ABSTRACT
Like so many of Harry B.Smith’s projects, The Wizard of the Nile began with a star. Comedian Frank Daniels had cut his teeth on the comic opera circuit in amateur productions and a brief stint with the McCaull Opera Company, but he became famous as an actor of farce comedies of the Charles H.Hoyt variety, in roles such as Old Sport, a drugstore clerk whose lifelong desire was to shake the hand of the man who shook the hand of John L.Sullivan, in A Rag Baby. In the mid-1890s, Daniels decided that he wanted to star in comic opera so, after a season with The Princess Bonnie Company, he elected to strike out on his own, under the management of Kirke LaShelle. Smith knew LaShelle when they both worked as newspapermen in Chicago. LaShelle had left the fourth estate for theatrical management and became the general manager for The Bostonians in 1892, where he remained until 1895, when he left to go into private management with his friend and associate, Arthur Clark, and organized the Frank Daniels Comic Opera Company.
