Greenwich Village Follies Opens
New York Herald, 1 September 1921, p. 9. Newspapers.com.
One hundred years ago today … The theater world was responding to last night’s opening of the Greenwich Village Follies of 1921, if ambivalently impressed by it, at least judging by the Herald’s review.
This was the third annual Greenwich Village Follies, a self-consciously artistic and ironic variation on revues like the Ziegfeld Follies, overseen by John Murray Anderson. The first two seasons had opened at the Greenwich Village Theater on Christopher Street, but by 1921 the production was big enough to open at the Schubert Theatre, 225 West 44th Street.
In 1921, the most significant addition to the Follies may have been the song “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” originally written in 1919, which became an unlikely anthem for the Roaring Twenties, a waltz that signifies late-night inebriation. The song is mentioned memorably in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as “a neat sad little waltz of that year.”
Cover of sheet music for “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” by. H.H. Warner. New York: Leo Feist, Inc., 1921. Wikicommons.
– Jonathan Goldman, September 1, 2021
TAGS: theater, vaudeville