Surviving documents feature a trove of genre experimentation, including dialogues and epitaphs, poems and songs, and farces and satires.
In a public ceremony to mark the closure of the pool and Turkish baths, built in 1927 to promote better health and the enjoyment of swimming for Newcastle's people, a local poet, Bill Herbert, wrote a song about "the farce of the Olympic legacy" to the tune of Blaydon Races.
Schikaneder began his career as an actor with a small traveling company performing the improvised farce and song then popular, but by age 22 he had written and starred in his first operetta.
Extended moments of farce, cheesy songs and talking dogs, emblematic characters and place names (Benny Profane, San Narciso, Webb Traverse, the escapist webspace in BleedingEdge called DeepArcher): all of this anticness grants us an inch of real autonomy, amidst the choking over-determination.
The English burlesque (a more satirical version of the extravaganza) and the burletta (a farce with songs) were also popular forms of the time, as was their French counterpart, the vaudeville, which paved the way for the operetta.
A raucous combination of farce, Elvis songs and Titus Andronicus, Lee Hall's early play, written long before Billy Elliot and The Pitman Painters, still bears all his hallmarks: a rare generosity of spirit and an ability to mix humour and tragedy and walk the line between the vulgar and the beautiful.
(Scott) *'THE CONSTANT GARDENER' (R, 129 minutes) A superior thriller with a conscience, from John le Carré's novel.( Scott) 'CÔTE D'AZUR (CRUSTACÉS & COQUILLAGES)' (No rating, 90 minutes, in French) This pansexual French sex farce embellished with songs is neither funny nor sexy nor enlightening in the manner of the traditional Gallic sex comedy.
A romantic farce adorned by the songs of Sidney Jones, it was successfully exported to New York in the same year.
Next month the New York Festival of Song introduces "Lucrezia," based on the sex farce "Mandragora" ("Mandrake Root") by Machiavelli, better known as the author of "The Prince".
The city had hundreds of performance spaces, indoors and open air, offering a full menu of theatrical genres from fantasy epics to topical farces and song-and-dance vaudevilles, the forerunners of Chinese opera and kung fu films.
