CHARLOTTE SWEET
Books and Lyrics by Michael Colby;
Music by Gerald Jay Markoe
Music hall was for Britain what vaudeville was for an earlier America and what a TV variety show often still is: a potpourri of songs, sketches and buffoonery so good-naturedly crude that it becomes accepted as the quintessential wholesome family entertainment. Few in England remember music hall; in America, even fewer have heard anything beyond the comic ditties that used to serve to round out the hour on PBS after episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. Yet with the passion of theater people for unearthing every oddment of stage history, an off-Broadway team...