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A Gaiety Girl
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, and later Rutland Barrington, George Grossmith, Jr., Scott Russell and Letty Lind. It also had a successful three-month Broadway run in 1894, followed by an American tour and a world tour.
Importance in the development of the modern musicalA 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 the same sound one expects from Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, Edwardes called them "musical comedies", leading some writers to incorrectly credit him with inventing a form that Harrigan & Hart had established on Broadway a decade earlier. Although Edwardes was not the true inventor of musical comedy, he was the first to elevate these works to international popularity. According to critic 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."[1] The plot of A Gaiety Girl was a simple intrigue about a stolen comb and included a few tangled romances. Hall's satirical book included lines which jabbed here and there 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. 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. The Gaiety GirlsThe 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 (Sunday, 23 December 1894, p.9a), "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." 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.[2] 
Stage Door Johnnies waiting after A Gaiety Girl
Roles and original London cast
Musical numbers
Poster
ACT II - On the Riviera.
NotesReferences
External links
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