“Music Hall” Welcome And Entertaining

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31922, 25 February 1969, Page 12

“Music Hall” Welcome And Entertaining

(By

Garry Arthur)

The N.Z.B.C.’s “Music Hall” will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it very entertaining. I haven’t had such a good laugh since I saw a close relative singing “Hl Walk Beside You” at a country concert many years ago.

“Music Hall” is clean and wholesome, which the genuine old-time music hall was certainly not, but it probably loses nothing by that lapse from authenticity. It is a chance for outrageous exaggeration and overacting, and is evidently providing a lot of fun for the cast. Perhaps their main fault is that some of the singers are too restrained—but inhibitions will probably fade as the series progresses. In its hey-day, music hall must have been the ultimate in public entertainment. It was rollicking and rumbustious, and took audience participation so far as to amount almost to a “multilogue.” Community singing in the Dunedin town hall and rhythmic clapping at folk concerts is about as close as we come to that sort of thing today. Perhaps there is a case for a music hall revival. Oldfashioned melodrama in coffee houses has enjoyed great popularity in Melbourne and Sydney in recent years, playing such chestnuts as “East Lynne” to appreciative audiences that take immense delight in booing and hissing at the villain. This was a minor weakness in the N.Z.B.C. production. Melodrama calls for conspiratorial exchanges between the villain and the audience, with appropriate twirling of moustaches, flourishing of capes and urgent warnings from the pit to the teensy-voiced heroine, who is invariably in danger of a fate worse than death.

“Music Hall's" little melodrama was very successful, but the audience's devastating witticisms (“Get on with it, mate.”) struck the wrong note completely. This was a programme where the costumed audience needed to be rehearsed in its role. Melodrama means complete commitment to the story, and when—for example—in “East Lynne” the distracted matron shrieks the immortal lines “Dead, dead, and never called

Television

me ‘Mother’ !” the audience, too, should be convulsed with grief. If this deficiency can be corrected, the N.Z.B.C.’s “Music Hall” will be almost completely authentic. The sets and costumes have been carefully chosen, and the master of ceremonies in his little box at the side of the stage proved to be an amusing and resourceful link between the performers and the patrons. “Music Hall” is a welcome diversion while we wait for the N.Z.B.C. to bring “Town and Around,” "Compass” and other homegrown features back from their long holidays. There seems no good reason why “Town and Around,” for instance, should take such a long rest. It will not resume until early in March, a break of more than two months. The reason, I am told, is that television, like newspapers, observes the annual “silly season.” This is the time of year when most people are on holiday and news sources are hard to find,

but it could hardly be said to continue beyond the end of January. In the meantime, the “Town and Around” team is busy filming whatever it can find and *ockpiling material for use during the year. The visit of the Duke of Devonshire, the chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society, is one event that has been filed away, but it will have whiskers on it by the time Channel 3 is able to use it. In any case. “Town and Around” is not designed to disseminate news as it happens. It is officially a news support programme, and there must be plenty of material that it could have been showing us this month. Instead we’ve had to put up with repeats of “canned” programmes that have been screened before.