In The Great Wet Way, a humorous account of transatlantic travel, American theatre critic Alan Dale represents ocean liners as sites of transformation, frivolity, and performance. In the passage above, he ponders the peculiar metamorphosis that overtakes him whenever he crosses the Atlantic. Cut off from the hustling world of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he loses his “real self,” becoming instead an autograph-hunting, bridge-playing, opera-glassing “ship self.” It is as though the ship has remade Dale and the social world around him (Fig. 1). Within this altered world, new sights become old sights, and eccentric clothing or mannerisms come to seem commonplace. Dale recalls seeing a young woman wearing a Panama hat covered with autographs from her fellow passengers. If the woman dared to “walk down Broadway or Fifth Avenue wearing that hideous autograph hat,” he writes, “[s]he would probably be followed by a howling and derisive mob. . . . Yet on board she was unmolested. After the first few days nobody noticed the autograph hat.”

Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder epitomized Scottishness in the Anglo-American cultural imaginary for much of the twentieth century. Yet Lauder's Scottishness was a carefully crafted performance, a collaborative effort between Lauder and his American agent, William Morris, centred on Lauder's embodiment of the ‘canny Scot’ stereotype. The article argues that this performance served two primary objectives within the context of early twentieth-century vaudeville. First, stories of Lauder's ‘characteristic’ Scottish thrift worked to deflect commentary about the star's status as a highly paid foreign commodity. By planting stories and arranging interviews that represented Lauder as a skilled and cunning Scot, Morris addressed growing anxieties that men, as well as women, were becoming mere cogs in the machine of corporate Broadway capital. Second, Morris's representation of Lauder as the epitome of all things Scottish guaranteed the loyal patronage of the Scottish diaspora and supported expressions of nationalist pride that were not antithetical to Scottish membership within the Union.

Decades before the rise of the international megamusical, Franz Lehár's operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) traveled the world, becoming a franchise surrounded by a constellation of commodities. Within two years of its opening in Vienna on 30 December 1905, the romantic tale of Hanna Glawari's second chance at love was playing in theatres across Europe and in “virtually every city in the German-speaking world,” including colonial communities in Africa and Asia. In Argentina, as many as five versions of the operetta opened simultaneously in Buenos Aires, each in a different language. By 1908, three Merry Widow road companies were touring the United States, and numerous burlesques of the piece were vying for the attention of theatregoers.

“Actresses as a rule know no more about making themselves beautiful than does the average woman; neither are they naturally more beautiful,” wrote actress Margaret Illington Banes in a 1912 article entitled “The Mad Search for Beauty.” “The truth of the matter is,” she continued, “that no actress—or any woman—can impart the secrets of beauty to another, any more than the rich man can impart the secrets of business success to some other man.” Disturbed by recent trends in the theatrical profession that required actresses to present themselves as “beauty specialists,” Banes sought to expose the constructed nature of their on- and offstage performances. Stage stars captivated audiences because they had numerous opportunities to appear onstage dressed in the height of style; “under the same circumstances,” she concluded, most women “would look quite as well.”