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Examples

  • League members vowed to stop the Irish from practicing “pure music-hall dancing,” an “un-Irish style that should not be tolerated.”

    A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

  • And Maureen Lipman uses not only her arch dryness of voice, but an almost music-hall physical dexterity: as she bobs and straightens, as if hit by each new revelation, there's a hint of the upstart beneath her satin-clad, stately-as-a-galleon bosom.

    Men Should Weep; Blasted; When We Are Married Susannah Clapp 2010

  • It's all incoherent, from the huge, elaborate sets to the mixed-bag costumes—Mime is decked out like a music-hall comedian with a curly yellow wig; Wotan gets top hat, tuxedo and opera cape; and German tenor Torsten Kerl, as Siegfried, should have refused the tight, belted overalls that make him look like an overgrown, rotund schoolboy— surely contender for the most unflattering costume of the year.

    Misjudged Siegfried Is No Laughing Matter Judy Fayard 2011

  • In his famous essay "Charles Dickens" 1939, George Orwell maintained that, 70 years after Dickens's death, a comedian who went on to a music-hall stage and imitated one of his major characters would stand a fair chance of having his imitation recognized.

    The Game Is Always Afoot D.J. Taylor 2011

  • The occupied English grumble about the disruption to cricket and the theatre caused by the invaders, but this is resolved when the German and Russian commanders agree to appear as music-hall acts.

    November Books 20) The Swoop, or How Clarence Saved England, by P.G. Wodehouse nwhyte 2009

  • It's a typically riotous mix of oompah music-hall cavortings, slurred-pitch Middle Eastern rhapsodising, luxuriously sensuous clarinet love-songs, and stormy collective blasts reminiscent of the 1960s John Coltrane quartet.

    Gilad Atzmon Orient House Ensemble: The Tide Has Changed John Fordham 2010

  • At times, Zanganeh achieves not so much ventriloquism in the occultic sense as the distorted imitation of speech of a music-hall dummy.

    The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh – review 2011

  • While it is the sheer physicality of Mr. Hurt's performance that impresses most—he totters about the stage with the squeaky-shoed grace of the music-hall clowns that Beckett loved—you will be no less stunned by the sound of his creaky, rusty voice, which suggests a hermit who never has occasion to speak a word aloud for months at a time.

    The End Of the Line Terry Teachout 2011

  • As scantily clad cabaret dancers apply false eyelashes, Mr. Burke sums up the influences behind his brand of Chap-Hop: Public Enemy's Chuck D, Noel Coward and British music-hall star George Formby.

    In 'Chap-Hop,' Gentlemen Rappers Bust Rhymes About Tea, Cricket Frances Robinson 2011

  • Jean-Sébastien Coté deftly inserted into his own score, which includes a lot of oriental drumming and twanging, appropriately moving baroque music for violin, cello and keyboards by J.S. and C.P.E. Bach, Antonio Soler, and the Chevalier Saint-Georges—who shows up as a character onstage, in an English music-hall "duel" with the aging, indigent and apparently female d'Éon.

    A Life in Multiple Roles: Lepage's Enigmatic Dance David Littlejohn 2011

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