Three musicals opened on 1 December, two of which are especially important in the history of the American musical theatre: Lady, Be Good! with songs by George and Ira Gershwin, including ‘Fascinating Rhythm’, and starring Adele and Fred Astaire; and Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue, the final instalment in the series that featured Fanny Brice, Grace Moore and Oscar Shaw. Also opening on that date was Princess April, a typical rags-to-riches tale about a young Irish immigrant. That type of plot had become so well worn that the show could not keep up with its competition. Lady, Be Good!, in addition to its brilliant score that included ‘Fascinating Rhythm’, ‘Oh, Lady Be Good’, and ‘Little Jazz Bird’, featured the duo pianists Victor Arden and Phil Ohmen and solidified the producing partnership of Alvin A. Aarons and Vinton Freedley. Music Box Revue had a framing story about Rip Van Winkle and included several overtly racist scenes as well as some stunningly beautiful ones, such as ‘All Alone’ performed by Moore and Shaw.

When Franz Lehár’s Viennese operetta The Merry Widow arrived London in 1907, it was not only one of the most remarkable West End hits but also the beginning of a new age of global entertainment. The reception took place worldwide and overcame national traditions to establish a new international show business in the early twentieth century. In consequence a cross-cultural exchange emerged confirming the ‘birth of the modern world’ at that time. Along with Lehár, a new generation of composers propagated the new style on the Continent, for example, Oscar Straus, Leo Fall and Emmerich Kálmán. In the decade before World War I, Viennese operettas dominated the repertory of the Western world. Balancing the ‘local’ and ‘global’ was an important aspect of their achievement, so it was no coincidence that all those composers originated from the Habsburg Empire. Thus, Lehár grew up as a son of a Czech-born, German-speaking military bandmaster and of a Hungarian mother, spending his childhood in seven different cities of Austria-Hungary. Life was similar for Leo Fall, who furthermore was Jewish like Oscar Straus, and Emmerich Kálmán. But they all worked in Vienna, the experimental laboratory for the arts generally and popular music especially.

Four prominent ‘origin stories’ for the American musical intertwine with the history of American operetta, which bifurcated, through the American legacies of Gilbert and Sullivan (including Cohan’s musical comedies) and The Merry Widow, into two distinct types: fast-paced musical comedies with an American profile, and the more romantically tinged, Viennese-derived American operetta. In balancing elements of these types, the American musical stage fostered camp reception modes, overtly emergent especially in Naughty Marietta, but becoming more closeted in the 1920s, when the two types again reached an extreme point of separation, with Gershwin’s and other musical comedies on one side of the divide, and Romberg’s and Friml’s hit operettas (along with Deep River), on the other, with operetta (or the ‘musical play’) bolstered by Hammerstein’s rhetoric laying claim to the higher aesthetic ground. Show Boat marked a probably deliberate attempt to remix and fuse the two types in a hybrid form that eventually stabilized in the wake of Oklahoma! Throughout, the element of camp, often passing as unintentional, governed the negotiations between the two types, allowing them to coexist in the musical play as it (re)emerged in the 1940s.

falls into two parts. The first section discusses the main elements of the touring repertoire. This consisted initially of popular melodramas such as The Manxman, Trilby and The Sign of the Cross. The Bandmann Opera Company, his most important company, provided facsimile versions of Edwardian musical comedies, most of which were drawn from the George Edwardes’ Gaiety Theatre, with whom Bandmann had an exclusive agreement. Another mainstay of his repertoire was variety theatre, which became increasingly important after 1914. Each genre was represented by its own company, each of which toured on an integrated rotation system. The second section discusses the heterogeneous publics on the Bandmann Circuit as a colonial public sphere. Bandmann’s publics included non-English-speaking audiences in Japan, parts of China and the Dutch East Indies, among other areas.

It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.

It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.