Tag Archives: twenties

Dolly Sisters

The Dolly Sisters: London

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The Dolly Sisters: London

‘Two more electric personalities it has never been my fate to meet. They radiated personal magnetism, vibrant energy or whatever you like to call it and any revue benefited enormously by their presence on the stage… On the stage and off the Dolly sisters were unique.’ Charles B. Cochran

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Dolly Sisters

The Dolly Sisters: New York

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The Dolly Sisters: New York

‘You can’t tell one apart from the other. In conversational ability they are as entertaining as they are with their tootsies. No prettier, smarter, clever people were born than these two girls… the most charming tots on the American stage…. they have proven themselves a box office asset… greater things will be heard…’ Unidentified 1916

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Film

The School For Scandal (1923)

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The School For Scandal (1923)

A surprising British feature film released in 1923 was Bertram Phillips’ The School For Scandal starring Queenie Thomas based on a well-known British stage play by Richard Sheridan.

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Cabaret

The Ambassadeurs Show 1929

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The Ambassadeurs Show 1929

The fourth Ambassadeurs show in Paris was presented by Edmund Sayag in the summer of 1929 with a vaguely oriental but again distinctively American content.

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Film

Paddy the Next Best Thing (1923)

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Paddy the Next Best Thing (1923)

Herbert’s Wilcox’s second film with Mae Marsh, following The Flames of Passion, was Paddy the Next Best Thing, a romantic drama about a young tomboy and her growing love for a rich landowner set in Ireland and London, once again directed by Graham Cutts.

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Theatre

Broadway

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Broadway : a cabaret and boot-legging drama of New York night-life

‘Broadway’ was regarded at the time as one of the best and slickest crime plays seen on the stage, laying bare the gangster racket in New York at the height of Prohibition in the mid 1920s. It was staged in both New York and London and was described as a thoroughly modern melodrama, although Theatre World insisted that the correct description, although a hybrid expression, was in fact a comedy drama.

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Personalities

Josephine Earle

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Josephine Earle

Josephine Earle was an American actress who made a name for herself at Vitagraph in a series of Vamp movie roles from 1915. She then made herself thoroughly at home in England during the 1920s appearing in British silent films, legitimate stage shows and cabaret.

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Venues

Murray’s Night Club

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Murray’s Night Club

Murray’s Night Club in Beak Street, London was opened in late 1913 by Jack Mays, an American and Ernest A. Cordell, an Englishman. It was part of the cabaret boom inspired by the tango craze that had been sweeping Europe and the USA and emerged at the same time as other venues such as the 400 Club the Lotus and slightly later the Cosmopolitan, the Tabarin, Macfarlane’s and The Cave of the Golden Calf.

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Film

The Flames of Passion (1922)

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Flames of Passion (1922)

One of the earliest ground breaking British silent films from Herbert Wilcox and Graham Cutts was The Flames of Passion starring the American actress Mae Marsh and a solid British cast.

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Dolly Tree, Theatre

The Peepshow

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The Peepshow

The debut revue from the Julian Wylie and Jas W. Tate organization at the London Hippodrome was The Peepshow launched 14th April 1921. Described as a tropical fantasia it proved to be a runaway success partly because several of the main scenes had already been tried and tested in previous Wylie–Tate productions, and so from the outset, the production was viewed as being polished and well produced.

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