Second and third remakes of unsuccessful shows rarely win out. However, this one squeezed out a quasi-success in its third version ...
THE BEAUTY SPOT Musical comedy in 3 acts by Joseph W Herbert. Music by Reginald De Koven. Herald Square Theater, New York, 10 April 1909.
Joseph Herbert's libretto to The Beauty Spot had already done duty as a play in South Africa and again, with music by Edward Jones attached, as a flop musical as produced in London by South Africa's Frank Wheeler (also director, choreographer, comic lead) and theatre-owner George H Broadhurst (also additional numbers) under the title The Prince of Borneo (Strand Theatre 5 October 1899, 31 performances), before it was wedded in its third, American life to a standard Reginald De Koven score.
Popular comedian Jefferson de Angelis starred in the now leading rôle of General Samovar, with Viola Gillette as his ex-actress wife, a lady who once modelled, rather unclad, for the painting entitled `The Beauty Spot' which she is now anxious to disown. The spot in question is, however, damning evidence. Alongside this saucy tale, the General's daughter, Nadine (Marguerite Clark), made her way to marrying the painting’s artist Jacques (George MacFarlane), rather than the cousin (Alfred de Ball) to whom she has been engaged since birth and who has, in any case, wed a Bornean lady (Isabel de Armond) in the meanwhile. The show ended with the offending painting being propped on an easel before the audience whilst the artist solved all problems by deftly covering the lady’s nakedness with some lightning draperies, and turning the identifying mole into a little mouse.
New York did not object to the indelicacies of the birthmark plot as London had done with its standard sanctimonious vigour and, although De Koven's score (which retained a song called ‘The Prince of Borneo’) was no more notable than Jones's had been, the show did very much better in its Broadway incarnation and totted up a fine 137 summer season performances before moving on to a cheerful and extended life on the road.
The same title was later used for a musical play in two acts by Arthur Anderson, adapted from the French of P-L Flers, with lyrics by Anderson, Clifford Harris and `Valentine' and music by James W Tate, which was produced at London's Gaiety Theatre, 22 December 1917. This `beauty spot' was not a birthmark, but a landmark, and the plot of the show dealt with how naughty Napoléon Bramble (Arthur Whitby) enriched himself on the publication of a book of traveller's tales really written by a dead friend. The show was, however, orientated by Parisian revueist P-L Flers much more towards the picturesque than the coherent, and the production was largely sculpted to feature the talents of the ill-fated French danseuse Régine Flory and her Polish dancing partner Jan Oyra. Their principal set piece `Kadouja and the Spirit of Haschisch' depicted Flory as a victim of the drug as portrayed by her partner. (The idea was modish rather than innovative, 50 years earlier the German Reeds had played a whole ‘hasheesh’ operetta at their Gallery of Illustration). Some light pieces by the show's nominal songwriters were supplemented by a couple of established American song hits, `Poor Butterfly' taken from the previous year's New York Hippodrome Big Show and Harry Tierney's spelling song M.I.S.S.I.S.S.I.P.P.I'.
Producer Alfred Butt tried, with The Beauty Spot, to establish himself in power at the Gaiety Theatre, from where he had ousted the successful Grossmith and Laurillard management, but the public preferred to follow the old team to the Prince of Wales Theatre and Butt's attempt to make himself the new George Edwardes got off to a poor start when the show lasted only an unprofitable 152 performances. Mlle Flory salvaged the haschisch routine and took it back to Paris where she introduced it into the Casino de Paris reuve Pa-ri-ki-ri (1918).
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