The Geisha - Background and Productions

Background and Productions

The success of An Artist's Model in 1895 had set the pattern for the Hall, Greenbank and Jones Edwardian musical comedies. Edwardes immediately put his team to work on a new musical.

The Geisha was first performed on 25 April 1896 at Daly's Theatre in London, produced by George Edwardes. The original production ran for 760 performances. This run, the second longest of any musical up to that time, would be beaten three years later by Edwardes' San Toy, which was written by Jones, Greenbank and Monckton. The cast included Marie Tempest in the role of O Mimosa San and Letty Lind as the dancing soubrette Molly Seamore. C. Hayden Coffin played Lieutenant Reginald Fairfax, Huntley Wright played Wun-Hi, and later Rutland Barrington and Scott Russell joined the cast. Direction was by J. A. E. Malone, choreography by Willie Warde and costumes by Percy Anderson. The music director was Ernest Ford. Edwardes took advantage of the continuing fascination of the public with the orient that had brought such success to Gilbert and Sullivan in The Mikado. However, The Geisha was a more topical entertainment than The Mikado, and despite its great initial popularity, The Geisha and the many other topical oriental Edwardian musicals, such as San Toy, A Chinese Honeymoon and even Chu Chin Chow did not endure through the decades as well as The Mikado.

Jones, aiming for a light, breezy score, kept each of his musical numbers under three minutes, except that the finales ran to about five. In addition to oriental shadings, Jones's music borrowed from continental European dance rhythms. Hall had taken some of the sauciness out of his style, since An Artist's Model, and evolved a combination of sprightly, up-to-date comedy and old-fashioned romance, into which he would insert parodies when the opportunity arose. Indeed, the Daly's Theatre shows were more romantic in character than the sillier Gaiety Theatre shows. Still, these musicals hewed to most of the features that made the Gaiety Theatre shows popular, especially Edwardes' pretty Gaiety Girls, dressed in the latest fashions. Many of the best-known London couturiers designed costumes for stage productions. The illustrated periodicals were eager to publish photographs of the actresses in the latest stage hits, and so the theatre became an excellent way for clothiers to publicise their latest fashions. The Gaiety Girls were, as The Sketch noted in its 1896 review of The Geisha, "clothed in accordance with the very latest and most extreme modes of the moment, and the result is a piquantly striking contrast, as you may imagine." The next musical for the Hall, Greenbank and Jones team moved from Japan to Ancient Rome, with A Greek Slave.

The Geisha was also an immediate success abroad, with an 1896 production in New York (starring Nancy McIntosh beginning in November), It became the biggest international sensation that the British musical theatre had ever known. It enjoyed other productions in America and played for thousands of performances on the European continent (one source counts some 8,000 in Germany alone). It has been "ranked as the first internationally successful British musical," helping to introduce the previously obscure term "Geisha" into many languages as a symbol of Japanese culture. In 1897, Robert Baden-Powell appeared in the role of Wun-hi in Simla, India. Two years later, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was present at its premiere in the Russian resort town of Yalta and mentions the show as a backdrop to the climatic scene in one of his best-known stories, "The Lady with the Dog" (1899).

The musical continued to tour for a few decades in Britain, receiving its last major revival in 1934, although lesser productions continued into the 1950s, and it was popular with amateur theatre groups, particularly in Britain, from World War I into the 1960s.