in New York in 1931 to her sojourns in Hollywood, her friendships and rivalries with writers and artists, the Sondheim musical, family memoirs that retold her history in divergent ways, and a television biopic currently in the making. With verve, audacity, and native guile, Gypsy Rose Lee moved striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street. Gypsy tells how she did it, and why.

Miguel de Cervantes's experimentation with theatricality is frequently tied to the notion of revelation and disclosure of hidden truths. Drawing the Curtain showcases the elements of theatricality that characterize Cervantes's prose and analyses the ways in which he uses theatricality in his own literary production. Bringing together the works of well-known scholars, who draw from a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches, this collection demonstrates how Cervantes exploits revelation and disclosure to create dynamic dramatic moments that surprise and engage observers and readers. Hewing closely to Peter Brook's notion of the bare or empty stage, Esther Fernandez and Adrienne L. Martin argue that Cervantes's omnipresent concern with theatricality manifests not only in his drama but also in the myriad metatheatrical instances dispersed throughout his prose works. In doing so, Drawing the Curtain sheds light on the ways in which Cervantes forces his readers to engage with themes that are central to his life and works, including love, freedom, truth, confinement, and otherness.

"Babylon Girls" is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows--chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like--between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston--black dances by which the "New Woman" defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences.

Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the "picaninny choruses" of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in "The Creole Show" (1890), "Darktown Follies "(1913), and "Shuffle Along" (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.

Peculiar Lives and Strange Times of Music Hall and Variety Artistes. What was the vulgar dressing-room practice of Jack Haig, Nutty but Nice, that so dismayed his fellow artists? How did the mysterious Werth, Banana Skin and Stone Manipulator, display his art? What anatomical peculiarity was enjoyed, although never displayed, by Stanelli and his Hornchestra? Find out the answers to these and other fascinating conundrums in this saucy backstage look at music hall, variety and vaudeville, illustrated with the posters and photographs of the time.

When Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin were born, variety entertainment had been going for decades in America, and like Harry Houdini, Milton Berle, Mae West, and countless others, these performers got their start on the vaudeville stage. From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the heart of show business in the States. Its stars were America's first stars in the modern sense, and it utterly dominated American popular culture. Writer and modern-day vaudevillian Trav S.D. chronicles vaudeville's far-reaching impact in "No Applause - Just Throw Money". He explores the many ways in which vaudeville's story is the story of show business in America and documents the rich history and cultural legacy of our country's only purely indigenous theatrical form, including its influence on everything from USO shows to "Ed Sullivan" to "The Muppet Show" and "The Gong Show". More than a quaint historical curiosity, vaudeville is thriving today and Trav S.D. peels back the curtain on the vibrant subculture that exists across the United States - a vast grassroots network of fire-eaters, human blockheads, burlesque performers, and bad comics intent on taking Vaudeville into the its second century.

The period between the Second World War and the mid-1960s saw the American music industry engaged in a fundamental transformation in how music was produced and experienced. Tim Anderson analyzes three sites of this music revolution: the change from a business centered around live performances to one based on selling records, the custom of simultaneously bringing out multiple versions of the same song, and the arrival of in-home high-fidelity stereo systems.
"Making Easy Listening" presents a social and cultural history of the contentious, diverse, and experimental culture of musical production and enjoyment that aims to understand how recording technologies fit into and influence musicians', as well as listeners', lives. With attention to the details of what it means to play a particular record in a distinct cultural context, Anderson connects neglected genres of the musical canon--classical and easy listening music, Broadway musicals, and sound effects records--with the development of sound aesthetics and technical music practices that leave an indelible imprint on individuals. Tracing the countless impacts that this period of innovation exacted on the mass media, Anderson reveals how an examination of this historical era--and recorded music as an object--furthers a deeper understanding of the present-day American music industry.
Tim J. Anderson is assistant professor of communication at Denison University.

