George Edwardes

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George Edwardes

George Joseph Edwardes (born as Edwards) (October 14, 1855 – October 4, 1915) was an English theatre manager who brought a new era in musical comedy to the British stage and beyond.

1 Life and career
- 1.1 Early career
- 1.2 Popularising musical comedy
2 Notes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Life and career

[edit] Early career

Edwardes was born at Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England. He worked first at Daly's Theatre and then at the Gaiety Theatre in London. He was Richard D'Oyly Carte's manager at the Opera Comique beginning in 1875 and became Carte's first managing director of the Savoy Theatre in 1881, helping to produce several of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas until 1885. It was while working at the Opera Comique that Edwardes met his future wife, Julia Gwynne, whom he brought to the D'Oyly Carte organisation, where she became a principal player. The couple married in 1885 and produced a daughter (Dorothy) and a son (D'Arcy).

Souvenir programme from Ruy Blas and the Blase Roue

In 1885, Edwardes became joint manager with John Hollingshead at the Gaiety, producing burlesques, like Little Jack Sheppard (many with music by Meyer Lutz), in which the Gaiety had specialized. In 1886, Hollingshead retired, and from then on the Guv’nor (as he came to be known) was in charge, with Nellie Farren's assistance.

The first show that Edwardes produced at the Gaiety was Dorothy (1886), a comic opera similar to those he had produced for Carte, but the Gaiety's audiences were used to burlesques, and so Edwardes continued to produce those popular pieces, including Faust up to Date (1888), Ruy Blas and the Blase Roue (1889), Carmen up to Data (1890).^[1] and Cinder Ellen up too Late (1891). However, Dorothy's runaway success (it became the longest-running hit in musical theatre up to that time) showed Edwardes and others that topical, light comedies could be enormously successful. At the same time, the death of Fred Leslie and retirement of Nellie Farren by 1892 helped bring to an end the era of Gaiety burlesque.

Edwardes produced shows at other theatres as well. For instance, after Gilbert and Sullivan stopped working together exclusively in the 1890s, Edwardes produced Gilbert's His Excellency at the Lyric Theatre in 1894. He also became manager of the struggling Empire Theatre, London, and transformed it into a music hall before it became associated with several sucessfull ballets under the composer-director Leopold Wenzel.^[2]

[edit] Popularising musical comedy

In the 1890s, Edwardes hit upon a new strategy for the Gaiety, which was a variation from the kinds of shows that he and Carte had produced. Like Thomas German Reed and W. S. Gilbert before him, Edwardes wanted to produce musical plays that were more respectable (and would attract a more affluent, polite crowd) and involved more continuity of plot than simple burlesque. But Edwardes sought pieces that integrated spoken dialogue and music in a lighter, less satiric way, with a more modern style, including topical songs and sassy byplay between the characters.

Poster for A Gaiety Girl

Although the earliest of these shows, taking a cue from Dorothy, had the same musical sound one expects from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, Edwardes called them "musical comedies" and incorporated some of the elements of the form that Harrigan & Hart had established on Broadway a decade earlier. Edwardes was the first producer to elevate these works to international popularity. In short, Edwardes popularised musical comedy in London. He used the best writers and composers to create entertainments appealing to the Victorian and Edwardian audiences. Although he never acted in his productions, Edwardes controlled every other aspect of them. He was later knighted for his work in the theatre.

[edit] The Gaiety Theatre

Souvenir - 1st anniversary performance of The Shop Girl

At the Gaiety Theatre, where Edwardes hired Ivan Caryll as the resident composer and music director, Edwardes created a series of shows featuring fashionable characters, tuneful music, romantic lyrics and pretty dancing. He embedded all of these in an often tenuous but nonetheless continuous narrative, and the shows were further unified by the score and book written expressly for the production at hand. Like burlesque, Edwardes' "girl" musicals featured chorus lines and other devices for the display of women's bodies, but within the context of the simple narrative, sumptuous, contemporary scenery, elaborate displays of contemporary fashion and attention to current social parody. The success of first of these, In Town in 1892 and A Gaiety Girl in 1893 (both of which were produced by Edwardes at the Prince of Wales Theatre), confirmed Edwardes on the path he was taking.

For the next two decades, the "girl" musicals, with popular songs by Lionel Monckton and a lively book by Owen Hall packed the Gaiety Theatre, including titles like The Shop Girl (1894), The Circus Girl (1896), A Runaway Girl (1898), The Orchid (1903), The Girls of Gottenberg (1907), Our Miss Gibbs (1909), The Sunshine Girl (1912), and After the Girl (1914). The heroines were independent young women who often earned their own livings. The stories followed a familiar plot line – a chorus girl breaks into high society, a shop girl makes a good marriage. There was always a misunderstanding during act one and an engagement at the end. In the words of a contemporary review, Edwardes’ musicals were "Light, Bright and enjoyable." These musicals were widely imitated by other British producers, and, within a decade, in America.

Perhaps to balance the "girl" musicals, the Gaiety also presented a series of what could be described as "boy" musicals, such as The Messenger Boy (1900), The Toreador (1901), Two Naughty Boys (1906), The New Aladdin (1906), and Theodore and Co..

[edit] The Gaiety Girls and high fashion

Gaiety Girls, c. 1890

A major attraction of Edwardes' shows was his beautiful, dancing corps of "Gaiety Girls". These were fashionable, elegant young ladies, unlike the corseted actresses from the earlier burlesques. In Edwardes' shows, these ladies were, as The Sketch noted in its review of The Geisha in 1896, "clothed in accordance with the very latest and most extreme modes of the moment." Many of the best-known London couturiers were designing costumes for stage productions. The illustrated periodicals were eager to publish photographs of all the actresses in the latest stage hits, and so the theatre became an excellent way for clothiers to publicise their latest fashions.^[3]

Gaiety girls were polite, well-behaved young women and became a popular attraction and a symbol of ideal womanhood. They 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.^[4] 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.^[5]

[edit] Later years

Cover of the Vocal Score

In 1895, Edwardes took over the management of Daly's Theatre, where Sidney Jones was hired as the resident composer and music director. Edwardes' shows at Daly's had more coherent plots and music specifically composed for the plot of the piece. They were even more like what musical comedy was to become at maturity than their Gaiety Theatre siblings, the more review-like "Girl" musicals. These shows included hits like An Artist's Model, The Geisha, A Greek Slave, and San Toy.

As Edwardes success grew, he needed another theatre and added the Adelphi Theatre to his chain of musical houses. There he directed Lionel Monckton, Percy Greenbank and Adrian Ross for some of their later musicals, including The Earl and the Girl 1903, The Quaker Girl 1910, The Dancing Mistress 1912, The Girl from Utah 1913, Tina 1915, and The Boy 1917.

Edwardes raced horses, and one of this thoroughbreds, Santoi, won many prizes.^[6] He died in London in 1915, leaving his estate in considerable debt. His theatrical enterprises continued to operate under the guidance of Robert Evett, who managed to produce a number of hits over the next few years, notably The Maid of the Mountains in 1917), that saved the estate.