Ma mie Rosette
It made little impact in Paris and closed the next month, but an English version in two acts presented in London in 1892, and subsequently around Britain and in Australia and New Zealand, was considerably more successful.
Lacôme had written eight full-length opérettes and opéras comiques for Paris theatres between 1873 and 1890, none of them breaking box-office records, but some, such as Jeanne, Jeannette et Jeanneton (1876), described as "decidedly successful" by the authors of Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique.
[1] He had worked with some of France's leading librettists, including Clairville, Albert Vanloo and Eugène Leterrier, but this was his first collaboration with either of the co-authors of the libretto of Ma mie Rosette.
She had been at school in England and then attended the Conservatoire de Paris, where she had caught the attention of Sarah Bernhardt, who cast her as the page in Jules Barbier's Jeanne d'Arc.
[8] The London version of Ma mie Rosette required minor changes in that regard; the English text was by George Dance, a young writer whose only major theatrical work before that had been as co-librettist of The Nautch Girl in 1891.
[9] The English version differed from most French imports in two ways: nearly half the numbers were new, composed by Ivan Caryll, the conductor of the production; and the piece was considerably more successful in London and the British provinces than it had been in Paris.
Rosette's dream takes place not after falling asleep close to her lover, but during a fainting fit caused by her shock at his volunteering for the army.
A comic element was introduced in the form of two new characters: Bouillon, a valet, poses as a nobleman to win Martha, who pretends to be a rural ingénue, but has really buried two husbands already.
The Times was unimpressed by Ma mie Rosette, complaining that once again "a French work has been tricked out afresh for the English market … presented to a public sated with things of the same in all directions.
[16] The Pall Mall Gazette thought the piece "head and shoulders above anything" in London productions of recent times, the theme almost worthy of Goethe with a soupçon of genuine comedy".
