Marie Jansen

Marie Jansen, born Harriet Mary Johnson on November 18, 1857, in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American musical theatre actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1880 to 1896. Adopted as an infant by Benjamin and Harriet Johnson, she was raised in Boston, where her father, a merchant, enrolled her at the New England Conservatory of Music. During her time there, she performed in music hall concerts and attracted the attention of British-American orchestra conductor and composer John Braham, who recognized her stage presence and later helped her obtain a position with the Comley-Barton Opera Company.

Jansen made her professional stage debut on September 13, 1880, at the Park Theatre in Boston, appearing in B. E. Woolf's musical comedy Lawn Tennis. The production subsequently opened at New York's Bijou Theatre and ran through Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, the Bijou presented Olivette, an English adaptation of the comic opera Les noces d'Olivette with music by Edmond Audran, in which Jansen played the Waiting Maid to the Countess. By May 1881, when Olivette opened at the Boston Globe, she had assumed the role of the Countess. That same year, while performing in Olivette, she married James Barton, an actor, theater manager, singer, and co-founder of the Comley-Barton Opera Company, who was a son of Philip Barton Key II and a grandson of Francis Scott Key. The two later divorced.

From November 1882 through February 1883, Jansen appeared at the Standard Theatre in the title role of the original American production of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Iolanthe, followed by the title role in an unauthorized production of Patience at the same venue. In March 1883 she transferred to the Fifth Avenue Theatre, reprising her Iolanthe role. Later that year, with the McCaull Comic Opera Company, she appeared at Haverley's Theatre in Philadelphia in the title role of Johann Strauss's operetta Prinz Methusalem, and in December 1883 scored a hit at the same venue in the English version of Carl Millöcker's operetta Der Bettelstudent. These successes led Rudolph Aronson to invite her to perform at New York's Casino Theatre early in 1884.

In the spring of 1884, producer Charles Wyndham engaged Jansen to create the lead role of Mrs. Coney in Featherbrain at London's Criterion Theatre, a production adapted from the French play La Téte de Linotte by Théodore Barrière and Edmond Gondinet. The show ran for eight months. She subsequently played the title role in a four-month run of the comic opera Fantine at the Boston Museum, then returned to Iolanthe as Phyllis. In May 1885, again with the McCaull Comic Opera Company, she played Rosetta in Sydney Rosenfeld's adaptation of Millöcker's Der schwarze Husar.

A year later, Jansen joined the cast of Erminie at the Casino Theatre, playing Javotte in the hit comic opera composed by Edward Jakobowski. Aronson added a song for her specifically for this production, Sunday after Three, My Sweetheart Comes to Me, adapted from an old German tune. In May 1888, also at the Casino, she created the American stage premiere of the title role in Nadjy, adapted by Alfred Murray from Francis Chassaigne's operetta Les noces improvises. Jansen stepped into the role after only five days of rehearsal following Sadie Martinot's last-minute departure over a creative dispute, and the production went on to run for 256 performances.

Beginning in May 1889, Jansen performed in three comic operas with Francis Wilson's Opera Company at the Broadway Theatre on 41st Street. The first, The Oolah by Sydney Aronson and Charles Lecocq, featured her as Tourouloupi, the wife of Cadi, and her rendition of the song "Be Good" drew considerable attention. In 1890 she appeared as Tessa in Wilson's Philadelphia production of The Gondoliers, and in August of that year played Lazuli, a traveling perfume peddler, in The Merry Monarch, by J. Cheever Goodwin and composers Woolson Morse and Emmanuel Chabrier, adapted from Chabrier's L'étoile. Her third production with Wilson's company was The Lion Tamer, opening in December 1891, in which she played Angelina, a circus equestrian, in a work with book and lyrics by Goodwin, music by Richard Stahl, and orchestrations by John Philip Sousa.

Among her other Broadway credits, Jansen starred in Miss Dynamite and appeared in A Florida Enchantment. In 1892 she left Wilson's company and appeared in Lester Wallack's Rosedale in Boston. Beginning in 1893, she toured for several years out of Boston's Howard Athenaeum as Trixie Hazelmere in Delmonico's at Six, a comic play written for her by Glen MacDonough. During the 1897–98 season she played Pearl Dodo in Frank Tannehill Jr.'s musical farce The Nancy Hanks.

A subsequent venture into vaudeville with her own company ended in financial failure, and by 1904 Jansen was forced into bankruptcy. She had been estimated to have earned approximately $500,000 over the course of her career, yet at the time of her bankruptcy she was unable to pay a seven-dollar weekly lodging bill while working as a seamstress and taking occasional minor stage roles. After her father Benjamin Johnson's death in January 1906, Jansen received only $500 from his $30,000 estate, with the remainder going to his widow. She contested the will in a Boston court, arguing that her stepmother had exercised undue influence over her father, but the suit was unsuccessful. Her last known stage appearance came in the fall of 1908 at New York's Olympic Theatre, where she performed as a principal in comedian Edmond Hayes's vaudeville show Mardi Gras Beauties. Jansen died on March 20, 1914, in Winthrop, Massachusetts, at the age of 56.