Hyperion Records

Our Miss Gibbs (Gaiety, 23 January 1909) was the greatest success of all the Caryll and Monckton collaborations; but it also became the last, when Caryll emigrated to America. It was a star vehicle par excellence for Gertie Millar, playing Mary Gibbs, a Yorkshire girl at Garrod’s store in London, who falls in love with a bank clerk who turns out to be an earl. The refrain of her innocent Act 1 entrance song Mary encapsulates as well as anything the infectiousness of Monckton’s writing. However, the song that has above all come to represent the Gaiety era is Moonstruck, performed apropos of very little in pierrot costume in a second act topically set at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition at the White City.

from notes by Andrew Lamb © 2008