1. Quoted in Glenn, Susan, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 165Google Scholar.

2. Traubner, Richard, Operetta: A Theatrical History (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1984), 247Google Scholar; Bordman, Gerald, American Operetta: From “H.M.S. Pinafore” to “Sweeney Todd” (Oxford University Press, 1981), 75Google Scholar.

3. Grun, Bernard, Gold and Silver: The Life and Times of Franz Lehar (London: W. H. Allen, 1970), 129Google Scholar; “‘The Merry Widow’ Making a Million,” New York Times (hereafter NYT), 22 December 1907, C8; John Kendrick, “‘The Merry Widow’ 101—History of a Hit: Part II,” available at www.musicals101.com/widowhist2.htm (accessed 17 April 2008); “Merry Widow Burlesques,” NYT, 28 December 1907, 7. Savage fiercely protected his rights to The Merry Widow, threatening to prosecute managers who did not seek his permission to stage their own variations of the operetta. See “Won't Burlesque ‘The Merry Widow,’” NYT, 18 December 1907, 9; “‘Merry Widow’ in Burlesque,” Variety, 4 January 1908, 6; “‘The Merry Widow’ in German” and “Mr. Savage Replies,” both in New York Dramatic Mirror, 18 January 1908, 7; and “More ‘Merry Widow’ Injunctions,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 11 April 1908, 2.

4. “‘The Merry Widow’ Proves Captivating,” NYT, 22 October 1907, 9.

5. Quoted in Bordman, 79.

6. On the feminization of theatre audiences, see Butsch, Richard, “Bowery B'hoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences,” American Quarterly 46.3 (September 1994): 374–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. “Savage Buys Vienna Opera,” NYT, 19 May 1907, C3. By the end of 1907, the American version of The Merry Widow was on course to make $1 million; “‘Merry Widow’ Making a Million.”

8. Traubner, 247; Grun, 128–9.

9. Hoganson, Kristin L., “The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Burton, Antoinette M. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 260–78, at 261CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Hoganson, , Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 57–104Google Scholar.

10. The exciting new collection The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (ed. Alys Eve Weinbaum et al. [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008]) offers a detailed analysis of the ties among consumption, fashion, and globalization in the 1920s and 1930s in a number of national contexts.

11. On economic nationalism, see Frank, Dana, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Schweitzer, Marlis, “American Fashions for American Women: The Rise and Fall of Fashion Nationalism,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Blaszczyk, Regina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 130–49Google Scholar.

12. Heilgers, Louise, “Delightful Dresses at Daly's,” in The Play Pictorial, vol. 10 (London: Stage Pictorial Publishing Co., 1907), 106–7, at 107Google Scholar; excerpted at www.lily-elsie.com/lucile-2.htm (accessed 16 March 2009).

13. See, for example, Kaplan, Joel and Stowell, Sheila, Theatre and Fashion: From Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), espGoogle Scholar. Introduction and Chapter 1; Rappaport, Erika Diane, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Troy, Nancy J., Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

14. Kaplan and Stowell, 11.

15. Marx, Karl, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Moore, Samuel and Aveling, Edward (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), chap. 3, sec. 4Google Scholar, available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4 (accessed 10 June 2009).

16. Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Barbara Hodgdon, “Bride-ing the Shrew: Costumes that Matter,” Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007): 72–83. Cultural historians, sociologists, and literary scholars have also offered important studies of the production, circulation, and distribution of various objects and commodities. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004).

17. Sofer, 19.

18. Gereffi, Gary, Korzeniewicz, Manuel, and Korzeniewicz, Roberto P., “Introduction: Global Commodity Chains,” in Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, ed. Gereffi, Gary and Korzeniewicz, Manuel (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994): 1–14Google Scholar.

19. Jackson, Peter, “Commercial Cultures: Transcending the Cultural and the Economic,” Progress in Human Geography 26.1 (2002): 3–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. In his attention to the material conditions of production, performance, and reception, Ric Knowles's perspective shares many similarities with the GCC approach. See Knowles, , Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

21. Eckert, Charles, “The Carole Lombard in Macy's Window,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3.1 (Winter 1978): 1–21, at 4, 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Allen, Jeanne, “The Film Viewer as Consumer,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 5.4 (Fall 1980): 481–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Doane, Mary Anne, “The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 11.1 (1989): 23–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayne, Judith, “Immigrants and Spectators,” Wide Angle 5.2 (1982): 32–41Google Scholar; Gaines, Jane, “The Queen Christina Tie-Ups: Convergence of Show Window and Screen,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 11.4 (1989): 35–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eckert, 100–21; Gaines, Jane and Herzog, Charlotte, “‘Puffed Sleeves before Tea-Time’: Joan Crawford, Adrian and Woman Audiences,” Wide Angle 6.5 (1985): 24–33Google Scholar.

