Notes on a Cowardly Lion by John Lahr Page A

geographical language is just supreme.
    Ve have learnt to speaking English in a bar room
    And that is vhy ve don’t know whose the reason …
    He is embarrassed now at the nonsensical, hokey quality of the humor; but in 1916 it was a big success.
    After College Days , Lahr had worked himself up to burlesque and The Best Show in Town , which became one of the season’s choicest burlesque offerings. It played to rave reviews and packed houses for its full forty-week tour. After the fourth month, the program for the show ran an advertisement announcing that “Bert Lahr, eccentric Dutch [was signed] three years more with Blutch Cooper.”
    The gaiety of this time is reflected in a picture of Lahr in his tattered first scrapbook. It shows him and Frank Hunter mugging with the soubrette of the show. They are dressed in children’s clothes complete with pillows for paunch and little skullcaps. They are being embraced by a zoftig beauty wearing a rhinestone star in the middle of her forehead. It is the only picture he has kept that depicts him clowning off stage.
    During the run of The Best Show in Town there was little leisure time. Performers worked two shows a day, seven days a week in the towns west of Chicago. When they were in the East, Sunday was a day of rest, but any free time was spent sleeping or planning new material. At every circuit theater, rehearsals would be held at 9:30 each morning and the chorus and routines overhauled.
    Lahr thrived on the work. He did not waste time at rehearsals. Hisearnestness made him the brunt of much good-natured joking. During the first tour he incorporated new kinds of comic movements into his performance, adopting many of the antics of the acrobats, who fascinated him. He developed a neck fall and a backward flip that he worked into the memorable Flugel Street Union scene (see Appendix 2) he did with Hunter.
    Wells’s burlesque was high-level entertainment. The audiences appreciated his skill. In cities like Detroit and Cincinnati, the local theater buffs announced that it was the best burlesque to come their way in a long time. Cincinnati offices reported that The Best Show in Town was “the most successful season of burlesque in the city.” And Dayton, where burlesque houses had been languishing because of a dearth of talent and suitable material, saw Wells’s show as heralding a new type of burlesque. One critic was outspoken on the subject:
    By this time, Dayton has learned that burlesque is not so black as it is painted. It has been pretty well cleaned up. Rot and coarseness, the solid foundations upon which the old burlesque was built, have been amputated and what remains is no worse than that which is found in almost any musical comedy. To be sure it is no show for babes in arms … But then the average man or woman can see it without being any the worse for the experience. It is spectacular and diverting and musical and its principal exponents comprise some of the cleverest people on the stage.
    Lahr’s reviews continued to be outstanding. He was “a coming Teuton” in almost every critical appraisal. He pasted each clipping in his book.
    Now the scraps of paper are brown with age. Many of them disintegrate at the touch. They tell little of the enthusiasm of those performances, but they include a few random entries that are not about him. These are mysterious and touching inclusions in a book that represents so much of his early dream and the beginning of his future. One clipping from a Charleston paper is about a show called Katinka (1916). A paragraph in that review is marked with a thin red line of lipstick:
    Katinka brought a large and capable cast to Charleston and yes—one really pretty girl; the petite little brunette, and there was onlyone. Too bad she was in the chorus, because there are better things ahead of her, much better things.
    A few pages later in the book there is another mention of someone other than