ABSTRACT
Creatinc a tidal wave of enthusiasm comparable only to that rolled up a generation earlier by Lydia Thompson and her bleached blondes, the Gaiety Girls disembarked in New York in the late summer of 1894. George Edwardes, the manager of the Gaiety Theatre in London, presented his English charges at Daly’s Theatre on September 18, 1894, in a so-styled comic opera, A Gaiety Girl. But it was not A Gaiety Girl which “became the talk of the town” and kept the piece running until it had to leave because of the players’ commitments back home in England. It was the Gaiety Girls themselves, who now occupy a special page in the theatrical memory book along with their American successors, the Florodora Girls and the Follies Girls. An audience jaded by the standardized come-ons of padded burlesque queens and empty-headed comic-opera chorus girls performing empty-headed drills fell wholeheartedly in love with the vivacity, the superior attractiveness of face and figure, and the good breeding and grooming of the pert visitors. Unlike the sirens of Lydia Thompson’s troupe, the Gaiety Girls moved the entire genus chorine one step up the ladder toward the position of respectability and social acceptance musical-comedy girls enjoy today.