23. For example, in 1915, A. G. Hyde and Sons, makers of the Heatherbloom petticoat, launched an intensive campaign to connect their product with Our Mrs. McChesney, the new vehicle for Ethel Barrymore (by Edna Ferber and George V. Hobart). See “Heatherbloom Is Advertised by Ethel Barrymore in a New Play,” Printers' Ink, 28 October 1915, 31–2; and “Ethel Barrymore Is Talking” (ad), The Delineator (January 1916): 46.

24. Doane, 23–5.

25. Gaines, 39–40; Gaines and Herzog, 24–33; Stacey, Jackie, “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification with Star–Audience Relations,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Gledhill, Christine (London: Routledge, 1991), 141–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Gaines, 56.

27. Wickstrom, Maurya, Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions (New York: Routledge, 2006), 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wickstrom, , “Commodities, Mimesis and The Lion King: Retail Theatre for the 1990s,” Theatre Journal 51.3 (1999): 285–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Wickstrom, Performing Consumers, 4.

29. Hardt, Michael, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 89–100Google Scholar.

30. Wickstrom, “Commodities,” 285.

31. Of course, comparing audience consumption of tie-ins associated with The Lion King circa 1997 with audience consumption of the Merry Widow hat circa 1907 is a little like comparing apples and oranges, and I certainly want to avoid making the presentist claim that late twentieth-century theatrical tie-ins served the same purpose or accrued the same meanings as their early twentieth-century predecessors. Although I would argue that commercial Broadway theatre has long engaged theatregoers, especially women, as affective laborers through giveaways, tie-ins, and other promotional schemes, the “corporate performances” (156) that Wickstrom describes are obviously quite different from the much looser consumer performances that characterized early twentieth-century theatre culture. My primary reservation about Wickstrom's analysis of theatrical tie-ins, then, emerges from her methodology. For as much as she offers a thorough and highly convincing (auto)ethnographic reading of consumer engagement with The Lion King tie-ins within the setting of the Disney gift shop (conveniently nestled within the New Amsterdam Theatre where the musical was playing), she provides little analysis of these commodities or of the consumers who purchased them beyond the hypercommercial environment of the Broadway theatre. Without telling this side of the story, Wickstrom's argument about the mimetic power of the theatrical tie-in is highly compelling but incomplete.

32. Abel, Paul, “United Kingdom: Copyright in ‘The Merry Widow,’” American Journal of Comparative Law 8.1 (Winter 1959): 88–91, at 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have not been able to determine how Savage acquired the rights to produce the show in the United States if Edwardes in fact controlled these rights. On Edwardes as manager, see Postlewait, Thomas, “George Edwardes and Musical Comedy: The Transformation of London Theatre and Society, 1878–1914,” in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History, ed. Davis, Tracy C. and Holland, Peter (Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K. & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 80–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Traubner, 247. On the Montenegro connection, see Grun, 124–5, 128.

34. For a complete plot synopsis, see Grun, 117–20.

35. Postlewait, 89; Rappaport, 192–4.

36. Heilgers, 106; excerpted at www.lily-elsie.com/lucile-2.htm (accessed 16 March 2009).

37. “Fashions on the Stage,” The Theatre (February 1905), p. v of advertising section.

38. Heilgers, 106–7; excerpted at www.lily-elsie.com/lucile-2.htm (accessed 16 March 2009).

39. On Lucile's theatrical work and influence on fashion, see Lady Gordon, Duff (Lucile), Discretions and Indiscretions (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1932)Google Scholar; Etherington-Smith, Meredith and Pilcher, Jeremy, The “It” Girls: Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, the Couturière “Lucile”, and Elinor Glyn, Romantic Novelist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), 6Google Scholar; Kaplan and Stowell, 8–44; Evans, Caroline, “The Enchanted Spectacle,” Fashion Theory 5.3 (2001): 271–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rappaport, 187–9; Roach, Joseph, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schweitzer, , “Patriotic Acts of Consumption: Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) and the Vaudeville Fashion Show Craze,” Theatre Journal 60.4 (December 2008): 585–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Duff Gordon, 72.

