NEWCASTLE'S MUSICAL HERITAGE AN INTRODUCTION By ...

Musical Comedy as we came to know it and proved a success in Newcastle as
did the London Gaiety Co. itself, which was to return over many more seasons.
Opera seasons appeared to fall off slightly as the century closed but before we
leave the Theatre Royal of the ‘Naughty Nineties’ and make our way to other
theatres in town we might allow ourselves a peak into the next century, when a
dashing young man, whose father had made a fortune from selling Beecham’s
Pills, came in October 1910 with his Opera Comique Co. and an orchestra of
forty musicians and one hundred artist under the direction of a young conductor,
Hamish MacCunn, and presented for the first time in Newcastle, two brilliant
musical productions; ’Tales of Hoffmann’ by Offenbach and ‘A Viennese
Masquerade’ by Johann Strauss. No, not a forgotten Strauss gem but an English
version of Die Fledermaus.
The Journal for November 18th 1910 reported:
‘The Beecham Season at the Newcastle Theatre Royal has fulfilled our highest
expectations and the public has displayed so much enthusiasm over the two
charming examples of opera comique that I think we are justified in calling upon
Mr Thomas Quinlan to redeem his promise and pay us a return visit. Perhaps it
will be found possible to extend the repertoire on a subsequent visit, this weeks
audience have certainly proved the demand for light, dainty, tuneful music when
it is capably presented’
This reflects the enthusiasm of the town’s theatre goers and music lovers, who
had probably been smitten by the George Edwardes presentation, two years
earlier, of the sensational play with music (as it was then described) ‘The Merry
Widow’ by Franz Lehar. This was to prove the most famous of all operettas. First
produced in Vienna in 1905 and only one year after its first presentation in
Newcastle it would chalk up 18,000 performances worldwide with 1,365 of them
in England. It would have been translated into thirteen languages and produced
in thirty countries including Turkey, Persia, Japan, China Hindustan and Serbia. It
should come as no surprise, therefore, to read that it was repeated at the Theatre
Royal for the next two seasons and probably more, and was the first of a spate of
plays with music, from the Continent, that would become known under the
generic title, Viennese Operetta and provide the music world with some of the
most beautiful melodies ever written. Italian Opera, however, was not entirely
dead and at The Royal in April 1912, Sig. Cavaliere Castellano and his Italian
Opera Co was presenting a short season. But what might be generally regarded
as the home of opera in Newcastle was not The Royal but the Tyne Theatre and
Opera House on Westgate Road.
The Tyne Theatre opened its doors on 23 rd September 1867 and for half a
century thereafter would serve as the town’ Opera House. In a general survey of
opera theatre, limited as it is here to a few paragraphs, it is difficult to decide
which is the more important - the opera or the singers. In the case of the Tyne
Theatre it was both. Within a few years of the theatre’s opening the world
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