Sunday in the Park With George Florodora Sighting

by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. In act two:

George: He denied conventional perspective and conventional space.

Marie: He was unconventional in his liferstyle as well
(ad-libbing again)

So was I! You know I was a Florodora Girl for a short time -- when I left Charleston and before I was married to my first husband --

George (Interrupting her): Marie. Marie!!

Important Dates

Aside from our usual rehearsal schedule commencing on June 29th, here are dates to keep open:

• Saturday May 30 - time TBD Tentative date for our Florodora read through, familiarization session and potluck BBQ at my house. More information very soon.
• Saturday July 25 1-4pm (time tentative) Sitzprobe at the Lyric Warehouse.
• Friday July 31 - In-venue dress rehearsal at the MVCPA. Call at 6pm. Note that Thursday July 30 is currently scheduled as no rehearsals dark night for the produciton.

Owen Hall, librettist (or, OK, One More Florodora Background Tidbit)

The standard references in the literature about the Florodora librettist Owen Hall (real name: James Davis, 10 April 1853 - 9 April 1907) are sparse, and on the whole, rather offhand. The pseudonym "Owen Hall" was an ironic nod ('owing all') towards his extensive debts. Another of his pseudonyms was "Payne Nunn." In fact, the was astoundingly prolific during the late Victorian and Edwardian era, and going from the text of our show, quite a good humorist and obviously a well-read literate fellow (as one might expect from a University of London graduate).

As evidence, Neil Midkiff writes of the lyrics in the clerk's sextet in act 1: "In reading a biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the English lexicographer, I was surprised to find a reference to "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" in a quotation from a 1782 letter from Boswell to another friend of Johnson. I had thought those names were invented by Lewis Carroll for _Through the Looking-Glass_, but it turns out that they date back at least to 1725, when an English poet and diarist compared Handel and Bononcini (then in rivalry for superiority in London's musical scene) to these indistinguishable pair of puny rivals from a traditional nursery rhyme."

Well, it has been a while...

No blog updates in a while, sorry. I've been busy with that pesky day job and logistics surrounding the Florodora performances. This blog will soon start to change direction a little with a director's ramble and more specific information about our revival production.

Crikey Bonza Sheila Gal - Got Any Mates Back In Oz?

I've just received a pre-press of an article (from Andrew Lamb) for the Summer 2009 edition of On Stage, the quarterly newsletter of Theatre Heritage Australia Inc. The article recounts composer Leslie Stuart's amusing memoir of his Australian "inspiration" for Tell Me Pretty Maiden and a bit more about the original creative conflict surrounding the now famous double sextette from Florodora.

Stuart relates that some of the original blocking of TMPM is his own!

The article is unfortunately only a jpeg scan, but it is legible. You can find the pages here and here.

There will also be a streamed webcast of excerpts of highlights from a 1946 Australian radio broadcast of Stuart's 1911 Musical Comedy Peggy on April 14 from Melbourne FM 96.5 between their time 9pm and 11pm. Victoria, Australia is 18 hours ahead of US PDT which puts the webcast for us Californians unfortunately at (yawn) 4am Tuesday morning April 14. Sigh.

Gotta find me some webcast recording software for Windoze...

Land Of My Home

The act 2 song Land of my Home appears in the orchestra parts for Florodora, and in two libretti but, oddly enough, not in the standard vocal score for the show. The vocal score contains many alternate numbers written for various versions and revivals of the show, but not this one, though it appeared originally, in a 1920 revival and presuming a date of the orchestra parts, as late as the 1950's.

The problem was finding the vocal line so we could include it in the show. We had the orchestration and the words, but no vocal line and no piano reduction for the song. Neil Midkiff has reconstructed the vocal line and arranged an accompaniment from the orchestrations, using ample instrument doubling as the clues to the tune.

I mentioned this number in an email to Ken Reeves, a musical researcher in England, and he has gone back to an 1899 score in the British Library (logo at right - not a picture of Ken Reeves :-) He was kind enough to call up that old manuscript and copy out the original piano vocal reduction of Land of my Home and mail it to me.

I like Neil's version. Of course I'll leave it up to him what material of the original to adopt, of course, but we'll be able to present this tenor ballad in our concert version of Florodora, probably the first hearing in a very long time.

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.