Owen Hall

Owen Hall (10 April 1853 – 9 April 1907) was the principal pen name of the Irish-born theatre writer, racing correspondent, theatre critic and solicitor, James Davis, when writing for the stage. After his successive careers in law and journalism, Hall wrote the librettos for a series of extraordinarily successful musical comedies in the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s, including A Gaiety Girl, An Artist's Model, The Geisha, A Greek Slave and Florodora. Despite his achievements, Hall was constantly in financial distress because of his gambling and extravagant lifestyle; his pseudonym was a pun on "owing all".

Life and career Born in a Jewish household, Hall was the eldest son of an English dentist who practised in Dublin and later became a portrait photographer in London, Hyman Davis (1824–1875), and his wife Isabella (1824–1900), whose maiden name was also Davis. The Davis family returned to London in the 1850s, Among his eight siblings were Julia, a successful novelist under the name "Frank Danby", who married businessman Arthur Frankau and was the mother of the author Gilbert Frankau and the comedian Ronald Frankau and grandmother of the novelist Pamela Frankau and the actress Rosemary Frankau; Eliza, who was the journalist "Mrs. Aria" and long-time lover of the actor Henry Irving; Harrie (1864–1920), who became a journalist in the US; and Florence ("Florette") a novelist who married Marcus E. Collins, brother of Arthur Collins, the manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

In the 1870s, Hall (still known as James Davis) married Esther Josephine (née Da Costa Andrade, 1854–1946) and had three children, Isabelle Davis (1877–1935), Hyman Davis (1878–1950) and Dorothy Davis (1880–1963). Isabel married Gerald Benjamin, the son of mayor Benjamin Benjamin of Melbourne, in 1912. Hyman married Helen Davis (so she didn't change surname) in 1914. Dorothy married a Belgian diplomat, Baron Marie-Georges-Gérard-Léon le Maire de Warzée d'Hermalle (1877–1931), and wrote of her travels in Persia, Peeps into Persia (1913), under the name of Dorothy de Warzée.

Early career

After practising from 1874 to 1886 as a solicitor, Hall gave up the law in favour of journalism, starting a newspaper called Pan, which "went to popularity and thence through an inexperienced direction to death", after which he "owned and edited in turn The Bat [1885–87], The Cuckoo and The Phoenix [after 1899], whilst writing industriously [and caustically] for The Sporting Times many paragraphs on ... racing, and dramatic criticisms, under the signature 'Stalled Ox'." He was assistant editor of Galignani's Messenger from 1888 to 1890. Hall was, for a time, interested in politics and ran (unsuccessfully) against the Liberal statesman Charles Russell for the Parliamentary seat of Dundalk in the 1880 election.

The change of career from critic to librettist came after he expressed a harsh view of a George Edwardes production, In Town (1892); the producer challenged Hall to do better. The result was the hit of the West End theatre season, A Gaiety Girl (1893), with music by Sidney Jones and lyrics by Harry Greenbank. Hall's satirical book included lines that jabbed in the style of an upmarket gossip columnist. The smart society back-chat was very popular with audiences, and A Gaiety Girl has a claim to being the first true musical comedy. Hall's next libretto was for An Artist's Model (1895), another success for the same writing team. He repeated the snappy dialogue style of the previous work, but joined it with a romantic plot, which Hall added at the last minute after Edwardes hired the star Marie Tempest, for whom Hall quickly wrote a new role. The result established the formula for two further extraordinary successes by Hall and his collaborators at Daly's Theatre. The next collaboration for Hall, Jones and Greenbank was another popular work for Daly's, A Greek Slave (1898). She wrote that, during his bankruptcy proceedings, Hall quipped irreverently: "Now I know that my Receiver liveth". His nephew Gilbert recalled that Hall said: "You can trust me with anything except a pretty girl or a sovereign."

Hall wrote several more works in the new century, including two more musicals for Davis: The Silver Slipper (1901) with Stuart, and the unsuccessful The Medal and the Maid (1903) with Jones. For Edwardes, he wrote "perhaps the most delightful of all his libretti" and his last big success, The Girl from Kays (1902), and later The Little Cherub (1906). A 1904 piece was Sergeant Brue, written with Liza Lehmann.