Entertainment in London - Restoration Spectacular, Vauxhall Gardens, Windmill Theatre, Almack's, the Cock Tavern Theatre, List of London Venues (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 38. Chapters: Restoration spectacular, Vauxhall Gardens, Windmill Theatre, Almack's, The Cock Tavern Theatre, List of London venues, Pantheon, London, Finborough Theatre, Canterbury Music Hall, Queen's Theatre, Long Acre, Oxford Music Hall, RampART, BBC Radio 2 Electric Proms, Party at the Palace, Ranelagh Gardens, Royal Surrey Gardens, Chelsea Theatre, Holophusikon, Jacksons Lane, Exeter Exchange, Gutshot Poker Club, Cremorne Gardens, London, Bartholomew Fair, London Festival Fringe, List of former theatres in London, City of London Festival, The Cans Festival, Cuper's Gardens, The Town & Country Club, Astley's Amphitheatre, GLASSsHRIMP. Excerpt: The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged "machine play," hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted. Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera." However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre at all. Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera," as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys. The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic ...