This Week In Florodora...

Tucked away in the US Library of Congress and mis-catalogued under the name Floradora, I found this listing for a 30 page book. It has too few pages to be a vocal score and too many for a sheet music song, so I was rather hoping the entry was another source libretto. I applied for a photocopy some weeks ago and it finally arrived on Thursday. It turns out this holding is a book of lyrics which is stamped "Received at the LOC on Dec 11 1899" - just a month after the show's opening in London and a year before it opened in New York. This helps yield some clues into the original order of numbers and lyrics, many of which were probably printed before the musical was finished, as the meter of the poetry in this lyric book doesn't exactly match the rhythms of the music from the vocal score.

One of the mysteries, the number Land of my Home, appears in this book of lyrics. So, contrary to a number of sources, it was at least intended for the original production.

Florodora auditions will be announced shortly. We also have a preliminary calendar very similar to what you might expect for a Discovery show, but with a mandatory orchestra sitzprobe (tentatively Saturday July 25th at 1 pm), a couple orchestra run-thrus in the warehouse, and the dress rehearsal at the venue on July 31st.

I received an e-mail from Ken Reeves, a scholar of stage musicals of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Ken is currently presenting a series on early musicals at the Westminster Public Reference Library in central London. On 24 March he'll be leading an audience participation presentation of The Shop Girl, the 1894 Gaiety musical. We've struck up a dialog about Florodora.

You can visit Ken's website at www.hobbyist.co.uk/postcards/earlybritishmusicals

Tell all your friends. Florodora is going to be fun!

I Was A Florodora Baby

In the stage revue Ziegfeld Follies of 1920, "Funny Girl" Fanny Brice sang the song I Was a Florodora Baby in which she croons "...the other five got married for money, and I got married for love". The song was a big pop hit 21 years after Florodora first opened!

That song and legend of the Florodora Girl still remained in popular culture and Brice again sang the number in the Warner Brothers Vitaphone (sound from phonograph records) film My Man in 1928.

Here is an excerpt from the Vitaphone disc featuring Brice singing I Was a Florodora Baby (complete with an affected New Yawk Yiddishe accent and pronounciation). After the song, the sound track continues with some dialog underscored by the orchestration of Tell Me Pretty Maiden from Stuart's Florodora score.

Florodora In Paris

The successful Florodora opening in Paris noted in the NY Times, January 28, 1903. The encored cakewalk mentioned is undoubtedly Tell Me Pretty Maiden.
(note they misspelled the composer's name and call it an operetta). I wonder if a libretto or score survives in French?

Draft Performing Edition - January 2009

A draft performing edition of Florodora including the new vocal score, libretto and midi files are available. If you didn't recently receive and email with a link to them and would like to take a look, please send me an email and I'll provide a link to the materials.

1952 Florodora Glasgow Connections

I've recently acquired a programme for a professional production of Florodora in Glasgow, Scotland in 1952. Old programs give an idea of how the show changed over time and yield insights into why the vocal score and orchestra parts came to be as they are. In the programme I found two surprises:

• The Music Director and production manager was Cyril Dawson. The orchestra parts in my colection have two numbers where Mr. Dawson credited as doing the orchestrations

• The theater assistant manager was Durward Lely. He was the son of the original D'Oyly Carte tenor Durward Lely Sr. who created the role of Nanki-Poo in The Mikado among many others.

The programme also includes the name of rights holders which also appear in some of the old orchestra parts and, of course, the list of lead actors. The only one I can track down on the intertubes is long-time British actress Hilda Campbell-Russell (right) who played the role of Lady Holyrood on that tour.

There are indications that the parts were used in the early 1950's. While it is tantalizing, one can't know whether they were used for this Florodora tour. Still, finding these connections is so much fun and connects me to the show even more.

Oysters Florodora

OK, so I know that oysters aren't every body's favorite food, but in the Florodora days they were quite a delicacy. As yet another example of how the show wove its way into popular culture, I ran across this recipe for Oysters Florodora:

MELT three tablespoonfuls of butter in a pan;
add four tablespoonfuls of flour and stir till smooth;
then add one-half teaspoonful of dry mustard,
a half teaspoonful of paprika,
a teaspoon of minced parsley,
two table-spoonfuls of lemon-juice,
two of Worcestershire sauce,
salt and one and
one-half cupfuls of strained oyster liquor

When the sauce is hot and bubbling drop in a pint of oysters, that have been carefully looked over, and cook till they are plump. Serve on hot buttered toast with pimolas on the side.

P.S. Pimolas are olives stuffed with pimentos.

The Royal Aquarium

In Florodora, the comic character Professor Tweedlepunch repeatedly introduces himself as being a Phrenologist "from the Royal Aquarium, London". Originally we had thought that this was a simple humorous non sequitur. Why in the world would a phrenologist be from an aquarium? So, we had originally thought it was like saying you were a snowplow driver from Tahiti.

BUT, it turns out that the Royal Aquarium was an actual place in Victorian London, designed as an aquarium in 1876, but never (almost) used as such. Originally having tanks and an elaborate system of pipes and many other multi-purpose rooms, almost immediately it ran into operating difficulties, but did once manage to display a dead whale.

By the 1890s, the Aquarium had acquired a risqué reputation, with unaccompanied ladies promenading through the hall in search of male companionship. It contained a legit theater which was mostly used as a music hall and for circus and other exotic entertainments. A natural place for a dubious sham phrenologist-cum-detective to claim to hail from, isn't it?

There are two other interesting Savoy Opera connections: The Royal Aquarium included a theater, the aptly named Aquarium Theatre. It had an unusually large Grand Organ whose installation and construction in 1877 was supervised by none other than Arthur Sullivan. In its opening year, one of the plays produced was an adaptation of Great Expectations by W. S. Gilbert.

Still in existence when Florodora was written in 1899, The Royal Aquarium was demolished in 1903, though the Aquarium Theatre stood until 1907. It is immortalized in Florodora. You can read all about it on Wikipedia.

Florodora Girl as The Ideal

The image and allure of the Florodora Girl replaced the Gibson Girl as the feminine ideal in the early years of the 20th century. Here is an illustration by Hamilton King of a Florodora Girl (1902) which was distributed by Turkish Trophies Cigarettes:

Hamilton King would soon draw the famous Coca-Cola Girl (left) advertising image, and in June 1920 King drew this gorgeous Theatre Magazine cover portrait of Marion Davies (right), who was later the producer and star of the 1930 movie The Florodora Girl (see below).

To this day, the Society of Illustrators annually awards their Hamilton King award for excellence.