The Girl in the Taxi

The German original had a libretto by Georg Okonkowski and was, in turn, based on a French play, Fils à papa, by Antony Mars and Maurice Desvallières.

The musical opened at the Lyric Theatre in London, produced by Philip Michael Faraday, on 5 September 1912 and ran for 385 performances.

B. W. Findon, writing in The Play Pictorial called this "The merriest of musical farces"[1] The piece toured internationally, including a production by J. C. Williamson's opera company in Australasia in 1915, starring Workman.

The musical was adapted back into French by Mars and Desvallières and produced in Paris and then Lyon in 1913 as La chaste Suzanne.

The Times took a dim view of the morality of the piece: If your notion of Paris is the "gay" city (in the technical sense); if you like the kind of farce that takes you to a rowdy night-restaurant, where you find husbands and lovers, cocottes, girls and wives, mixed up in total confusion amid noise, paper streamers, and "penny teasers"; if you are amused by drunkenness; if you like to see an elderly member of the Forty a prude by day and a goat by night; his son receiving his "education" from a young married woman, and his daughter going with her betrothed to spy upon her father's escapades; if you like to see father and son dancing round together in delight at having found one another out; and if you like to enjoy all this rather heavily told, and spread, with catchy music, then The Girl in the Taxi is the very piece for you.

The paper thought much more highly of the farcical scenes in Act 3, "which gave us some of the 'knock-about' business which we hope to find funny till we die".

[4] The Manchester Guardian expressed no moral qualms about the piece and thought the themes of the plot were handled tactfully and amusingly.