St Nicolas Players

Note from the Directors ...

"Since moving to Lincolnshire 7 years ago, Music Hall Memories has been dreamed and planned over many a dining room table conversation. For many years we have been involved with Music Hall shows up and down the country and we are very grateful to St Nics' committee for offering us this opportunity to bring our expertise to the society.  We want this production to spark a love of Music Hall within the society and ensure the old songs and performers are not forgotten. 

To get things off the ground we had to find a pianist and we were fortunate to find two,  Jacqueline  Kemp and Liz Mackay. They found the music demanding to say the least. Much of the music has not been available to the public for many years.  Often hand written remembered music and sketchy bars of dots have been poured over and practised before we even got to the rehearsal room.

From the first rehearsal we have endeavoured to coach the cast about the characters and history of the Music Hall.  For instance did you know the words Music Hall came from the room a landlord built on to his pub specifically to encourage people to spend more time and money at his establishment.  The chairman was usually the landlord himself and he called ‘order order’ not to call order to the room but to persuade the punters to buy more beer. Refusing to bring on the next act or turn encouraged them to order again and again. 

One of the hardest decisions was matching songs and characters to the individual cast members. We had a good idea of what each member was interested in after the auditions and set about creating a programme with a good mix of songs and monologues.  The finished show promises colour, laughter and audience participation for which the Music Hall was renowned.  We thank the cast and committee for their hard work and dedication to this project.

We decided to produce a song sheet for every audience member to encourage them to join in and sing along. Some of the cockney melodies may be known and remembered by many, yet we have songs with catchy tunes that are easy to sing along to. Some may evoke memories of family party times. The Playbill style posters and Song Sheets we produced to emulate original Victorian/Edwardian style Music Hall publicity. We are very grateful to Hannah Pilkington for the photographic input. We would like to thank Steve (It’s a Wonder) Underwood for bringing in the lighting and sound.  It is quite a task to set up in a community hall.  Although a lovely space for Music Hall and more intimate than the larger theatre it presents its own technical challenges."