By Steve Crum

NOTE: The images and copied text are from both The Kansas City Times & The Kansas City Star, both newspapers owned by the same company.

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Broadway, exemplified by The Winter Garden Theater, was the perfect fit for Al Jolson. Billed as a featured performer from the start, Jolson would soon become headliner extraordinaire. Jolie, in blackface, portrayed Erastus Sparkler in “La Belle Paree” from March 20-June 10, 1911. The show then toured a few Eastern cities. He was Claude, a black waiter, in “Vera Violetta,” Nov. 3, 1911-Feb. 29, 1912 (includes another Eastern city tour). 

After a March 1-2, 1912 preview in Albany, “The Whirl of Society” and “A Night With the Pierrots” opened March 5 at the Winter Garden. It ran through June 19, followed by an interestingly plotted tour of mainly Eastern cities, along with a handful of Midwest sites and two dates in Canada: Montreal and Toronto. 

The Sam S. Shubert Theater in Kansas City was stop two on the trek, following a month’s booking in Chicago. Jolson and company played KC, Sept. 29-Oct. 5, 1912. It was in “The Whirl of Society” that Jolson sang “Snap Your Fingers,” “Row, Row, Row,” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” 

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The ads and engravings for the Kansas City production show Jolson, caricatured with dark eyes, bending back his partner. Then again, perhaps it is not Jolson since he is not “blacked up.” In another promo for the show that appears to be an engraving, Jolson is in blackface, playing his soon to be trademarked character Gus. Cast member Fanny Brice is pictured to Jolson’s right. 

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Advance Story under etching:

Shubert~”Whirl of Society.”

One of the biggest attractions to play the Shubert Theater this season will be given there next week, when the New York Winter Garden Company presents “The Whirl of Society” and “A Night With the Pierrots.” The engagement will open tomorrow night. The company has just finished a long run at the Lyric Theater, Chicago. Previous to that it enjoyed a whole season at the Winter Garden.

Novelties spring forth from the aisles, the foyer and everywhere. The orchestra leader sings a solo, the chorus girls and principals gallivant up and down a “Sumurun” runway over the center aisles, girlish limbs peek through the stage curtains, and there is a fun and beauty first part with seventy persons on the stage. There is no plot, but there is a theme–the doings of the ambitious social neophytes at Newport. 

Frankly, “The Whirl of Society” is nothing more or less than a great, big, expensive vaudeville show–now a ragtime “best seller” for the counters of the music stores, now a “turkey trot,” and again a swift passage of comic patter among the principal clowns.

The company is an all-star organization. The cast includes Al. Jolson, Miss Ada Lewis, Miss Fanny Brice, Lawrence D’Orsay, Clarence Harvey, Maurice, Florence Walton, the Courtney Sisters, Claudia Carlstadt, Florence Cable, Oscar Schwartz, Laura Hamilton and a chorus of sixty.

Matinees Wednesday and Saturday.

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NEXT, Part 5 of The Kansas City Jolson Story: Jolson’s first extravaganza as star, “THE HONEYMOON EXPRESS.”