Victorian Theater and The Limelight

In the Victorian period, the expression in the limelight meant the most desirable acting area on the stage, front and center. Today, the expression simply means someone is getting public recognition and acclaim.

The limelight effect was discovered by Goldsmith Gurney in the 1820s based on his work with an oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. Scottish inventor, Thomas Drummond (1797-1840), built a working model of the calcium light in 1826 for use in the surveying profession.

The calcium light was created by super heating a cylinder of quicklime (calcium oxide) with an oxy-hydrogen flame that gives off a bright light with a greenish tint.

Eleven years later, the term limelight was coined to describe a form of stage illumination first used in 1837 for a public performance at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. 

By the 1860s, this new technology of stage lighting was in wide use in theaters and dance halls around the world. It was a great improvement over the previous method of stage lighting, candle powered footlights placed along the stage apron. 

Limelight lanterns could also be placed along the front of the lower balcony for general stage illumination providing more natural light than footlights alone. 

A lighthouse-like lens (Fresnel lens) was developed that could direct and focus concentrated light on the stage to spotlight a solo performance. Actors and performers must have felt they were living in the heyday of the theater.

The term green room has been used since the Victoria period to describe the waiting area performers use before going on stage. Theater lore has it that actors would sit in a room lit by limelight to allow their eyes to adjust to the harsh stage lighting, preventing squinting during their stage entrances.

Although the electric light replaced limelight in theaters by the end of the nineteenth century, the term limelight still exists in show business, as does the term green room.

Today, the green room is used by celebrities before they appear on talk shows, but it is not usually painted green. The room still performs a similar function as in the Victorian age--to prepare a performer to go on stage.

Inside the Mind of The Curious Incident of the Dog

Last week, I saw an amazing play in New York with the most creative use of theater space I've ever seen. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a National Theatre production based on a 2003 mystery novel of the same name by Mark Haddon. The original London production--now running on Broadway--won seven Olivier Awards in 2013. 

What first appears to the audience as the chaotic thoughts and erratic behaviors of a fifteen-year-old male with Asperger syndrome, proves to be a journey through the mind of someone who is a math savant. But this is neither a play about Asperger syndrome nor math. It is about Christopher Boone's investigation into the pitchfork murder of his neighbor's dog that leads to a larger mystery he is determined to solve.

Several days after I saw the play, I was thinking about the inventive set. Duh! It finally struck me. The stage is a representation of Christopher's mind. The mystery unfolds on stage with the background, left and right sides, and the floor configured like graph paper. The open ceiling shows the limitless night sky and the scope of the boy's ambition. The lighting effects and the tech work behind this production are an eye-popping assault on the senses.

This metaphoric construct depicts the inner reality of an autistic teenager who discovers much more than he could ever imagine. He can interpret only the literal and not the figurative. When Christopher sets out in search of his mother, he must interact with the London Underground system for the first time in his life. Navigating the subway for most people is nothing more than a routine nuisance, but for Christopher, it is a harrowing ride towards self-discovery.

I expect this mystery drama will do very well Sunday night at the 2015 Tony Awards. http://www.curiousonbroadway.com/

More Theater Lore

London's oldest active theater site, Theater Royal Drury Lane, opened in 1663 in the early years of the English Reformation. Four theaters have occupied this site over the years. 

The first theater burned down in 1672. It was rebuilt by Christopher Wren and reopened on March 26, 1674. One-hundred and seventeen years later, Irish playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan had the building demolished and opened a larger theater in 1794. That building burned down only fifteen years later in 1809. The current building was rebuilt and reopened in 1812. Presently, it is owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Theater Royal Drury Lane was really the first modern proscenium arch theater which provided a visual frame for the audience with permanent wings to the left and right of the stage to hide and shift scenery on and off the stage.

Learning about theater lore from a backstage tour is a fascinating excursion into the past. On the Royal Drury Lane Theatre tour at Covent Garden in London, the tour includes guides who dress in period costumes as they trade off their docent duties for quick costume changes. 

At one moment, a Victorian cleaning woman comes singing "I could have danced all night" down a staircase with a feather duster, then an eighteenth-century, English nobleman in costume suddenly appears and continues the tour. Next, a woman from the gaslight period comes out in a red dress and tells about how the theater was in her day. The tour is quite entertaining.

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Learning the origins of words from these tours is an article of faith, but because it is lore, I have a willing suspension of disbelief. For instance, I learned that the term "crew" as applied to the backstage crew derives from a little known fact.

In the early nineteenth-century, the new theater owners rebuilt and redesigned the theater once again. They hired out of work sailors who were between sea tours to work backstage; they became known as "the crew." These sailors devised the system of pulleys and battens which raise and lower scenery from the loft above. This innovation created new staging opportunities for playwrights and directors.

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On the Shakespeare's Globe Theater tour, I learned the origin of the term "box office." 

At the various entrances to the original Medieval theaters in the sixteenth-century, patrons would place their pennies in a ceramic box as they entered the theater. These boxes were collected at the box office. The theater owners would "break the bank" there for security reasons.

Today, box offices are where patrons purchase tickets for events, but the term has an additional context also. It has come to be associated with the amount of money a movie or play takes in.

"Good box office" means the production is making money; "box office poison" means the producers are losing money. Weekly and yearly figures are important to the entertainment industry and are reported widely around the world.

Jenny Hilborne - Writer of Mysteries and Psychological Thrillers

I met Jenny Hilborne at a book fair in Solana Beach in April of 2011, when we were sharing a booth and promoting our debut novels. We were both new born to the green wood of publishing.

Jenny is a Brit from Swindon in Wiltshire, England, who has lived in Southern California for the past fifteen years. She still maintains her roots in England, but she now carries a subdued British accent.

She and I hit it off when I told her the subject of my next writing project, a true crime history of the John Norman Collins murders of 1967-69. This time I would try my hand at non-fiction, and I've been buried by my research ever since.

In the meantime, Jenny had just published Madness and Murder, had No Alibi close to publication, and was planning her third novel, Hide and Seek. She has since completed and published her fourth novel, Stone Cold. She is a virtual writing machine.

So far, most of her novels take place in her favorite city, San Francisco, and people familiar with the City by the Bay will recognize the locales. But Jenny went home to the United Kingdom for six months to do research on Stone Cold to enhance its verisimilitude.


"I didn't want to be stereotyped as only writing about the West Coast," Jen said. "I needed to draw inspiration from home, but it was a challenge getting used to British English again." 


Jen says that she enjoyed her research for Stone Cold which got her out of the house and away from her computer screen. While in England, she visited the Cotswolds and Oxfordshire, the settings featured in her latest book.

Check out Jenny's blog: http://jfhilborne.wordpress.com/

Check out her Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Jenny-Hilborne/e/B003YYF5F4/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1365958456&sr=1-2-ent