Victorian Burlesque - Gaiety Theatre

Gaiety Theatre

Burlesque became the specialty of London's Gaiety Theatre and Royal Strand Theatre from the 1860s to the early 1890s. In the 1860s and 1870s, burlesques were often one-act pieces running less than an hour and using pastiches and parodies of popular songs, opera arias and other music that the audience would readily recognize. Nellie Farren starred as the theatre's "principal boy" from 1868, and John D'Auban choreographed the Gaiety burlesques from 1868 to 1891. Edward O'Connor Terry joined the theatre in 1876. Early Gaiety burlesques included Robert the Devil (1868, by Gilbert), The Bohemian G-yurl and the Unapproachable Pole (1877), Blue Beard (1882), Ariel (1883, by F. C. Burnand) and Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed (1883).

Beginning in the 1880s, when comedian-writer Fred Leslie joined the theatre, composers like Meyer Lutz and Osmond Carr contributed original music to the burlesques, which were extended to a full-length two or three act format. These later Gaiety burlesques starred Farren and Leslie. They often included Leslie's libretti, written under his pseudonym, "A. C. Torr", and were usually given an original score by Lutz: Little Jack Sheppard (1885), Monte Cristo, Jr. (1886), Pretty Esmeralda (1887), Frankenstein, or The Vampire's Victim (1887), Mazeppa and Faust up to date (1888). Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué (1889) made fun of the play Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo. The title was a pun, and the worse the pun, the more Victorian audiences were amused. The last Gaiety burlesques were Carmen up to Data (1890), Cinder Ellen up too Late (1891), and Don Juan (1892, with lyrics by Adrian Ross).

In the early 1890s, Farren retired, Leslie died, and musical burlesque went out of fashion in London, as the focus of the Gaiety and other burlesque theatres changed to the new genre of Edwardian musical comedy. In 1896, Seymour Hicks declared that burlesque "is dead as a doornail and will never be revived." From her retirement, Nellie Farren endorsed this judgment.