1. Berlin/London: London/Berlin – an outline of cultural transfer 1890–1914
2. Local contexts and genre construction in early continental musical theatre
3. German operetta in the West End and on Broadway
4. The Arcadians and Filmzauber – adaptation and the popular musical theatre text
5. How a sweet Viennese girl became a fair international lady: transfer, performance, modernity – acts in the making of a cosmopolitan culture
6. ‘A happy man can live in the past’ – musical theatre transfer in the 1920s and 1930s
7. ‘Hullo, Ragtime!’ West End revue and the Americanisation of popular culture in pre-1914 London
8. The Argentine tango: a transatlantic dance on the European stage
9. Dover Street to Dixie and the politics of cultural transfer and exchange
10. The transculturality of stage, song and other media: intermediality in popular musical theatre
11. The Sandow Girl and her sisters: Edwardian musical comedy, cultural transfer and the staging of the healthy female body
12. West End musical theatre and the representation of Germany
13. The Tropical Express in Nazi Germany
14. Operetta and propaganda in the Third Reich: cultural politics and the Metropol-Theater

In the decades before the Second World War, popular musical theatre was one of the most influential forms of entertainment. This is the first book to reconstruct early popular musical theatre as a transnational and highly cosmopolitan industry that included everything from revues and operettas to dance halls and cabaret. Bringing together contributors from Britain and Germany, this collection moves beyond national theatre histories to study Anglo-German relations at a period of intense hostility and rivalry. Chapters frame the entertainment zones of London and Berlin against the wider trading routes of cultural transfer, where empire and transatlantic song and dance produced, perhaps for the first time, a genuinely international culture. Exploring adaptations and translations of works under the influence of political propaganda, this collection will be of interest both to musical theatre enthusiasts and to those interested in the wider history of modernism.