Maud Raymond

Maud Raymond, born Rashel Lobenstein on August 15, 1871, on Orchard Street in New York City, was an American actress, singer, and comedienne whose stage career spanned from the late 1880s through the early 1910s. The daughter of H. Lobenstein, a Russian-born father, and Lena Lobenstein, a Bavarian-born mother, she was educated in public schools on the East Side of Manhattan. Her family later Americanized her name to Rachel "Ray" Levingston, though she performed professionally under the stage name Maud Raymond. She is also known by her married name Maud Rogers, or Mrs. Gus Rogers. She died on May 10, 1961.

Raymond entered the entertainment world through variety theatre in the late 1880s as a member of the burlesque troupe Rice & Barton. In January 1889 she participated in a benefit concert for the Eastern District Hebrew Free School in Brooklyn, and by November of that year she was appearing at the Grand Museum, a dime museum in New York City, in the play Oklahoma Nick. Her early engagements took her through multiple New York venues, including Huber's Palace Museum and Huber & Gebhardt's Casino, where she worked as a singer. By January 1891 she had traveled to St. Louis, where the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described her as a talented ballad singer performing at the Winter Garden Theater. The Brooklyn Daily Times later characterized her as a serio-comic vocalist and soubrette, a designation that would define much of her early career identity.

Throughout the early 1890s Raymond built her experience across a wide range of theatrical contexts. She performed with Turner's English Girls burlesque troupe as prima donna, touring Kansas and Texas, and later joined Rose Hill's English Folly Company for engagements in Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Ohio. In September 1892 she appeared at the reopening of the newly renovated Shea's Music Hall in Buffalo, New York, and that same month took a soubrette role in The Black Thorn with Joseph J. Sullivan's theatre troupe in Connecticut. She subsequently toured in the farce Bill's Boot alongside Sullivan and the Russell Brothers, and in April 1893 appeared on Broadway in a variety show at the Imperial Music Hall headlined by Matthews & Bulger. That same month she performed with Weber and Fields at the Park Theatre in Manhattan before touring with them to St. Louis. In the summer of 1893 she starred in the farce My Uncle at the Eighth Street Theatre in Philadelphia, and in the autumn of 1894 she performed at Tony Pastor's 14th Street Theatre as part of the Howard Athenaeum company, with additional engagements at Albaugh's Grand Opera House in Washington, D.C., and the Chestnut Street Opera House in Philadelphia.

Raymond's personal and professional life converged in late 1894 and early 1895 when she was touring with the variety troupe of Fields and Hanson, which also featured Gus Rogers and his brother Max, who performed together as the Rogers Brothers. Gus Rogers's real name was Gustave Solomon. Raymond and the Rogers Brothers were jointly engaged at Tony Pastor's 14th Street Theatre in January 1895, and on January 30, 1895, Gus and Maud married in New York City. Her mother's death shortly afterward forced her to cancel planned performances in Connecticut. Raymond went on to perform with the Rogers Brothers at venues including Broadway's Casino Theatre, Proctor's Twenty-Third Street Theatre, the Orpheum Circuit in cities as far as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington state, and the Madison Square Roof Garden.

On Labor Day 1895, Raymond and the Rogers Brothers appeared in secondary lead roles in the premiere of the farce The Rainmakers, a starring vehicle for the comedy duo Donnelly and Girard. Raymond's portrayal of the soubrette role of Bolivar earned her considerable success, and the production toured widely through the 1895–1896 season. Commentators on her career have identified this as her first significant stage role. Following The Rainmakers, she secured a fifteen-week engagement at Tony Pastor's before transitioning into a series of musical comedies built around the Rogers Brothers. In these productions Raymond adopted the brothers' comedic approach of lampooning German and Dutch characters, and a contemporary American theatre writer credited her as the finest female performer working in that genre on the American stage.

Raymond's Broadway career, which extended from 1899 to 1910, grew directly out of her work with the Rogers Brothers. The musical A Reign of Error, which she appeared in beginning in 1898, reached Broadway in 1899 and marked her first appearance in a Broadway theatre outside the vaudeville variety format. She subsequently starred as Letta Winnie in The Rogers Brothers in Wall Street, also in 1899. Her Broadway credits further include the musical The Social Whirl, the revue The Gay White Way, and the musical Mr. Hamlet of Broadway, in which she starred. She also appeared in the musicals Girlies and The Young Turk. Beginning with the role of Topsy in the 1901 Broadway production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, some of her Broadway parts were performed in blackface. As a vocalist during the first decade of the twentieth century, she became associated with coon songs and ragtime material throughout her Broadway engagements.

The death of Gus Rogers in 1908 brought the Rogers Brothers partnership to an end. Raymond continued to appear in Broadway productions through approximately 1912 in shows independent of the Rogers Brothers framework. She made several recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1909 and 1910, which are catalogued in the Discography of American Historical Recordings.