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The first musical comedy to be called so was A Gaiety Girl, staged in 1893 by George Edwardes at the Gaiety Theatre, London. A romantic farce adorned by the songs of Sidney Jones, it was successfully exported to New York in the same year. John Hollingshead (Edwardes’ predecessor at the Gaiety Theatre) wrote in 1903:
The invention or discovery of musical comedy was a happy...
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