ABSTRACT
Spectacle in pantomime was directed to the end of fantasy, sometimes darkly grotesque, often excessively pretty and ideally beautiful.1 Aladdin found a new lease of life at the Gaiety Theatre in February, 1882. Although ‘dramatised about five hundred times within the last hundred years or so’ as George Sala noted, Aladdin at the Gaiety delighted because ‘any wearisome suggestion of Arabian Nights Entertainments is not forced’:
Mr Hollingshead dresses his pretty ballerine, not as the ladies in brocaded caftan and baggy trousers, and with ‘golden lily’ feet, are dressed at Pekin or Canton … The damsels of the Flowery Land are not accustomed to exhibit their apparatus of locomotion; but a Gaiety audience demands ‘plenty of Leg’ … I could go to see Aladdin over and over again.2
