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.