Jerome Kern in the context of "Princess Theatre, New York City"

Edwardian musical comedy is a genre of British musical theatre that thrived from 1892 into the 1920s, extending beyond the reign of King Edward VII in both directions. It began to dominate the English musical stage, and even the American musical theatre, when the Gilbert and Sullivan operas' dominance had ended, until the rise of American musicals by Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin and Cole Porter following the First World War.

Between In Town in 1892 and The Maid of the Mountains, premiering in 1917, this new style of musical theatre proliferated across the musical stages of Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world. The popularity of In Town and A Gaiety Girl (1893), led to an astonishing number of hits over the next three decades, into the 1920s, the most successful of which included The Shop Girl (1894), The Geisha (1896), Florodora (1899), A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), The Earl and the Girl (1903), The Arcadians (1909), Our Miss Gibbs (1909), The Quaker Girl (1910), Betty (1914), Chu Chin Chow (1916) and The Maid of the Mountains (1917).

Show Boat is a musical with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It is based on Edna Ferber's best-selling 1926 novel of the same name. The musical follows the lives of the performers, stagehands and dock workers on the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi River show boat, over 40 years from 1887 to 1927. Its themes include racial prejudice and tragic, enduring love. The musical contributed such classic songs as "Ol' Man River", "Make Believe", and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man".

The musical was first produced in 1927 by Florenz Ziegfeld. The premiere of Show Boat on Broadway was an important event in the history of American musical theatre. It "was a radical departure in musical storytelling, marrying spectacle with seriousness", compared with the trivial and unrealistic operettas, light musical comedies and "Follies"-type musical revues that defined Broadway in the 1890s and early 20th century. According to The Complete Book of Light Opera:

In music, number refers to an individual song, dance, or instrumental piece which is part of a larger work of musical theatre, opera, or oratorio. It can also refer either to an individual song in a published collection or an individual song or dance in a performance of several unrelated musical pieces as in concerts and revues. Both meanings of the term have been used in American English since the second half of the 19th century.

Ira Gershwin (born Israel Gershovitz; December 6, 1896 – August 17, 1983) was an American lyricist who collaborated with his younger brother, composer George Gershwin, to create some of the most memorable songs in the English language of the 20th century. With George, he wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring songs such as "I Got Rhythm", "Embraceable You", "The Man I Love", and "Someone to Watch Over Me". He was also responsible, along with DuBose Heyward, for the libretto to George's opera Porgy and Bess.

The success the Gershwin brothers had with their collaborative works has often overshadowed the creative role that Ira played. His mastery of songwriting continued after George's early death in 1937. Ira wrote additional hit songs with composers Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen. His critically acclaimed 1959 book Lyrics on Several Occasions, an amalgam of autobiography and annotated anthology, is widely considered an important source for studying the art of the lyricist in the golden age of American popular song.

The Earl and the Girl is a musical comedy in two acts, with a book by Seymour Hicks, lyrics by Percy Greenbank and music by Ivan Caryll. It was produced by William Greet and opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 10 December 1903. It transferred to the Lyric Theatre on 12 September 1904, running for a total of 371 performances. It also ran at the Casino Theatre in New York beginning on 4 November 1905 for 148 performances (with some added music and lyrics by Jerome Kern and others), starring Eddie Foy and W. H. Denny. A production toured Australia in 1906 and 1907. A revival in London in 1914 ran for a total of 107 performances, and there were later revivals and tours.

The original London cast included a number of performers who had recently appeared in productions of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which was no longer performing at the Savoy Theatre at the time of the premiere of The Earl and the Girl, including Walter Passmore, Henry Lytton, Robert Evett, M. R. Morand, Reginald Crompton, Powis Pinder, Charles Childerstone, Alec Fraser, Ernest Torrence, Rudolph Lewis, Agnes Fraser, and Louie Pounds. Lytton later used the song "My Cosy Corner" from the show in his music hall acts with much success, and made a recording of it. Kern's song "How'd You Like to Spoon with Me?" was interpolated into the New York production, and it also became a hit.

Guy Reginald Bolton (23 November 1884 – 4 September 1979) was an Anglo-American playwright and writer of musical comedies. Born in England and educated in France and the US, he trained as an architect but turned to writing. Bolton preferred working in collaboration with others, principally the English writers P. G. Wodehouse and Fred Thompson, with whom he wrote 21 and 14 shows respectively, and the American playwright George Middleton, with whom he wrote ten shows. Among his other collaborators in Britain were George Grossmith Jr., Ian Hay and Weston and Lee. In the US, he worked with George and Ira Gershwin, Kalmar and Ruby and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Bolton is best known for his early work on the Princess Theatre musicals during the First World War with Wodehouse and the composer Jerome Kern. These shows moved the American musical away from the traditions of European operetta to small scale, intimate productions with what the Oxford Encyclopedia of Popular Music calls "smart and witty integrated books and lyrics, considered to be a watershed in the evolution of the American musical." Among his 50 plays and musicals, most of which were considered "frothy confections", additional hits included Primrose (1924), the Gershwins' Lady, Be Good (1924) and especially Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1934).

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (/ˈwʊdhaʊs/ WUUD-howss; 15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr. Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.

Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction. Most of Wodehouse's fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, although he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. He wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies during and after the First World War, together with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, that played an important part in the development of the American musical. He began the 1930s writing for MGM in Hollywood. In a 1931 interview, his naive revelations of incompetence and extravagance in the studios caused a furore. In the same decade, his literary career reached a new peak.

Show Boat is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater on a steamboat that travels between small towns along the banks of the Mississippi River, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction Era riverboat to Gilded Age Chicago to Roaring Twenties New York, and finally returns to the Mississippi River.

Show Boat was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1927 by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Three films followed: a 1929 version that depended partly on the musical, and two full adaptations of the musical in 1936 and 1951.