Music and performance provide a unique window into the ways that cultural information is circulated and perceptions are constructed. Because they both require listening, are inherently ephemeral, and most often involve collaboration between disparate groups, they inform cultural perceptions differently from literary or visual art forms, which tend to be more tangible and stable. In Yellowface, Krystyn R. Moon explores the contributions of writers, performers, producers, and consumers in order to demonstrate how popular music and performance has played an important role in constructing Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes. The book brings to life the rich musical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time, Chinese and Chinese American musicians and performers appeared in a variety of venues, including museums, community theaters, and world's fairs, where they displayed their cultural heritage and contested anti-Chinese attitudes. A smaller number crossed over into vaudeville and performed non-Chinese materials. Moon shows how these performers carefully navigated between racist attitudes and their own artistic desires. While many scholars have studied both African American music and blackface minstrelsy, little attention has been given to Chinese and Chinese American music. This book provides a rare look at the way that immigrants actively participated in the creation, circulation, and, at times, subversion of Chinese stereotypes through their musical and performance work.

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of \u201cthe people.\u201d In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated. Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.

This captivating book presents a uniquely comprehensive cultural history of cabaret, where the most radical of artists, poets, writers, musicians, and theater directors have gathered since 1881. Lisa Appignanesi takes us to the original cabaret--the smoke-filled rooms of the Chat Noir in Paris that served as a meeting place for the avant-garde and a laboratory of subversion against the establishment. She then follows the journey of the cabaret across Europe and to the United States, tracing each development in cabaret history to the present day.
This much revised and updated edition of Appignanesi's classic work is enriched with materials that have become more accessible in the post-Soviet era. It also features a variety of new illustrations from both East and West. The book provides a lively look at all aspects of cabaret, where art and entertainment join to mock and provoke, and where radical artistic, literary, and political ideas have found expression for more than 120 years.

..".engaging, richly illustrated, and well-reserached.... Part anthology, cultural studies, history, journalism and political science, it... manages to consistently engage the reader..." - African Studies Review

"Lindfors's book shows how the 'edutainment' of the 19th century perpetuated an ignorance of Africa that makes it easy for whites to stay racist and difficult for blacks to gain an accurate and dignified understanding of their heritage.... an unusually strong, readable collection." Boston Book Review

Ethnological show business that is, the displaying of foreign peoples for commercial and/or educational purposes has a very long history. In the 19th and 20th centuries some of the most interesting individuals and groups exhibited in Europe and America came from Africa, or were said to come from Africa. African showpeople (real as well as counterfeit), managers and impresarios, and the audiences who came to gape are the featured attractions here how they individually and in concert helped to shape Western perceptions of Africans."

In this comprehensive study of women in vaudeville, Alison Kibler reveals how female performers, patrons and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. She focuses on the role of gender in struggles over whether high or low culture would reign in vaudeville, examining women's performances and careers in vaudeville, their status in the expanding vaudeville audience, and their activity in the vaudevillians' labour union. Alison Kibler demonstrates that respectable women were key to vaudeville's success, as entrepreneurs drew women into audiences that had previously been dominated by working-class men and recruited female artists as performers. But, although theatre managers publicly celebrated the cultural uplift of vaudeville and its popularity among women, in reality their houses were often hostile both to female performers and to female patrons and home to women who challenged conventional understandings of respectable behaviour. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville and were implicated in broader attacks on mass culture as well.

In 1936 as Texas prepared to celebrate its centennial--100 years after the Battle of San Jacinto--Dallas was chosen as the site of the official exhibition. Plans were under way for a modest Frontier Days Celebration in Fort Worth--until Star-Telegram publisher and civic booster Amon G. Carter stepped in. Carter considered the naming of Dallas as the official site a gross miscarriage of justice and was determined to get even by mounting a show that would directly rival the official event--and pull tourist dollars into Fort Worth. To put his celebration together Carter hired flamboyant Broadway producer Billy Rose. The result was Fort Worth's Frontier Centennial, an improbable conglomeration of agricultural exhibits, sideshow nudes, an old-time Wild West show, Rose's musicalized circus Jumbo, and a parade of Broadway and vaudeville talent led by feature artiste, stripper Sally Rand. The centerpiece for this extravaganza was the dinner theater, Casa Manana, with the world's largest revolving stage surrounded by a tank of water on which it seemed to float, over twenty fountains, and geysers of water that shot into the air at strategic intervals. The building featured over thirty Spanish-style arches, was 320 feet in length, and contained the world's longest bar, a fact of which Rose was inordinately proud. But it was the revue on this magnificent stage that truly made theatrical history. On opening night, Paul Whiteman raised his baton and two bands swung into the fanfare. There were interpretations of the St. Louis World's Fair, the Paris Exposition of 1925, and Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress Exposition. Texas "Sweetheart Number One" wore a $5,000 gold-mesh gown, and Sally Rand wore only a huge opaline balloon. On opening night when the orchestra played "The Eyes of Texas," the audience rose to its feet singing, whistling, and cheering. "Texans," wrote one critic, "are not given to polite applause." The Frontier Centennial and its sequel, the Frontier Fiesta, closed after only two brief seasons (1936 and 1937), the second season cut short by controversy and lawsuits. Rose left Fort Worth under a cloud, informed by city fathers that his services were no longer needed. Undaunted, he went on to become a multimillionaire with almost legendary status as a theatrical producer. But Fort Worth was never again the same after the Frontier Centennial . . . and memories of that festival linger today, even though the buildings were long ago razed. Today a permanent theater-in-the-round, appropriately named Casa Manana, is located on the centennial grounds. Popular with Fort Worthians, it can only echo the splendor of the original.

