Look at the Record: An Album of Toronto’s Lyric Theatres compiled and annotated

Abstract

Joan Parkhill Baillie lists herself not as writer of a book, but as compiler of an album. This is appropriate, for Look at the Record is primarily composed of pictorial reproductions of 50 physical spaces in Toronto in which “lyric” performance took place, accompanied by reproductions of newspaper clippings, advertisements, playbills, and an occasional correspondence meant to give some sense of what such performance was like in each space. It is a scrapbook, in which no apparent attempt has been made at critical analysis or historical narrative. In general, documents are arranged chronologically by first performance of lyric theatre in a particular physical space, and are accompanied by a brief statement concerning the construction of each building, a sample of productions or companies and the years in which they appeared. If Parkhill Baillie’s purpose was to convince the general reader of lyric theatre’s importance to Toronto’s history, I believe even the most unregenerate music-hater would surrender under the sheer weight of the documentation.