The show starred C. Hayden Coffin, Louie Pounds, Decima Moore, Eric Lewis, W. Louis Bradfield, and later Rutland Barrington, George Grossmith, Jr., Scott Russell, Huntley Wright and Marie Studholme.

Although the earliest of these shows have a score similar in character to Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, Edwardes called them "musical comedies", leading some writers to incorrectly credit him with inventing a form that Harrigan & Hart and others had established on Broadway a decade or more earlier.

"[2] The plot of A Gaiety Girl is a simple intrigue about a stolen comb and includes a few tangled romances, "a crazy quilt of mistaken identity, imposters, villains, class barriers, and a day at the beach, elements that showed up in dozens of musicals in London and New York in subsequent seasons.

"[3] Hall's satirical book includes lines which jab at society conventions in the style of an upmarket gossip columnist.

[3] The show's popularity depended, in part, on the beautiful "Gaiety Girls" dancing chorus appearing onstage in bathing attire and in the latest fashions.

"[5] The 1890s Gaiety Girls were polite, well-behaved young women, respectable and elegant, unlike the corseted actresses from the earlier burlesques.

After Connie Gilchrist and Rosie Boote had started the fashion a score of the Guv'nor's budding stars left him to marry peers or men of title while other Gaiety Girls settled for a banker or a stockbroker....[7]A party of Gaiety girls and young society ladies are invited to a garden party given by the officers of the Life Guards at Windsor, as are a judge of the divorce court, Sir Lewis Gray, and a chaplain, Dr. Montague Brierly.