| A Gaiety Girl | |
| Music: | Sidney Jones |
| Lyrics: | Harry Greenbank |
| Productions: | 1893 West End |
A Gaiety Girl is an English musical comedy in two acts by a team of musical comedy neophytes: Owen Hall (book, on an outline by James T. Tanner), Harry Greenbank (lyrics) and Sidney Jones (music). It opened at Prince of Wales Theatre in London, produced by George Edwardes, on 14 October 1893 (later transferring to Daly's Theatre) and ran for 413 performances. The show starred C. Hayden Coffin, Louie Pounds, Decima Moore, Eric Lewis, W. Louis Bradfield, and later Rutland Barrington, George Grossmith, Jr., Scott Russell, Huntley Wright and Marie Studholme. Topsy Sinden and later Letty Lind danced in the piece. Choreography was by Willie Warde. Percy Anderson designed the Japanese costumes for the musical, while the non-Japanese costumes were supplied by leading fashion houses.[1] Blanche Massey was one of the Gaiety Girls in the piece. It also had a successful three-month Broadway run in 1894, followed by an American tour and a world tour.
A Gaiety Girl followed Tanner's and Edwardes's success with In Town (1892), and would lead to a series of musicals produced by Edwardes that would pack the Gaiety Theatre for decades. Although the earliest of these shows have a score similar in character to Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, Edwardes called them "musical comedies", leading some writers to incorrectly credit him with inventing a form that Harrigan & Hart and others had established on Broadway a decade or more earlier. Although Edwardes was not the true inventor of musical comedy, he was the first to elevate these works to international popularity. According to musical theatre writer Andrew Lamb, "The British Empire and America began to fall for the appeal of the British musical comedy from the time when A Gaiety Girl was taken on a world tour in 1894."[2]
The plot of A Gaiety Girl is a simple intrigue about a stolen comb and includes a few tangled romances, "a crazy quilt of mistaken identity, imposters, villains, class barriers, and a day at the beach, elements that showed up in dozens of musicals in London and New York in subsequent seasons."[3] Hall's satirical book includes lines which jab at society conventions in the style of an upmarket gossip columnist. The smart society back-chat irritated several people in high places in London who wrote to Edwardes asking for alterations. The public, on the other hand, loved it, even when the Reverend Brierly, a character depicted as a man of doubtful moral rectitude, was demoted, after pressure from Lambeth Palace, to being just plain Dr. Brierly. Satire is also directed, among other things, at the army, and the story ridicules a judge of the divorce court, which caused some controversy.[4]
A Gaiety Girl's success confirmed Edwardes on the path he was taking. He immediately set Hall, Jones and Greenbank to work on their next show, An Artist's Model. A Gaiety Girl led to some fourteen copies (including The Shop Girl, The Circus Girl and A Runaway Girl), which were very successful in England for the next two decades, and were widely imitated by other producers and playwriting teams.[3]
See main article: Gaiety Girls. The show's popularity depended, in part, on the beautiful "Gaiety Girls" dancing chorus appearing onstage in bathing attire and in the latest fashions. According to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, "The piece is a mixture of pretty girls, English humor, singing, dancing and bathing machines and dresses of the English fashion. The dancing is a special feature of the performance, English burlesques giving much more attention to that feature of their attractiveness than the American entertainments of the same grade do."[5] The 1890s Gaiety Girls were polite, well-behaved young women, respectable and elegant, unlike the corseted actresses from the earlier burlesques. They became a popular attraction and a symbol of ideal womanhood. Many of the best-known London couturiers designed costumes for stage productions by the 1890s, particularly for the Gaiety Girls. The illustrated periodicals were eager to publish photographs of the actresses in the latest stage hits, and so the theatre became an excellent way for clothiers to publicise their latest fashions.[6]
The young ladies appearing in George Edwardes's shows became so popular that wealthy gentlemen, termed "Stage Door Johnnies", would wait outside the stage door hoping to escort them to dinner. In some cases, a marriage into society and even the nobility resulted. Alan Hyman, an expert on burlesque theatre who penned the 1972 book The Gaiety Years, wrote:
ACT I – The Cavalry Barracks at Winbridge.
ACT II – On the Riviera.