ABSTRACT
On October 3, 1910, a month after the Follies of 1910 closed, Harry B.Smith’s adaptation of Die geschiedene Frau, by Victor Léon (music by Leo Fall), opened at the Globe Theatre bearing the title The Girl in the Train. Many of Smith’s earliest works had been adaptations of foreign comic operas, usually from the “golden age” of Viennese operettas. As his career matured, he turned to French opérettes and vaudevilles to supply source material for summer entertainments at the Casino Theatre, or Ziegfeld’s extravaganzas for Anna Held. With The Girl in the Train, an adaptation commissioned by producer Charles Dillingham, Smith began a series of translations and Americanizations of more recent German musical theater works that would occupy him for the next twenty years. Die geschiedene Frau (literally, “The Divorced Wife”) originally opened at the Carltheater in Vienna on December 23, 1908. An English version had been prepared by Adrian Ross and produced by George Edwardes in London in 1910, and Dillingham sought Smith’s help in providing American audiences with a more idiomatic translation.