41. Duff Gordon, 109–10.

42. Duff Gordon, 108.

43. “Daly's Theatre: ‘The Merry Widow,’” London Times, 10 June 1907, 4.

44. Duff Gordon, 108.

45. Duff Gordon, 108, 134–8; Evans, 277.

46. Rappaport, 184–7.

47. See, for example, Steele, Valerie, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian through the Jazz Era (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Davis, Fred, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Entwistle, Joanne, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000)Google Scholar.

48. “Merry Widow Hats Outdone,” NYT, 14 June 1908, C1.

49. Howarth, Mary, “A Forecast of Fashion,” London Magazine, April 1908, 137Google Scholar.

50. Frohman, Daniel, “Actress Aided by Camera,” Cosmopolitan 22 (February 1897): 413–20Google Scholar, at 414.

51. On developments in half-tone technology, see Harris, Neil, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. Higham, John and Conklin, Paul Keith (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979): 196–211Google Scholar. On theatrical photography, see Bassham, Ben L., The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Buszek, Maria Elena, “Representing ‘Awarishness’: Burlesque, Feminist Transgression, and the Nineteenth-Century Pin-Up,” Drama Review 43.4 (Winter 1999): 141–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayer, David, “‘Quote the Words to Prompt the Attitudes’: The Victorian Performer, the Photographer, and the Photograph,” Theatre Survey 43.2 (November 2002): 223–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kelly, Veronica, “Beauty and the Market: Actress Postcards and Their Senders in Early Twentieth-Century Australia,” New Theatre Quarterly 20.2 (May 2004): 99–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52. See, for example, sheet music gathered in the Sam DeVincent Collection of Illustrated American Sheet Music, ca. 1790–1987, Series 9, Domestic Arts & Clothing, Kenneth E. Behring Center, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC.

53. I purchased the score on eBay from a seller in Australia and the cover indicates that Chappel & Co. Ltd. had a branch office in Melbourne.

54. According to musicologist Bernard Grun, “the complete novelty of The Merry Widow lies in the frankly erotic nature of its subject, and in the ingenious boldness with which the vibrant sensuality of the story is musically interpreted” (119).

55. Kelly, 100.

56. “‘The Merry Widow’ Proves Captivating.”

57. “Miss Taylor's New Hat” (February 1909) [clipping], in Robinson Locke Collection, v. 451 (Laurette Taylor), p. 2, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

58. “Gould–Suratt Firm Dissolves,” New York Telegraph (6 July 1908), in Robinson Locke Collection, Envelope 2203 (Valeska Suratt); Marble, Anna, “The Woman in Variety,” Variety, 31 October 1908, 9Google Scholar.

59. “Merry Widow Hat Wins $25 for Girl,” New York World, 21 June 1908, 3M.

60. For more on the relationship between stage and street in the staging of fashion stunts, see Schweitzer, Marlis, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 147–8Google Scholar. See also Schweitzer, , “Surviving the City: Press Agents, Publicity Stunts, and the Spectacle of the Urban Female Body,” in Performance and the City, ed. Solga, Kim, Hopkins, D. J., and Orr, Shelley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61. “Riotous Hat Hits Chinese,” Los Angeles Sunday Times, 29 March 1908, 12. (A scan is online at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/files/1908_0329_page.jpg; accessed July 5, 2009.) Although the accuracy of this account is highly suspect, the publication of two cartoons alongside the print story offers some proof that an event of this nature did occur.

62. See, for example, Sherman, Helen Griffith's 1910 one-act play The Merry Widow Hat (Boston: Walter H. Baker Co., 1910)Google Scholar; “The Merry Widow Hat,” NYT, 7 June 1907, SM5. Cartoons showing African American women wearing homemade versions of the style similarly demonstrate the fad's extensive reach. In “Mr. Showemhow Makes a Merry Widow Hat,” a middle-class woman gives a Merry Widow hat made of vegetables to her black washerwoman. Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1908, comics section.

63. “Merry Widow Hats Galore,” NYT, 22 May 1908, 7.

64. See Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the Runway, 1–14, 96–137; Hoganson, “Fashionable World.” Some of this material on Savage's promotional stunt also appears in When Broadway Was the Runway and is reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

65. “Hot Skirmish over ‘Merry Widow’ Hats,” NYT, 14 June 1908, 11; “Women in Hard Battle for Free ‘Merry Widows,’” New York World, 14 June 1908, 1.

66. “All on Account of the Merry Widow Hats,” Chicago Sunday Record-Herald, 17 May 1908, V:2.

