Tag Archives: Johnny Hudgins

Les Acacias, Night-Club, Paris

The Acacias night-club was a hall at the rear of the Hotel Acacias sited at 47 Rue des Acacias near the Bois de Bologne with a garden utilized for the summer. It was one of the many night-resorts in Paris in the Jazz Age that became a favoured rendezvous of high society throughout the 1920s. The roster of performers who appeared at Les Acacias was astonishing, providing a veritable Who’s Who of glittering international stars of stage and cabaret.

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Club Alabam in New York

From the 1910s, into the 1920s and 30s, Black culture in all forms proliferated in Harlem and became known as the Harlem Renaissance. In particular there was a flowering of jazz music, performance and night-clubs in the early part of the 1920s. This trend extended into Manhattan, first with Lew Leslie’s cabaret venue called the Plantation in 1922 and then with the Club Alabam in 1924. At the same time Black artists invaded Montmartre in Paris and established a comparable ‘Harlem in Montmartre.’

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The Ambassadeurs Show 1927

The Ambassadeurs Show 1927

The second Ambassadeur’s show presented by Edmund Sayag in the summer of 1927 was described as ‘not a revue but a series of acts to entertain the classy diners’ and primarily featured a range of top American acts headed by Georgie Hale.

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The Ambassadeur Show 1926

The Ambassadeur Show 1926

Edmund Sayag’s first show at the newly renovated Café des Amabassadeurs was Lew Leslie’s all-black production Blackbirds of 1926. Direct from New York, Blackbirds capitalised on the success of The Revue Negre, featuring Josephine Baker, staged earlier in 1925 and was an instant hit.

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The Kit Cat Club

The Kit Cat Club

The fashionable Kit Cat Club in the Haymarket, which to many people today still epitomises the gay carefree days of the 1920s, was opened in the summer of 1925 and immediately became one of the most famous nocturnal haunts in London. Decked out with the last word in restaurant and dance floor equipment it was regarded as the most sumptuous resort in Europe and was the only club in London that had been built expressly for the purpose of a club.

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