It's that time again. My desktop is getting as crowded as the Drury Lane stage in Novello days. It's time to plonk some these fascinating (to me) finds on The Blog ...
A couple of 1920s from American showbusiness. Different area of the American showbusiness ...
Fanchon & Marco ..? |
It did the Keith circuit rounds for a couple of seasons, like other 'big vaudeville acts' of the kind, and was then shelved in favour of more, like 'shows'. This, apparently composite, photo survives ...
She is credited with later appearances at La Haye (1872), Lille and Angers, and I see her in 1870 acclaimed for her 'magnifiques qualités vocales', Had her early promise evaporated? Been held up by unplanned motherhood? Or had she gone to parts abroad? No, she'd just slipped from metropolitan memories.
I see her in 1873 giving Faust at Pau, in 1877-8 singing Le voyage en Chine, Inès in L'Africaine and Berthe in Le Prophète in Marseille, Leonora in Il Trovatore in La Havre ('très belle personne, qui donne au personnage une très grande allure dramatique'), in 1875 'fort chanteuse' at Montpelier, in 1880 ('after ten years') back in Paris at the Château d'Eau in Si j'étais roi, in 1883 playing Carmen at Limoges and ... is that in Réunion? Yes. 21 October 1883 as La Favorita ...
Just fancied this photo of Ivy Sawyer, on her way from child performed to centarian ... not quite Lewis Carroll's demure little Alice in Wonderland, is she!
Ivy SAWYER [Elsie SAWYER] (b London, 13 February 1898; d Irvine, Calif., 16 November 1999) began her career as a London child starlet. She appeared for a number of years as Alice in Wonderland, originally (1906) as the dormouse, the first oyster and the cornflower (with two solo dances) and later as Alice (1909-1914), played in the chorus of Seymour Hicks's My Darling (1907), and for George Edwardes as the midshipman in The Marriage Market (1913) before, aged 20, she went to America, to appear in the title-rôle of Edwardes's Betty. She married her co-star, stayed, and they became an on-stage as well as off-stage pair appearing together in the Oh, Boy! tour (1917, Mrs Budd), Oh! My Dear (1918, Hilda Rockett), She's a Good Fellow (1919, Jacqueline Fay), The Half Moon (1920, Grace Bolton), It's Up to You (1921, Harriet Hollister), three Music Box Revues, Mayflowers (Elsie Dover), Just Fancy (in which she played an American girl, Linda Lee Stafford, whilst her American husband played the English Prince), and Lucky (Grace Mansfield), in which Miss Sawyer appeared for once with, but not opposite, her husband.
MÉALY, Juliette [JOSSERAND, Juliette] (b Toulouse 1 October 1861; d Monaco 9 January 1952). Had plenty of photos taken in her long and scrumptious career. But I like this one. And anyway, folks could do with the facts :-)
Juliette Méaly 'with her abbreviated skirts, a wealth of rustling frills and a huge hat' not to mention a very fine soprano voice, led a full career in the European musical theatre, starring in many a Parisian rôle where a certain glamorous audacity was needed, yet proving herself a fine performer in a wide range of parts, from the classics to the music-hally, through a long career.
She made her earliest appearances at a very young age at the Eldorado in 1884, but she first came into fuller evidence as a young and appealing jeune première at the Théâtre des Menus-Plaisirs (Marcel in La Fiancée des verts-poteaux 1887 etc) when she took over from Yvonne Stella in the central rôle of Audran's L'Oncle Célestin (1891). She followed up at the same house alongside Félix Huguenet in Roger's Le Coq (1891, Cécilia) and in the leading rôle of Audran's Article de Paris (1892, Jeanne) before moving on to appear in La Vie parisienne at the Variétés, and starring on the rather larger Gaîté stage as Michelette in Le Talisman (1893). She followed this distinct personal success by taking her new-found stardom to the rest of Europe, and later the same year she visited Budapest’s Somossy Theatre, Bucharests’s Théâtre Lyrique and the Vienna Carltheater playing Miss Helyett and Le Petit Duc, and then London where she appeared at Alhambra with Paul Fugère in a selection from La Femme de Narcisse, and was featured in a pasted-in `green-room scene' in In Town at the Gaiety Theatre (August), alongside American whistler Tom Browne and impersonator Cissie Loftus.
Back in Paris, she starred as Christiane in Le Troisième Hussards (1894) at the Gaîté, as the voluptuous Mimosa, nude scene and all, in the spectacular Le Carnet du Diable(1895, 1897, 1899) and as another near-the-knuckle demoiselle, Paquerette in Le Carillon(1896), both at the Variétés where, under the direction of Fernand Samuel, she would make her `home' for most of the next two decades. In between her appearances in osée opérette à grand spectacle, she played in the Variétés revivals of the classics (Dindonette in L’Oeil crevé, Gabrielle in La Vie parisienne, Marguerite in Le Petit Faust etc). In 1897 she created the rôle of the actress Fanny in Le Pompier de service, but the years which followed brought no new rôles of value as Mlle Méaly appeared as Fragoletto to the Fiorella of Tariol-Baugé in Les Brigands and as Eurydice at the Variétés, and took another turn around central Europe, playing Madame Méphisto, Blondeau and Monreal's Parisian `opérette-folie' spectacle, which had her as a female demon taking vengeance on her underworld husband, Mam'zelle Nitouche, Le Pompier de service and L'Auberge du Tohu-bohu (Flora) at Budapest's Magyar Színház (16-20 April 1901), Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtisches Theater (15 May 1901) and Theater des Westens (22 February 1901) and Vienna's Theater an der Wien and Carltheater.
She had her best fresh rôle for a decade when she starred as the Princess Bengaline in Planquette's posthumous Le Paradis de Mahomet (1906), and then stepped aside from the Variétés to appear at the Moulin-Rouge alongside Mistinguett in La Revue de la femme(1907) and the following year as the star of the opérette Son Altesse l'amour, this time in competiton with Gaby Deslys. She was seen regularly on the Paris stage for another decade, repeating her best rôles (notably La Vie parisienne's Gabrielle, but no longer those requiring a nude scene) and creating the occasional new rôle, as in Les Merveilleuses (1914) or, as late as 1921, in a return to the stage, in La Galante Épreuve at La Cigale.
Well, you have to investigate the unfruitful oddities along with the druitful, or else you never 'discover'.
Well, that's one pile sorted. I'll start the next tomorrow ...