67. Ibid.

68. “The New Feminine Hat,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 6 June 1908, 2.

69. See, for example, “The Theatre Hat in California,” NYT, 21 February 1895, 3; “Hats Barred in Wisconsin,” NYT, 25 March 1897, 1; “Ohio's Anti-High Hat Law,” NYT, 6 April 1896, 9; “Chicago's Theatre Hat Law,” NYT, 7 January 1897, 1.

70. “Church Ban on Big Hats,” NYT, 20 April 1908, 1.

71. “‘Merry Widow’ Hat Eclipse,” NYT, 13 May 1908, 2.

72. “Big Hats Hide Church Fire,” NYT, 20 April 1908, 1.

73. “Cut Stairways or Hats?” NYT, 7 June 1908, 1.

74. “New Feminine Hat,” 2.

75. Mayer, Hy, “Some Impressions of the Passing Show,” NYT, 10 May 1908, 12Google Scholar.

76. Riviere, Joan, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–13Google Scholar.

77. Butler, Judith, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78. Russo, Mary, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar.

79. Braziel, Jana Evans and LeBesco, Kathleen, “Introduction: Performing Excess,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15:2 (2005): 9–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80. For a more detailed analysis of the sheath gown, see Schweitzer, “Surviving the City,” 146–7; and Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the Runway, 143–54. (One commotion prompted by such an outfit was reported just below “Cut Stairways or Hats?”: “Sheath Gown in West Street,” NYT, 7 June 1908, 1.)

81. The reference to a young lover singing “coon songs” to his paramour illustrates the popularity of this undeniably racist genre with early twentieth-century audiences. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing well into the 1910s, the “coon song” craze played on racial stereotypes of African Americans, complete with extreme dialect and jungle-type settings. Perhaps ironically, some of the most popular “coon songs” of the period were written by talented African American songwriters, who included lyrics that subverted or parodied white notions of blackness. On the politics of coon songs, see Sotiropoulous, Karen, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 81–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Let It Resound: Sheet Music in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection,” available at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/LetItResound/art_rmt_hogan_e.html (accessed June 13, 2009).

82. See the sheet music for “Under My Merry Widow Hat,” by Gus A. Benkhart and Bobby Heath (Philadelphia: Welch & Wilsky, 1908) at the Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia, available online at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.100004594/contactsheet.html (accessed 16 March 2009).

83. Gordon, Linda, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America, rev. and updated (1974; New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 159–85Google Scholar.

84. Many eBay collectors mistakenly assume that I. Grollman was either the publisher or photographer of the Merry Widow cards, but he is identified only as the copyright holder. In 1908, I. Grollman headed a department for the Acmegraph Company of Chicago, a printing company that produced mail-order catalogs and picture postcards. See Regensteiner, Theodore, My First Seventy Years (Chicago: Regensteiner Corp., 1943), 129–30, 134–5Google Scholar.

85. These cards seem to have been popular with American consumers, if the number for sale today on eBay is any indication. The postcards in my personal collection were sent from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Youngstown, Ohio, and Ready, West Virginia; from Bloomington, Indiana, to Lincoln, Illinois; from Waterloo, Iowa, to Pashwill, Iowa; from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin; from Fredonia, Kansas, to Fall River, Kansas; from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Havre-de-Grace, Maryland; and from Binghamton, New York, to Burghautou [sic], New York. On the “golden age” of postcards, see Schor, Naomi, “‘Postales’: Representing Paris 1900,” Critical Inquiry 18.2 (Winter 1992): 188–244CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Palczewski, Catherine H., “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91.4 (November 2005): 365–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86. I. Grollman postcard, 1908. In author's collection.

87. See Bailey, Beth L., From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (1988; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 16–20, 79–80Google Scholar; and Rothman, Ellen K., Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 203–44Google Scholar.

88. See, for example, Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 110–13Google Scholar; Peiss, , “‘Charity Girls’ and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880–1920,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Peiss, Kathy and Simmons, Christina (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989): 58–69Google Scholar; Garvey, Ellen Gruber, “Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women,” American Quarterly 47.1 (March 1995): 66–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and D'Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle B., Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2d ed. (1988; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 222–35, 239–65Google Scholar.

89. I. Grollman postcard, 1908. In author's collection.

90. I. Grollman postcard, 1908. In author's collection.

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92. Buck-Morss, Susan, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rabinovitz, Lauren, For the love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Wolff, Janet, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Parsons, Deborah L., Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.