Florodora!

If you write historical fiction, you’d better like doing research. Fortunately, I love it! In A Newlywed’s Guide to Fortune and Murder, the theater plays a role—or more specifically one play, so I had to do some research to find one that would have been performed in April of 1900. I hit the jackpot with FLORODORA, a musical comedy in two acts. It opened at the Lyric Theater in London in November of 1899 and ran for 455 performances. That was a very long run for the time!

The show’s popularity made a hit of the song, Tell Me Pretty Maiden (are there any more at home like you?) It’s meant to be a pick-up line, and I’ve heard it at least once during my younger more social days. I didn’t understand it then, and frankly, I still don’t. The number was performed by eight actors and eight beautiful actresses who played the English girls. (In the New York production it looks like they went for six of each.) Queen Victoria loved the theater, but actors and actresses, though they might be celebrities, were still considered not quite respectable.

In the New York City production of FLORODORA, which opened a year later, these actresses gained such popularity they simply became known as Florodora Girls. They must not have been met with the same bias about respectability in the US, because it’s rumored that each of the original eight married a millionaire. Quite an accomplishment for that era if it’s true!

Musical comedy is my favorite form of theater and it’s nice to know it was popular in the era of my books, even if I don’t always get the humor. In the whole history of, well, history, 1900 is so close. Both my grandmothers were born in the early 1890s so it feels like not so long ago. I think that’s what I love so much about this era. Even though life was very different than it is today, people are still the same.

You can learn more about FLORODORA Here Florodora – The Guide to Musical Theatre