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 success of In Town and A Gaiety Girl (1893) led to an astonishing number of hits, 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.
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or comedy:
“If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there are night owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The comedy of hollow sounds derives
From truth and not from satire on our lives.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)