Purposefully smutty: the Barrison sisters

 

Everyone nowadays knows the opening to the stage musical of 42nd Street. The slowly rising curtain and the tapping feet.

Original!!!

Er ... not by a huge chunk of a century ...

In the 1890s a quintette of girls billed as 'the Barrison sisters' introduced the same or similar effect in their act.  Not tap, I think, but the curtain going gradually up and showing their legs ... bit by saucy bit ...

Here they are ...

And this is their no1 known as Lona Barrison

Apparently the others included and Inger and a Gertrude and an Olga and an Ethel and a Sophie, and Lona was married to a chap named Mons William Fleron. ... 

Anyway, they were said to have been born in Copenhagen, they'd been on the stage (or the act had) since they were 'diminutive' (and only four) and therafter they made a feature of their 'wickedness'. It was even announced that Lona had been banned from the German states because of her 'wickedness'. In 1902 a 'Marie Barrison' was announced as the 'one oif the original and last of the Barrison sisters'.

The favoured story of then was told (in German) at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045081/1896-10-03/ed-1/seq-5/#date1=1756&index=18&rows=20&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&words=Barrison+Sisters+SisterS&proxdistance=5&date2=1963&ortext=&proxtext=&phrasetext=Barrison+Sisters&andtext=&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

And then when Mabel Barrison came on the scene she was said to have been one of the Barrison sisters.

Well, I see Lona travelling in Europe in the later 'nineties while in America others were doing what professed to be burlesques of their act (they'd have called it a 'tribute' these days). There were, of course, the regulation number of aristocratic officers who committed suicide over one or another of them, and the regulation set of newspapers sued for 'libelling' them ..

The act was reported as having been disbanded in 1897 in Brussels. Three of the girls went back to Kallenborg and mother, Lona and Sophie (or was it Gertrude?) carried on. And another group surfaced calling themselves 'the Barrison sisters'.

In Germany, in 1908, one of the 'original five'; was killed in a motor car smash in Bavaria ... with, of course, her wealthy lover ...

So .. I find this ... taken from a 2020 (!) biography 

"Lona (Abelone Maria, 1871–1939), Olga (Hansine Johanne, 1875–1908), Sophia (Sofie Kathrine Theodora, 1877–1906), Inger (Inger Marie, 1878–1918), and Gertrude (Gertrud Marie, 1881–1946) Barrison were actual sisters (many "sister" vaudeville acts were not) of Danish-German descent. The five sisters were all born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Along with their mother, the sisters emigrated to the United States in 1886, joining their father, who had earlier made the same journey. 

Lona Barrison, the oldest of the sisters, had a fleeting theatre experience in Copenhagen as a young girl, and it was she who initially gravitated towards the theatre scene after the family settled in Manhattan, New York City. Later on, she was joined by her siblings. Originally called Bareisen, they anglicized their surname, thus becoming the Barrison Sisters. The five blond and curly-haired siblings were said to sing in high squeaky voices and dance with middling ability. They achieved notoriety, however, by ingenious use of double entendres on stage.

Actress Pearl Eytinge initially produced them and wrote a comedietta for them called Mr Cupid. Her manager, Danish-born William (Wilhelm Ludvig) Fleron (1858–1935), took over the management of the sisters and married Lona in 1893."

Well, I guess they know more than I do! And I guess it was Olga who died in the accident. 

They seems to have been fat, dyed blonde, with little squeaky voices .. and a fund of dirty jokes.  And for that you commit suicide?  I think not,