Music-hall-style variety shows were the mass entertainment of the late 19th century. They featured a variety of musical and performance acts, and as the audience was almost exclusively male, a great deal of eroticism. Those acts played particularly well at the Folies Bergere in Paris. In New York, Florenz Ziegfeld sought to open his own version of the follies.

On this day, July 8, in 1907, Ziegfield’s Follies premiered at the New York Theatre, featuring, much like his Paris inspiration a scantily clad chorus line of beautiful women. Four years later the “‘s” was dropped, and the title that lasted into the 1930s was born.

It wasn’t all titillation, however, and many of the top entertainers of the early decades of the 1900s toured through the Ziegfield Follies. W.C. Fields had a delightfully bizarre billiards skit; Eddie Cantor, the well-known musician played sometimes alongside Fields and other times with the African-American comedian Bert Williams. Ann Pennington, star of stage and screen got her start at the Follies, and so did other notable female performers like Josephine Baker, Ruth Etting, Helen Morgan, Marilyn Miller, and Sophie Tucker.