The First Cast Recording

In September and October of 1900, the two-year-old Gramophone Company of London invited cast members from Florodora to make recordings of the songs that they were singing every night in the show. The world's first ever "original cast recording" was created in four sessions, comprising 14 seven-inch disks (the longer playing - by about a minute - higher fidelity 10-inch 78 rpm hadn't yet been invented).

It was a big gamble. The primitive recording technology of the day better captured louder, and often less accomplished, singers. The Florodora cast members persevered, giving themselves a place in history and giving us an important record of the style of performance in the original production.

In Lady Holyrood's solo numbers, actress Ada Reeve practically recites many of her numbers music hall style. Some of this clipped delivery might be exaggerated so that the words came through on the recording, but contemporary accounts and reviews also tell us of her comic melodrama style. Now we can hear it. Indeed in the vocal score the notes in the vocal line of the number are represented in all sixteenth notes - and now we know why.

Florodora's composer, Leslie Stuart, happened to be filling in as conductor at the Lyric Theatre during this time and joined in on the recording sessions as accompanist on a day of these recordings. We can safely assume those numbers are delivered in a manner that the composer approved of! Paul Rubens, lyricist, also accompanies the recordings. (Rubens soon became a noted composer/lyricist of many West End hit musicals).

Eleven of these original Florodora recordings were released on a modern CD by Pearl records in 1993 and though now discontinued, new and used copies can still be found on the Internet. The recordings are understandably low fidelity, but give us another connection to the Florodora Days.

Happy 109th Birthday, Florodora

Florodora opened exactly 109 years ago today, November 11th, 1899 at the Lyric Theatre in London where it originally ran for 455 performances!

The Florodora Cocktail

I've gotta try this one after a long day of scanning:

60 ml London dry gin
15 ml fresh lime juice
15 ml Chambord liqueur (or BOLS Raspberry, Framboise, etc)
Ginger ale

For a Florodora "Imperial Style" replace the Gin with Cognac. Yum.

Shake well with 4 to 5 ice cubes in a chilled cocktail shaker, then pour unstrained into a Collins glass and top off with the cold ginger ale. Lime Wedge garnish.

I'll take two!

Florodora In Joyce and Woodhouse

Florodora shows up in the oddest places...

The tenor song in Florodora, In the Shade of the Palm, is artfully mis-quoted all through the Sirens chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. In Florodora, the heroic tenor Frank Abercoed tells his beloved Dolores that he'll return if she but waits patiently for him. Get it?

In The Adventures of Sally by P.G. Wodehouse takes a swipe at all of the actresses who ever claimed to be a Florodora Girl:

Sally was disappointed, but it was such a beautiful morning, and New York was so wonderful after the dull voyage in the liner that she was not going to allow herself to be depressed without good reason. After all, she could go on to Detroit tomorrow. It was nice to have something to which she could look forward.

"Oh, is Elsa in the company?" she said.

"Sure. And very good too, I hear." Mrs. Meecher kept abreast of theatrical gossip. She was an ex-member of the profession herself, having been in the first production of "Florodora," though, unlike everybody else, not one of the original Sextette. "Mr. Faucitt was down to see a rehearsal, and he said Miss Doland was fine. And he's not easy to please, as you know."

Scanning Old Parts

Scanning, scanning, scanning.

The Florodora vocal score is scanned and now I'm scanning the orchestra parts. Some of the orchestra parts are quite old and fragile and have a lot of edge damage from years of quick page turns and many repaired tears fixed with - now yellowing - tape. The binding on the covers is quite old and the deteriorating tape on rips and replaced adjacent pages is sticking together. And as with all old ephemera, the acid in the paper is causing some foxing and ink is fading a bit, but this isn't an issue - yet.

All this, you can imagine, makes the scanning (even more) tedious. So far, the 14 numbers comprising the cello parts of Act 1 need the most TLC. They are the top of the list for re-entering in a modern notation program.

But - happy news - most of the orchestra parts are VERY readable and still could be used out of the box. In fact, some of the pages never seem to have been used (well not, say within the last 50+ years). The second act was most recently re-copied very meticulously by hand for all of the parts on very good paper.

At one time there must have been at least 14 full sets of Florodora in circulation - these parts are marked "Set 'N'", and I have a couple of books marked "Set 'H'". Some have "1952" written on the cover.

Even if we can't do the Discovery with full orchestra, I will feel good having preserved Florodora. Too many of these old shows have lost their orchestrations over the years.

