Cutler Comedy Company
The Cutler Comedy Company was an American travelling medicine show, that also featured melodramas, banjo music and blackface minstrelsy, founded by Frank L. Cutler in the late 19th century. For a while in the 1890s the company not only featured his daughter, Myra Cutler, but also Joe Keaton (They would later marry and become the parents of silent film star Buster Keaton)
Among the medicine's the company marketed was the "Kickapoo Elixer"
The company performed once in Cape Town during 1906, under the patronage of the Governor, probably while en route to Australia and by then without the Keatons.
The company 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].
Edward McPherson. 2011. Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat HatFaber & Faber (Chapter 1), Google E-book[2].
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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