A 100-year-old drag performance from Penn’s Mask & Wig made music history

It was 100 years ago this month that Joan of Arkansas changed the course of recording history.

That’s the title of the 1925 production from the University of Pennsylvania’s Mask and Wig musical comedy troupe that played a key role in a technological revolution that forever changed how music was recorded and enjoyed.

On April 9, 1925, the 78 rpm record of “Joan Of Arkansas — Medley,” credited to the Mask and Wig Glee Chorus, with “Joan of Arkansas — Buenos Aires” on the flip side, was issued on Camden’s Victor label.

The 10 inch record of comic songs from a Wild West romp about a rodeo rider heroine — which, despite its punny title, Mask and Wig historian Peter Kohn says was not a Joan of Arc satire — became the first electrical recording released to use the then brand new Western Electric recording system.

Why is that such a big deal?

Because before Joan of Arkansas, (whose title character was played by a male actor in drag since Mask and Wig was a male-only ensemble until just three years ago) acoustic recording required vocalists to sing loudly into a megaphone not unlike the cone seen on the iconic Victor label with Nipper the dog listening to “His Master’s Voice.”

It favored operatic singers and vaudeville singers “who could project to the back of the hall,” says Mark Obert-Thorn, the producer and engineer who curated the new 1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording on the Pristine Classical label. The electrical amplification, he said, “enabled more dynamic range of recording frequencies, music could sound more natural.”

Obert-Thorn’s compilation showcases the Mask and Wig songs written by Charles Gilpin, as well as Victor recordings made in Camden — then one of the music industry capitals of the U.S. The Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, performs Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and Italian baritone Giuseppe De Luca sings Cimara’s “Stornello (Son come i chicchi).”

“With electrical recording, you had amplification. You could sing at a lower tone. You could whisper,” explains Obert-Thorn, a lifelong Philadelphian who now lives outside of Detroit, speaking via Zoom.

In fact, the earliest recording made by the new Western Electric system was by Art Gillham, known as “The Whispering Pianist,” for Victor’s rival, New York-based Columbia Records

Innovative technology allowed for more intimate emotional expression from vocalists — from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish — who seduced the listener, rather than overpowering them.

“It paved the way for crooning, and for the more subtle kind of delivery you heard in Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and on to today,” says Obert-Thorn, who added that the new technology had a profound effect on classical music. Instead of singers going into the studio, “[the technology] could go into big halls, it could go into live performances, it could go outside,” he said.

The Joan of Arkansas recordings were drawn from the troupe’s 37th production. Mask and Wig was founded in 1889 by Penn undergrad Clayton Fotterall McMichael, and it made its debut at the Chestnut Street Opera House with Lurline, an adaptation of Henry Byron’s The Nymphs of the Lurleyburg.

The troupe’s founding, says Kohn, an attorney and Mask and Wig alum who lives in Bella Vista, “was provoked by the realization that the only theatrical productions at Penn and Philadelphia at the time were dusty old Greek and Roman tragedies and Shakespeare, and there was no comedy to be found.”

So McMichael and his cofounders of the second oldest undergrad dramatic club in the U.S. — Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals is older — set out to “shake it up a bit, and parody these historic figures and plays,” says Kohn.

The historian showed off Mask and Wig paraphernalia at the troupe’s Bavarian beer hall, hunting lodge-style clubhouse on Quince Street in Center City. The building, which had a past as one of the first African American Lutheran churches in the U.S. and a dissecting room for students at Thomas Jefferson Medical College, was re-designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre, starting in 1894.

Eyre hired young illustrator Maxfield Parrish to paint the Old King Cole mural behind the club’s Grille Room bar. Parrish’s painted caricatures of members still adorn the walls, along with hundreds of hanging beer steins.

Kohn’s caricature, depicting him as Count Calimanco from a 1988 Lurline, Again production, is done by a later artist. The original Parrish mural was sold at an auction for $662,000 in 1996.

That payout was used to fund an endowment for the troupe, whose spring 2025 parody of celebrity and influencer culture, Once Upon a Crime in Hollywood, staged its final performance at the clubhouse last weekend.

Mask and Wig was on The Ed Sullivan Show four times in the 1950s, and songs written by members were recorded by stars of the big band era including Sinatra, Count Basie, and Rosemary Clooney. The standard “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” was written by alum Bobby Troup.

The Joan of Arkansas history-making recording came about mainly by being in the right place at the right time. The recordings on March 16, 1925, were not the first electrical recordings made in Camden but were the first to be released.

Most of the early electrical recordings at Victor were made by orchestras and notable opera singers. But there was also a growth market for more lighthearted fare like Mask and Wig’s comic burlesques.

“Somebody at Mask and Wig must have known someone at Victor,” Obert-Thorn thinks. “Somebody had an in.”

“I think it really has to do with nothing more than the proximity of Philadelphia to Camden,” says Kohn, “and the popularity that Mask and Wig had as a source of entertainment, really nationally.” Then, as now, Mask and Wig was a touring enterprise. The ensemble traveled in its own Mask and Wig-branded railcar, going as far west as Chicago.

Other recordings made at Victor in 1925 before Mask and Wig’s March 16 studio date weren’t issued until later in the year. But Joan of Arkansas was released on April 9, just three weeks after it was recorded.

Why such a hurry? The likely reasons for the rush, Obert-Thorn and Kohn agree, are two.

Victor wanted to test the market for the new, improved sonic technology, getting a leg up on competitors like Columbia and the Chicago-based Brunswick label. And Mask and Wig needed a product to sell, coinciding with a show starring Edwin R. Cox Jr. as Joan that the New York Evening Post called “jim-dandy from first to last.”

That tour kicked off on March 28 in Wilmington and ran through Penn’s spring break, with an April 4 show in New York. The Joan of Arkansas recordings weren’t ready for those dates, but would have been in hand on time for an Atlantic City show April 11, and a two-week engagement at the Forrest Theater on Walnut Street that began April 13.

So for that hometown stand, Mask and Wig would have had their new history-making records available to sell at shows. It’s an industry model that holds 100 years later: Mask and Wig would perform their new songs live. And after the show was over, they had merch to sell.