used on a dark stage, and
lights only the singer's head and shoulders. The focus lights the
complete figure. The flood covers the stage. Each of these is worked in
conjunction with eight or nine shaded films placed before the arc light.
Here is a typical lighting-plot, used by a prominent star:--

First Song. Symph.; all up stage and house. Focus for my entrance.
White perches and battens for first chorus. Then black out, and
gallery green focus for dance, changing to ruby at cue, and white
floods at chord off.

The limelight man never sees the show. In his little cupboard, he hears
nothing but the hissing of his arcs and the tinkle of the
stage-manager's prompting bell at the switchboard which controls every
light in the theatre, before and behind. He has to watch every movement
of the artist who is on, but what he or she is doing or saying, he does
not know. He is, perhaps, the only man who has never laughed at Little
Tich.

John Davidson, I think, wrote a series of poems under the title of "In a
Music Hall," but these were mainly philosophical, and neither he nor
others seem to have appreciated the _colour_ of the music-hall. It is
the most delicate of all essences of pleasure, and we owe it to the free
hand that is given to the limelight man. You get, perhaps, a girl in
white, singing horribly or dancing idiotically, but she is dancing in
white against a deep blue curtain filigreed with silver, and the whole
flooded in amber light. And yet there are those who find the London
music-hall dull!

The modern music-hall band, too, is a hard-working and poorly
remunerated concern; and in many cases it really is a band and it does
make music. It is hard at it for the whole of the evening, with no break
for refreshment unless there be a sketch in the bill. There are, too,
the matinees and the rehearsal every Monday at noon. The boys must be
expert performers, and adaptable to any emergency. Often when a number
cannot turn up, a deputy has to be called in by 'phone. The band seldom
knows what the deputy will sing; there is no opportunity for rehearsal;
and sometimes they have not even an idea of the nature of the turn until
band parts are put in. This means that they must read at sight, that the
conductor must follow every movement of the artist, in order to catch
his spasmodic cues for band or patter, and that the boys must keep one
eye on music they have never seen before, and the other on their