Restoration spectacular

Spectaculars, or elaborately staged "machine plays", hit the London public stage for the first time in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. The Restoration spectacular has always had a bad reputation, starting with the contemporary critic and dramatist John Dryden, as the epitome of bad taste and a threat to the witty, dialogue-driven "legitimate" Restoration drama. However, these shows drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted.

Related Topics:
Restoration - Scenery - Baroque illusionistic painting - Special effects - Trapdoor - Fireworks - John Dryden - Restoration drama

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Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes defined as a specific genre of "English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre at all (see Hume, 205). Only a handful works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as evidenced by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys. The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as Dryden's Albion and Albanius would involve a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like Thomas Shadwell's Psyche or Dryden's King Arthur would put it comfortably in the black for a long time.

Related Topics:
Court - Masque - Opera - Genre - Samuel Pepys - Albion and Albanius - 1684 - 85 - Thomas Shadwell - Psyche - 1674 - 75 - King Arthur - 1690 - 91

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