To this day, nobody's really sure if the Cherry Sisters were ever in on the joke.
Addie, Effie, Ella, Lizzie and Jessie were five sisters from Marion, Iowa (population at the time about 3000) who got it in their head that they should put on a show despite none of them having any experience in any aspect of the put-on-a-show industry. And so they did, renting the opera house (I guess Marion was the kind of town that had both an opera house and barely enough people to fill it), selling tickets to friends and neighbors and making a cool $200 in profit from it.
At which point they said huh, that's quite a bit of money, and people seemed to react nicely. Let's take this on the road.
Their show, Something Good, Something Sad, was a vaudeville revue: maudlin plays and skits, not-very-good original songs performed not very well, an occasional essay reading. It was by all accounts awful. Newspapermen competed to be the best at calling it the worst. The Cherry Sisters had to perform behind a wire mesh because the audience was going to chuck garbage at them in any case, so the only choice was whether or not to defend themselves.
Oh, speaking of those newspapermen, the sisters once sued a newspaper editor for libel because he published some reviews that hit a little too close to the bone. (To be fair, phrases like "the mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns" would make me upset too.) The case went up to the Iowa Supreme Court, which found in favour of the newspaper. Cherry v. Des Moines Register is still an important precedent today; no matter how much the entire world is on fire, you do have a legally-recognized right to write bad reviews.
So we have a show so bad that the audience is expected to throw things, newspapers are expected to write reviews so vicious that they help establish First Amendment case law, and there's an entire damned essay portion. All of this leads you to ask: how badly did the tour flop?
When Something Good, Something Sad had a six-week run in New York, it was such a smash hit that it saved the theatre from bankruptcy a mere ten days into the run. It probably grossed somewhere in the equivalent of mid-to-high six figures, inflation-adjusted. And that was just one part of the tour.
Move right the hell over, "Victorian kids wouldn't understand Mountain Dew", because "hatewatching was invented in the 2000s" is the new king of the mountain.
And yeah, it is entirely possible that these women were completely aware of what they were doing, and had marketing savvy to spare. It is entirely possible that they spent years working on making their show exactly good enough to be so bad you had to see it for yourself. They were writing their own material, original skits and plays, original essays, a mix of original songs and rewritten lyrics. They saw how people reacted as they tried new material. They kept in what they kept in, for a reason.
But then again, maybe they really did just think they had everything nailed down that first show in Marion. Maybe they spent their decades on the road (their career started in the 1890s and their last public performance was in 1936) rehearsing and improving every single day. Every time the curtain was about to rise, Addie and Lizzie would glance at each other across the stage, and say with their eyes: you got this. You've got this. You're so good. And at the end of the night, no matter how loud the booing, they'd always know there's at least one person who's applauding.
And I think that's awesome.
