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.

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).