Cutler Comedy Company
The Cutler Comedy Company was a travelling medicine show, that also featured melodramas, banjo music and blackface minstrelsy.
Originally founded by Frank Cutler in the mid 19th century, and for a while in the 1890s featuring his daughter, Myra Cutler and Joe Keaton (later parents of silent film star Buster Keaton)
The company performed once in Cape Town during 1906, under the patronage of the Governor, probably while en route to Australia, by then without the Keatons.
They appeared in the Good Hope Theatre, Cape Town, on 2 March 1906 with performances of Het Zoen in die Donker (a Dutch/Afrikaans translation of Buckstone's A Kiss in the Dark), Catching a Count (Anon.) and what was simply billed as "A Farce in the Taal" (i.e. an untitled farce in Afrikaans).
Sources
S.D. Trav. Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies, From Nickelodeons to Youtube. BearManor Media. (Chapter 8), Google-ebook[1].
D.C. Boonzaier, 1923. "My playgoing days – 30 years in the history of the Cape Town stage", in SA Review, 9 March and 24 August 1932. (Reprinted in Bosman 1980: pp. 374-439.)
F.C.L. Bosman, 1980. Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, Deel II, 1856-1916. Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik: p.481
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