Len Platt , Tobias Becker and David Linton

Several months before the outbreak of the First World War, a new piece of popular musical theatre opened at the Gaiety Theatre in London’s West End. After the Girl told the story of Doris Pitt, the daughter of a Cincinnati millionaire sent to Brussels to complete her education. When her father arrives on a visit in Paris, he finds her ‘corrupted’ and determines to send her back home. Doris, however, has other ideas. Pursued by an anxious father, she runs away – first to a school friend in Amsterdam, then to Budapest and then on to Berlin, where Mr Pitt finally catches up with her. She is performing as a singer in a variety hall. Father and daughter are eventually reconciled, and the show ends with them celebrating the New Year at the Carlton Hotel in New York. After the Girl reads like a comment on popular theatre before the First World War. Although it appears to be a musical comedy in most respects, its title and subtitle signify distance from that genre. The show takes on the dimensions of a hybrid commodity, becoming a ‘Revusical Comedy’. Its writers acknowledge the form, which had been dominant across Europe and America since the 1890s, but at the same time emphatically identify the new show with revue, the rising genre popular on the Continent and in New York since the early 1900s, but which did not start to gain real momentum in London until shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. After the Girl marked the moment when the West End’s hitherto most popular genre, musical comedy, faced a challenge that was to prove decisive. The ambiguities of the show’s title positions After the Girl very specifically in a post-girl world, beyond the ‘girl shows’ which had been so much part and parcel of musical comedy culture up to that time, albeit simultaneously making a not quite final contribution in this respect. The further interest lies in the roaming disposition of the show’s central character. Doris Pitt, the American who travels all over Europe, can be read as