[1] After several failed attempts at becoming a sailor, a cook and a cigar shop clerk and a disastrous audition at the conservatory in The Hague, Kiehl finally made his stage debut as La Flèche in Molière's The Miser on 21 February 1875 at the company of his cousin Valois.

[2] Soon after he moved to Amsterdam, where he joined the company of Gustave Prot and Frans P. Kistemaker.

There he had his first big successes as an operetta comedian in adaptations of The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes and The Bells of Corneville among others.

At Prot & Kistemaker he would frequently team up with Johannes Philip Kelly and Bart Kreeft, who became known as the Three K's.

[3][4] Kiehl would go on to join a large number of companies, among which the Artisschouwburg (where he wrote and directed what might be the most successful original Dutch operetta ever written: De Parel van Zaandam which garnered rave reviews and was due to be staged in London[5][6][7]) the opera department of Royal Theater Carré and the company of Louis Bouwmeester in the Paleis voor Volksvlijt.