Random Coincidences

Random coincidences will occur, especially in the incestuous world of theater. There are going to be many surrounding a show as big as Florodora, but here are two that strike me as particularly fun factoids :

• In the original N.Y. production of Florodora Lady Holyrood was played by the actress/singer Edna Wallace Hopper (right). Edna was the estranged wife of actor William DeWolf Hopper - who played Ravenne in Erminie. Edna was a San Francisco native and from all accounts led a rather colorful life.
  
• The original London production of Florodora premiered at the Lyric Theatre which some of you might recall was built from the proceeds from Dorothy, a previous Discovery production. Just as Dorothy far outran The Mikado, Florodora far outran The Rose of Persia.

I like to find out about the people who starred in and created the shows as it gives me a better feeling of connection to the material.

Considerably More 'Go'

In 1906, Florodora composer Leslie Stuart (right) was asked in an interview about being judged against the example of Gilbert and Sullivan. He said, "We living composers either imitate - unpardonable sin - or do not imitate - which is worse".


Florodora - having premiered in the same city and the same month as The Rose of Persia - would naturally be compared to Savoy Operas. Tom B. Davis, a Florodora producer, commented: "In some respects it may be said to resemble a Savoy Opera, but with all due respect to those really, in many cases beautiful creations, Florodora has considerably more 'go' than they have, whilst about its music, it has that peculiar charm that Stuart seems to have made so peculiarly his own".


By the time he composed Florodora 36-year-old Stuart (real name, Thomas Barrett) was already an established composer of popular song and contributor to musical comedies. In the British Empire he was famous as composer of the song Soldiers of the Queen (or King, depending...) and a large number of once popular but now entirely regrettable music hall "coon" songs.


Well aware that he lived and composed in the long shadow of a master, a portrait of Sullivan hung above the reed organ on which Stuart composed. His own compositions were more in the style of popular music and more 20th century rhythmic invention, utilizing more counterpoint, syncopation, layering, and an abundance of dotted meters in, on average, brighter, brisker tempi. In the biography "Leslie Stuart - The Man Who Composed Florodora" Andrew Lamb writes:

Altogether, Leslie Stuart was surely more adventurous than Sullivan in the way he set out to create effects, even if those effects did not always succeed in the way that Sullivan's painstaking settings of his lyricists words did.

Why Florodora?

Florodora was the world's first international mega-musical. As time went on it became a showbiz legend - the first musical theater legend. Almost 30 years before Showboat, before Oklahoma!, before Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera there was Florodora, which showed what could happen when a stage musical permeates popular culture. Liken it to how Pinafore electrified the world of operetta twenty years earlier.

There was Florodora soap, clasps, hats, cigars and, of course, perfume. The Gibson Girl was replaced by the Florodora Girl. Every major town in the English speaking world saw a production or tour. The world's first ever cast recording was of, you guessed it, Florodora.

Florodora opened in London in 1899 and ran for nearly 3 years and was almost immediately revived. The next year saw an even longer run on Broadway in New York City. Florodora circled the globe to every major city. It opened in Seattle in 1901 and eventually in the Bay Area in 1907. It achieved the financial success and lasting fame that every major musical was measured against for decades.

"They are goddesses, the first of their class to immortalize the chorus girl," one critic stated in fulsome tribute to the damsels.

The much hyped celebrities of Florodora, The Six Florodora Girls, became international celebrities and for no rational reason, were whisked off the stage by rich bachelors at an astounding rate. During the two year run of the show in London and New York, hundreds of women were replaced in the role, and even more claimed to have been.

In San Francisco, ballet audiences were given the chance to vote on which choristers would become the Florodora Girls! In reality, as you can see, they weren't "chorus girls" as we know them, but very well coiffed, stylish and modestly costumed English ladies.

Whether or not you'll think that Florodora is the greatest show ever composed, its music was known and played for years. Celebrities kept Florodora on their bios for their entire lives - Milton Berle kept it on his resume (as a youth he was a Florodora Boy), Gypsy Rose Lee's mother claimed to have been a Florodora Girl, In My Man (1928) Fannie Brice sang "I Was a Florodora Baby,". The lives of the "original six" were chronicled until their deaths. Harry Truman played selections on the piano while in the White House. There was a feature movie in 1930, The Florodora Girl, and reference to the show appeared in literature and advertising for decades. Evelyn Nesbitt, the notorious femme fatale of Ragtime fame, was a chorister in the show (though it is unclear whether she was ever actually one of THE Six).

And we get to perform it, see it and hear it next summer!