ABSTRACT
The extraordinary and unexpected Broadway success of Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe) on 21 October 1907 gave rise to a large number of ‘Viennese’ operetta productions in New York and other American cities. Over the next 20 years, more than forty Austrian, German, and Hungarian operettas were imported and produced in a variety of versions; these ran the gamut from straight translations of the originals to minor tinkering with the plot to the complete substitution of the original book with a new one.
The first part of this chapter is a brief historical review of the foreign musical shows produced in New York during the two decades preceding the Widow's premiere (Bordman, 1981), followed by an outline of the ‘Viennese’ shows produced during the two decades after. The second part is a study of Charles Frohman's 1913 New York production of The Doll Girl, an adaptation of Leo Fall's Das Puppenmädel (1910) (Marcosson and Frohman, 1916). Starring Richard Carle and Hattie Williams, the musical score included five numbers by Jerome Kern as subsitutes for the originals, as well as two additional numbers by other composers, and a song by Walter Kollo recycled from an earlier Frohman production. By comparing the working script that Harry B. Smith fashioned with the score of the original, I document the changes that the show underwent for its Broadway incarnation. Finally, although I have not found direct evidence concerning Frohman's input into this show, I speculate that his unusual position as both the producer of the show and agent/manager for his stars undoubtedly influenced the thrust of the resulting show. Overall, this examination of The Doll Girl gives new insight into how Viennese operettas reached Broadway.
