Edwardian Musical Comedy

Edwardian musical comedy was a form of British musical theatre from the period between the early 1890s, when the Gilbert and Sullivan operas' dominance had ended, until the rise of the American musicals by Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin and Cole Porter following the First World War.

Between In Town in 1892 and The Maid of the Mountains in 1917, this new style of musical theatre became dominant on the musical stage in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world. The popularity of the earliest ones, In Town and A Gaiety Girl (1893), led to an astonishing number of hits over the next three decades, the most successful of which included A Gaiety Girl (1893), The Shop Girl (1894), The Geisha (1896), Florodora (1899), A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), The Earl and the Girl (1903), The Arcadians (1909), Our Miss Gibbs (1909), The Quaker Girl (1910), Betty (1914), Chu Chin Chow (1916) and The Maid of the Mountains.

Edwardian musical comedy began in the last decade of the Victorian era and captured the optimism, energy and good humour of the new century and the Edwardian era, as well as providing comfort during the First World War. The Gaiety Theatre's well-loved but racy burlesques were coming to an end, and so was the run of phenomenally successful family-friendly Gilbert and Sullivan operas. These two genres had dominated the musical stage since the 1870s. A few lighter, more romantic comic operas, beginning with Dorothy (1886) found success and showed that audiences were ready for something new.

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