were "Light, Bright and enjoyable." These musicals were widely imitated by other British producers, and, within a decade, in America. Perhaps to balance the "girl" musicals, the Gaiety also presented a series of what could be described as "boy" musicals, such as The Messenger Boy (1900), The Toreador (1901), The New Aladdin (1906), and Theodore and Co. (1916)The Gaiety Girls and high fashion A major attraction of Edwardes' shows was his glamorous, dancing corps of "Gaiety Girls". These were fashionable, elegant young ladies, unlike the corseted actresses from the earlier burlesques. In Edwardes' shows, these ladies were, as The Sketch noted in its review of The Geisha in 1896, "clothed in accordance with the very latest and most extreme modes of the moment." Many of the best-known London couturiers designed costumes for Edwardes' productions. The illustrated periodicals were eager to publish photographs of actresses in the latest stage hits, and so the theatre became an excellent way for clothiers to publicise their latest fashions. Gaiety girls were polite, well-behaved young women and became a popular attraction and a symbol of ideal womanhood. They were much sought after by the "stage door johnnies" of the 1890s—some of them becoming popular actresses or marrying into society and even the nobility. For example, in 1907, Denise Orme married Lord Churston and she later married the Duke of Leinster. Alan Hyman wrote in The Gaiety Years, At the old Gaiety in the Strand the chorus was becoming a matrimonial agency for girls with ambitions to marry into the peerage and began in the nineties when Connie Gilchrist, a star of the Old Gaiety, married the Earl of Orkney and then in 1901, the Marquess of Headfort married Rosie Boote, who had charmed London the previous year when she sang Maisie in The Messenger Boy. 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. The Guv'nor finding this was playing ducks and drakes with his theatrical plans had a 'nuptial clause' inserted in every contract... Debutantes were competing with the other girls to get into the Gaiety chorus while upper-class youths were joining the ranks of the chorus boys. Other theatres and later years Edwardes joined with American producer Augustin Daly to build a new London theatre