Victorian Spectacular Theatre: 1850–1910 by Michael R. Booth, and: The Revolution in German Theatre: 1900–1933 by Michael Patterson (review)

books and company Victorian Spectacular Theatre: 1850-1910. Michael R. Booth. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 190 pp., $29.50 (cloth). The Revolutionin German Theatre: 1900-1933. Michael Patterson. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 232 pp., $29.50 (cloth). Both these valuable and readable volumes are part of the Theatre Production Studies series, under the general editorship of John Russell Brown, Associate Director of Britain's National Theatre and a dramaturg of formidable talent. If these are typical of the others, which include Restoration Theatre, Jacobean Private Theatres, and The Royal Court Theatre: 1965-1972, one would do well to apply for an NEA grant and buy them for the drama bookshelf at home, at college, or at the library. They are packed with detailed information and lively, theatrical anecdote, but they are only slightly less expensive than seeing Nicholas Nickelby. It's astonishing today to see how delighted Broadway and West End audiences are at even the most ordinary kind of stage-trickery or illusionistic scenery. The curtain goes up, revealing a Long Island living-room, and the audience bursts into applause. And yet, a century ago, far more complicated , remarkable stage effects were the rule-and audiences expected them. Booth sketches the beginnings of this fascination with the miracles that lighting, scene-painting, theatre-machinery, and handsome costumes can achieve, especially in the service of a tawdry script. De Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, a miniature theatre of realistic illusions, is cited, as are the historically accurate sets and costumes of Charles Kean's Shakespeare productions, and the beloved transformation scenes of Christmas pantomimes . The magic of instantly turning a market-place into a flaming Hades was nothing new to the Victorians; it had already been perfected in the eighteenth-century court theatres, with chariot-and-pole shifts, set in motion by a great revolving drum beneath the stage and by drums and pulleys overhead. Booth describes a number of impressive productions so 140 well that one wonders if we are not missing a lot of theatrical excitement iri our current miasma of minimality and banal stage realism. (One also recalls the famous Beerbohm Tree Midsummer Night's Dream early in this century, in which Tree had real fireflies, real running water, and real rabbits in his Athenian forest. Booth notes the gradual attraction to scenic design of distinguished English painters, at first aloof from melodrama. Shakespeare productions with finicky archeological reconstruction were effective bait for some noted artists. Victorian spectaculars were not designed merely to please the populace, they seem to have delighted the London and provincial theatre public at all levels of sophistication, as Booth stresses. Henry Irving's 1885 Faust is discussed in detail, as is Tree's 1910 Henry V1II. Booth's style is anecdotal and direct, making these forgotten productions come to life. Patterson is a less lively writer, but no less interesting in the amount and kind of production detail and anecdote he provides. He is also intent on establishing the philosophical, technical, and social forces which generated the German theatre revolution, culminating in Expressionism and its expressions, Abstractionist Theatre and Primitivist Theatre, as well as the later developments of Piscator's theatre and Brecht's elaboration of Epic Theatre. Major plays in production, such as Kaiser's From Morning till Midnight and Toller's Transfiguration, are given close attention, as are Piscator's Hoppla, Such Is Life!, and Brecht's Man Equals Man. One very valuable feature of Patterson's book is a chronology of important play productions from 1900 up to the Nazi seizure of power. Glenn Loney Musical Comedy in America. Cecil Smith and Glenn Litton. Theatre Arts Books, 367 pp., $14.95 (paper). This is a book in two parts. The first, by Cecil Smith, is a reprint of his 1950 edition of the same title and covers musical comedy from The Black Crook to South Pacific. The second part, by Glenn Litton, is a 1981 updating, covering musicals from The King and I to Sweeney Todd. Neither author was nor is a theatre historian so this is far from being a scholarly examination . Both parts of this book are rather an enthusiastic labor of love, full of inspired description, value judgements, and commentary that compel...