George Joseph Edwardes (né Edwards; 8 October 1855 – 4 October 1915) was an English theatre manager and producer of Irish ancestry who brought a new era in musical theatre to the British stage and beyond.
Edwardes started out in theatre management, soon working at a number of West End theatres. By the age of 20, he was managing theatres for Richard D'Oyly Carte. In 1885, Edwardes became a manager at the Gaiety Theatre with John Hollingshead, who soon retired.
For the next three decades, Edwardes ruled a theatrical empire including the Gaiety, Daly's Theatre, the Adelphi Theatre and others, and sent touring companies around Britain and abroad. In the early 1890s, Edwardes recognised the changing tastes of musical theatre audiences and led the movement away from burlesque and comic opera to Edwardian musical comedy.
Contents
Life and career
Edwardes was born at Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England. He was the eldest of four sons and three daughters of James Edwards, comptroller of customs, and his wife, Eleanor Widdup. Edwardes's parents were Roman Catholics from Wexford, Ireland. He attended St James's College, in Clee, after which he was sent to London to take the examination for the Royal Military Academy. He did not enter the Academy, however, because his cousins, Irish theatre managers John and Michael Gunn, obtained a job for him at Leicester's Royal Opera House.
Early career
Michael Gunn met Richard D'Oyly Carte in 1875 and later became a partner in his production company. He and young Edwardes moved to London to work for Carte at the Opera Comique in the mid-1870s, with Edwardes being given the trusted position of treasurer. He eventually became Carte's manager at the Opera Comique and then was Carte's first managing director of the Savoy Theatre in 1881, helping to produce several of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas until 1885. During this time, he added the "e" to his surname. While working at the Opera Comique, Edwardes met his future wife, the singer Julia Gwynne, who was appearing with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, where she was playing small principal roles. The couple married in 1885 and produced three daughters, including one named Dorothy, and a son, D'Arcy.
In 1885, Edwardes was hired to succeed John Hollingshead as manager at the Gaiety Theatre, producing the burlesques in which the Gaiety specialised. Together, they produced Little Jack Sheppard a burlesque in a full-length format with an original score by Meyer Lutz, which opened at Christmas 1885. After this, in 1886, Hollingshead retired, and from then on the Guv'nor (as Edwardes came to be known) was in charge, with the assistance of the theatre's star player, Nellie Farren.
The next show that Edwardes produced at the Gaiety was Dorothy (1886), a comic opera similar to the Gilbert and Sullivan operas that he had produced for Carte, but the Gaiety's audiences were used to burlesques, and so Edwardes sold the rights to Dorothy, which became a hit at another theatre. Following on the success of Little Jack Sheppard, Edwardes turned the Gaiety back to producing burlesques, but these were "new burlesques": full-length pieces with original music by Meyer Lutz, instead of scores compiled from popular tunes. These included Monte Cristo, Junior (1887), Miss Esmeralda (1887), Frankenstein, or The Vampire's Victim (1887), Faust up to Date (1888), Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué (1889), Carmen up to Data (1890), Cinder Ellen up too Late (1891), and Don Juan (1892, with music by Meyer Lutz, book by Fred Leslie and lyrics by Adrian Ross). John D'Auban choreographed the Gaiety burlesques until 1891. These new burlesques were very successful and toured widely in Britain and abroad. However, Dorothy's runaway success (it became the longest-running piece in musical theatre history up to that time) showed Edwardes and other producers that topical, light comedies could be enormously successful. At the same time, the death of Fred Leslie and retirement of Nellie Farren by 1892 helped bring to an end the era of Gaiety burlesque.
Popularising musical comedy
In the 1890s, Edwardes hit upon a new strategy for the Gaiety, which was a variation from the kinds of shows that he and Carte had produced and also had elements of the Gaiety burlesques and of music hall entertainments. The earliest of these shows, taking a cue from Dorothy, had a musical style similar to the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. Into this mix, he incorporated some of the elements of the form that Harrigan & Hart had established on Broadway a decade earlier. Like Thomas German Reed and W. S. Gilbert before him, Edwardes wanted to produce musical plays that were more respectable (and would attract a more affluent, polite crowd) than risqué burlesque. But Edwardes sought pieces that integrated spoken dialogue and music in a lighter, less satiric way than Gilbert and Sullivan had, using topical songs, fashionable costumes and sassy byplay between the characters.
The first of these, In Town in 1892 and A Gaiety Girl in 1893 (both of which were produced by Edwardes at the Prince of Wales Theatre), met with strong success and confirmed Edwardes on the path he was taking.
Edwardes dubbed his new musical plays "musical comedies". If Edwardes didn't invent the genre, he popularised it in Britain and was the first producer to elevate them to international popularity. He used the best writers and composers to create entertainments appealing to his Victorian and Edwardian audiences. Although he never acted in his productions, Edwardes controlled every other aspect of them.
At the Gaiety Theatre, Edwardes hired Ivan Caryll as the resident composer and music director and created a series of shows featuring fashionable characters and costumes, tuneful music, romantic and topical lyrics and pretty dancing. He embedded these elements in an often tenuous but nonetheless continuous original narrative. Like burlesque, Edwardes's "girl" musicals featured chorus lines and other devices for the display of women's bodies, but within the context of the simple narrative, elaborate displays of contemporary fashion and scenery, and light parody of social convention and topical issues.
For the next two decades, the "girl" musicals, with popular songs by Lionel Monckton and lively, wise-crack filled books by Owen Hall, filled the Gaiety Theatre, including The Shop Girl (1894), The Circus Girl (1896), A Runaway Girl (1898), The Orchid (1903), The Spring Chicken (1905), The Girls of Gottenberg (1907), Our Miss Gibbs (1909), The Sunshine Girl (1912), and After the Girl (1914). The heroines were independent young women who often earned their own livings. The stories followed a familiar plot line – a chorus girl breaks into high society, a shop girl makes a good marriage. There was always a misunderstanding during act one and an engagement at the end. In the words of a contemporary review, Edwardes’s musicals were "Light, Bright and enjoyable." These musicals were widely imitated by other British producers, and, within a decade, in America.
Death
Edwardes died at his home in Regent's Park, London, just before his 60th birthday. He was buried at St Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green, and was survived by his wife, Julia Gwynne. Although Edwardes left valuable properties, he also left considerable debts. His theatrical enterprises continued to operate under the guidance of Robert Evett, who managed to produce a number of hits over the next few years, notably The Maid of the Mountains and The Boy, both beginning in 1917, that paid the debts of the estate.