A Gaiety Girl
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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 George Grossmith, Jr. and Scott Russell. It also had a successful three-month Broadway run, followed by an American tour.
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[edit] Importance in the development of the modern musical
This 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.
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.
[edit] The Gaiety Girls
The show's popularity depended, in part, on the beautiful "Gaiety Girls" chorus appearing onstage in bathing attire. The Gaiety Girls were fashionable, elegant young ladies, unlike the corseted actresses from the burlesques. 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."
Gaiety girls were polite, well-behaved young women, who were much sought after by the "stage door johnnies" of the 1890s--some of them becoming popular actresses or marrying into society and even the nobility. They became a popular attraction and a symbol of ideal womanhood. Alan Hyman wrote in The Gaiety Years,
- At the old Gaiety in the Strand the chorus was becoming a matrimonial agency for girls with ambitions to marry into the peerage and began in the nineties when Connie Gilchrist, a star of the Old Gaiety, married the Earl of Orkney and then in 1901, the Marquess of Headfort married Rosie Boote, who had charmed London the previous year when she sang Maisie in The Messenger Boy. After Connie Gilchrist and Rosie Boote had started the fashion a score of the Guv'nor's budding stars left him to marry peers or men of title while other Gaiety Girls settled for a banker or a stockbroker. The Guv’nor finding this was playing ducks and drakes with his theatrical plans had a 'nuptial clause' inserted in every contract.... Debutantes were competing with the other girls to get into the Gaiety chorus while upper-class youths were joining the ranks of the chorus boys.[1]
[edit] Roles
- Charles Goldfield
- Major Barclay
- Bobbie Rivers
- Harry Fitzwarren
- Romney Farquhar
- Sir Lewis Gray
- Lance
- Auguste
- Dr. Montague Brierly
- Rose Brierly
- Lady Edytha Aldwyn
- Miss Gladys Stourton
- Hon. Daisy Ormsbury
- Lady Grey
- Alma Somerset
- Cissy Verner
- Haidee Walton
- Ethel Hawthorne
- Mina
- Lady Virginia Forest
[edit] Musical numbers
ACT I - The Cavalry Barracks at Winbridge.
- No. 1 - Opening Chorus - "When a masculine stranger goes by, array'd in a uniform smart..."
- No. 2 - Chorus & Song - Sir Lewis - "O sing a welcome fair to Mr. Justice Grey." & "I'm a judge..."
- No. 3 - Song - Goldfield - "Beneath the skies of summer sweet I linger where two pathways meet..."
- No. 4 - Chorus & Concerted Piece - "Here come the ladies who dazzle Society..."
- No. 5 - Song - Lady Virginia & Chorus - "I am favourably known as a high-class chaperone..."
- No. 6 - Concerted Piece, with Girls & Major - "To the barracks we have come..."
- No. 7 - Duett - Dr. Brierly & Rose - "Oh, my daughter, there's a creature known as man..."
- No. 8 - Trio - Lady Virginia, Sir Lewis & Dr. Brierly - "When once I get hold of a good-looking He..."
- No. 9 - Song - Dr. Brierly - "Little Jimmy was a scholar and his aptitude was such..." (five verses)
- No. 10 - Waltz
- No. 11 - Song - Goldfield - "Oh, we take him from the city or the plough..." (four verses)
- No. 12 - Finale Act I - "To my judicial mind there's not a doubt..."
ACT II - On the Riviera.
- No. 13 - Introduction and Opening Chorus - "Here on sunlit sands daintily we figure..."
- No. 14 - Concerted piece - "That ladies cannot bathe, if so they please, without encount'ring creatures such as these..."
- No. 15 - Trio - Rivers, Fitzwarren & Goldfield - "Buck up, buck up, old chappie!..."
- No. 16 - Song - Mina - "When your pride has had a tumble, and you've set your cap too high..."
- No. 17 - Trio - Sir Lewis, Dr. Brierly & Lady Virginia - "When in town you're safely landed, and the doctor far away..."
- No. 18 - Duet - Rivers & Rose - "Unlucky the morn on which I was born the youngest of several brothers..."
- No. 19 - Trio - Lady Edytha, Gladys & another - "We're awfully anxious to join in the fun..."
- No. 20 - Carnival Chorus - "Let folly reign supreme today, for carnival is holding sway..."
- No. 21 - Song - Rivers & Chorus - "Mesdames, messieurs, je suis Pierrot. (I'm nothing of the sort, you know...) "
- No. 22 - Song - Goldfield - "Sunshine above, and sunshine in my heart! Laughter and love hold carnival today..."
- No. 23 - Finale Act II - "I find it's really better far to keep my pranks for Bench and Bar..."
