Édouard Marchand: Pioneer of the Revue

October 20 was the birthday of the man credited with devising the modern stage revue, Édouard Marchand (1859-1905).

In 1886 he was hired by the Folies Bergère to devise stage shows for the new venue. By this stage he had amassed experience and reputation as a booker and presenter of music hall and cabaret entertainment, and had also been a theatre director. His unique contribution was to combine variety entertainment with polished stage shows, elevating and dignifying a form traditionally associated with earthier platforms. A couple of decades later (shortly after Marchand’s death) Florenz Ziegfeld was to import the form to America, the equivalent here of course being recruiting acts from vaudeville and burlesque and bringing them to Broadway. The Broadway revue blossomed as a unique form throughout the first third of the 20th century, essentially ending with the dawn of the Great Depression, around the same time as vaudeville itself.

The impresario’s son Léopold Marchand (1891-1952) became a successful Parisian playwright and screenwriter. One of Marchand’s best known scripts sounds at least partially autobiographical. Written in 1925, it’s called Mon gosse de père (“My Childish Father”). A 1930 film version starred Adolphe Menjou; it was later remade in 1953. Léopold Marchand was married to actress and model Michalina “Misz” Hertz, a Polish Jew by origin. Hertz committed suicide in Paris in 1942, hours before the Vichy French were scheduled to perform a mass arrest of foreign Jews in the action that came to be known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup.

To learn more about the roots of variety entertainment, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,