English Musicals (Other Than Gilbert and Sullivan) in America

English Musicals [Other Than Gilbert and Sullivan] in America. It is not generally recognized that, while American musicals have won worldwide fame for their daring and excellence, English musicals have time and again been the real pioneers. American lyric works have simply moved forward from the impetus provided by West End examples. In addition to Gilbert and Sullivan, many of their contemporaries such as Cellier and Solomon enjoyed some popularity with American audiences, and Erminie's success was exceptional. But it was the Savoyard comic operas that served as exemplars to American writers of the period and that opened all American stages to song and dance entertainments. When the vogue for comic opera faded, the Gaiety Theatre musical comedies that George Edwardes had instituted in London came across the Atlantic, beginning in 1894 with A Gaiety Girl, to speed the development of the new genre. Of course, America had also been evolving its own musical comedy tradition, but the sophistication and elegance of the Gaiety musicals set new standards and propelled the advance. Although it was not a Gaiety musical, Florodora (1900) proved the most popular importation of the period. In the 1920s the popularity of Charlot's Revue similarly promoted the cause of the intimate revue and signaled the end of the gargantuan extravaganza of the Ziegfeld school. A handful of later English musicals were noteworthy successes, such as Bitter Sweet, The Boy Friend, Oliver!, and Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. However, these were looked upon as almost sui generis and had little real influence on the development of American musicals. Since then such Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals as Evita, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera have enjoyed remarkable successes, but their influence on mainstream American lyric theatre remains to be seen. Me and My Girl was an unusual case of a British musical not finding success on Broadway until decades after it premiered in London.