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Dan Lowrey's Star of Erin Music Hall

 

Dan Lowrey's Star of Erin Music Hall

This image, from a programme cover, shows the interior of the popular Dublin theater which opened at Crampton Court in 1879 (and with which Joyce was certainly familiar).

The term "music hall" as an art form refers to a type of variety entertainment that flourished in the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century (indeed, echoes of it can even be heard in certain tunes by the Beatles, whose own youth was steeped in that tradition). Music hall performances often featured mixed bills of melodramas, ballads, light opera, popular songs, recitations, sketches, solo turns, and American-style minstrel routines, ranging in tone from the comical to the sentimental to the risqué.

Reconstructed in 1897 as the Empire Theatre of Varieties, Lowrey's music hall still stands as the present-day Olympia Theatre.

As an interesting footnote, Joyce's involvement in the Volta Theatre, Ireland's first cinema (opened in Dublin in 1909), has been well documented by Richard Ellman; however, the first-ever screening of a cinematic film in Ireland took place at the Star of Erin, on April 20, 1896.


Image reproduced from Infinite Variety: Dan Lowrey's Music Hall, 1879-97, by Eugene Watters and Matthew Murtagh (Norwich, Great Britain: Gill and Macmillan Limited, 1975).


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