Open from 1942 until 1945, the Hollywood Canteen was the most famous of the patriotic home-front nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations. Since the opening night, when the crowds were so thick that Bette Davis had to enter through the bathroom window to give her welcome speech, the storied dance floor where movie stars danced with soldiers has been the subject of much U.S. nostalgia about the "Greatest Generation." Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the wartime nightclub, Sherrie Tucker explores how jitterbugging swing culture has come to represent the war in U.S. national memory. Yet her interviewees' varied experiences and recollections belie the possibility of any singular historical narrative. Some recall racism, sexism, and inequality on the nightclub's dance floor and in Los Angeles neighborhoods, dynamics at odds with the U.S. democratic, egalitarian ideals associated with the Hollywood Canteen and the "Good War" in popular culture narratives. For Tucker, swing dancing's torque--bodies sharing weight, velocity, and turning power without guaranteed outcomes--is an apt metaphor for the jostling narratives, different perspectives, unsteady memories, and quotidian acts that comprise social history.

From New York Times bestselling author of The French Photographer 'A glamorous, transporting read' Woman's Weekly . . . IN 1920s NEW YORK, EVERYONE IS CHASING A DREAM . . . The Roaring 20s - a time for glamour, frivolity and freedom for women. But for Evie Lockhart, a small-town girl who is determined to become one of the first female doctors, it means turning her back on her family and the only life she's ever known. In a desperate attempt to support herself through Columbia University's medical school, Evie auditions for the infamous late-night Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. But if she gets the part, what will it mean for her new relationship with Upper East Side banker Thomas Whitman - a man Evie thinks she could fall for, if only she lived a less scandalous life . . . Captivating and inspirational, A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald is a love story starring a woman ahead of her time, set against the backdrop of Jazz Age New York. Perfect for fans of Lucinda Riley and Kate Furnivall. 'If you're mad about the roaring twenties and all things Gatsby, this romance will have you enchanted' WOMAN'S DAY PRAISE FOR NATASHA LESTER: 'A fantastically engrossing story. I love it' KELLY RIMMER 'Intrigue, heartbreak... I cannot tell you how much I loved this book' RACHEL BURTON 'A gorgeously rich and romantic novel' KATE FORSYTH 'If you enjoy historical fiction (and even if you don't) you will love this book' SALLY HEPWORTH 'Utterly compelling' GOOD READING

Charles Spencer Chaplin was a stage performer before he was a filmmaker, and it was in English music hall that he learned the rudiments of his art. The last film he made in the United States, ""Limelight"", was a tribute to the music hall days of his youth. As a parallel to Chaplin's past, the film was set in 1914, the year he left the musical revue stage for a Hollywood career. This collection of essays examines ""Limelight"", and the history of English music hall. Featuring contributions from the world's top Chaplin and music hall historians, as well as previously unpublished interviews with collaborators who worked on ""Limelight"", the book offers new insight into one of Chaplin's most important pictures, and the British form of entertainment that inspired it. Essays consider how and why Chaplin made ""Limelight"", other artists who came out of English music hall, and the film's international appeal, among other topics. The book is filled with rare photographs, many published for the first time, sourced from the Chaplin archives and the private collections of other performers and co-stars.

Jack Cardiff tells the story of his life in films, first as a cameraman and then as a director. He was one of the first to use the Technicolor film camera, and the book provides a record of how colour cinematography developed in Britain. He also provides a humorous account of his days on the music-hall circuit during the 1920s and '30s, and anecdotes about his experiences photographing actresses such as Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe.

This volume traces the distinct cultural languages in which individual and collective forms of trauma are expressed in diverse variations, including oral and written narratives, literature, comic strips, photography, theatre, and cinematic images. The central argument is that traumatic memories are frequently beyond the sphere of medical, legal, or state intervention. To address these different, often intertwined modes of language, the contributors provide a variety of disciplinary approaches to foster innovative debates and provoke new insights. Prevailing definitions of trauma can best be understood according to the cultural and historical conditions within which they exist. Languages of Trauma explores what this means in practice by scrutinizing varied historical moments from the First World War onwards and particular cultural contexts from across Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa - striving to help decolonize the traditional Western-centred history of trauma, dissolving it into multifaceted transnational histories of trauma cultures.

An engaging history of Ghana s enormously popular concert party theatre.

..". succeeds in conveying the exciting and fascinating character of the concert party genre, as well as showing clearly how this material can be used to rethink a number of contemporary theoretical themes and issues." Karin Barber

Under colonial rule, the first concert party practitioners brought their comic variety shows to audiences throughout what was then the British Gold Coast colony. As social and political circumstances shifted through the colonial period and early years of Ghanaian independence, concert party actors demonstrated a remarkable responsiveness to changing social roles and volatile political situations as they continued to stage this extremely popular form of entertainment. Drawing on her participation as an actress in concert party performances, oral histories of performers, and archival research, Catherine M. Cole traces the history and development of Ghana s concert party tradition. She shows how concert parties combined an eclectic array of cultural influences, adapting characters and songs from American movies, popular British ballads, and local story-telling traditions into a spirited blend of comedy and social commentary. Actors in blackface, inspired by Al Jolson, and female impersonators dramatized the aspirations, experiences, and frustrations of their audiences. Cole s extensive and lively look into Ghana s concert party provides a unique perspective on the complex experience of British colonial domination, the postcolonial quest for national identity, and the dynamic processes of cultural appropriation and social change. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of African performance, theatre, and popular culture.

Catherine M. Cole is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published numerous articles on African theatre and has collaborated with filmmaker Kwame Braun on "passing girl; riverside," a video essay on the ethical dilemmas of visual anthropology.

June 2001
256 pages, 26 b&w photos, 3 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, notes, bibl., index
cloth 0-253-33845-X $49.95 L / 38.00
paper 0-253-21436-X $19.95 s / 15.50"

It's Saturday night in Key West and the Girlie Show is about to begin at the 801 Cabaret. The girls have been outside on the sidewalk all evening, seducing passersby into coming in for the show. The club itself is packed tonight and smoke has filled the room. When the lights finally go down, statuesque blonds and stunning brunettes sporting black leather miniskirts, stiletto heels, and see-through lingerie take the stage. En Vogue's "Free Your Mind" blares on the house stereo. The crowd roars in approval. In this lively book, Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor take us on an entertaining tour through one of America's most overlooked subcultures: the world of the drag queen. They offer a penetrating glimpse into the lives of the 801 Girls, the troupe of queens who perform nightly at the 801 Cabaret for tourists and locals. Weaving together their fascinating life stories, their lavish costumes and eclectic music, their flamboyance and bitchiness, and their bawdy exchanges with one another and their audiences, the authors explore how drag queens smash the boundaries between gay and straight, man and woman, to make people think more deeply and realistically about sex and gender in America today. They also consider how the queens create a space that encourages camaraderie and acceptance among everyday people, no matter what their sexual preferences might be. Based on countless interviews with more than a dozen drag queens, more than three years of attendance at their outrageous performances, and even the authors' participation in the shows themselves, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret is a witty and poignant portrait of gay life and culture. When they said life is a cabaret, they clearly meant the 801.

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of \u201cthe people.\u201d In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated. Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.