Babes in Toyland is a Laurel and Hardy musical Christmas film released on November 30, 1934. The film is also known by the alternative titles Laurel and Hardy in Toyland, Revenge Is Sweet (the 1948 European reissue title), and March of the Wooden Soldiers (in the United States), a 73-minute abridged version. Based on Victor Herbert's popular 1903 operetta Babes in Toyland, the film was produced by Hal Roach, directed by Gus Meins and Charles Rogers, and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There are two computer-colorized versions between The Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1991 and Legend Films in 2006. Although the 1934 film makes use of many of the characters in the original play, as well as several of the songs, the plot is almost completely unlike that of the original stage production. In contrast to the stage version, the film's story takes place entirely in Toyland, which is inhabited by Mother Goose (Virginia Karns) and other well-known fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters.

Anna Eileen Heckart (née Herbert; March 29, 1919 – December 31, 2001) was an American stage and screen actress whose career spanned nearly 60 years. Heckart won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and two Emmy Awards, as well as was nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2000, she received the Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre.

Victor August Herbert (February 1, 1859 – May 26, 1924) was an American composer, cellist and conductor of English and Irish ancestry and German training. Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor, he is best known for composing many successful operettas that premiered on Broadway from the 1890s to World War I. He was also prominent among the Tin Pan Alley composers and was later a founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). A prolific composer, Herbert produced two operas, a cantata, 43 operettas, incidental music to 10 plays, 31 compositions for orchestra, nine band compositions, nine cello compositions, five violin compositions with piano or orchestra, 22 piano compositions and numerous songs, choral compositions and orchestrations of works by other composers, among other music. In the early 1880s, Herbert began a career as a cellist in Vienna and Stuttgart, during which he began to compose orchestral music. Herbert and his opera singer wife, Therese Förster, moved to the U.S. in 1886 when both were engaged by the Metropolitan Opera. In the U.S., Herbert continued his performing career, while also teaching at the National Conservatory of Music, conducting and composing. His most notable instrumental compositions were his Cello Concerto No. 2 in E minor, Op. 30 (1894), which entered the standard repertoire, and his Auditorium Festival March (1901). He conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1898 to 1904 (taking over from founding conductor Frederic Archer) and then founded the Victor Herbert Orchestra, which he conducted throughout the rest of his life. Herbert began to compose operettas in 1894, producing several successes, including The Serenade (1897) and The Fortune Teller (1898). Some of the operettas that he wrote after the turn of the 20th century were even more successful: Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906), Naughty Marietta (1910), Sweethearts (1913) and Eileen (1917). After World War I, with the change of popular musical tastes, Herbert began to compose musicals and contributed music to other composers' shows. While some of these were well-received, he never again achieved the level of success that he had enjoyed with his most popular operettas.

Mademoiselle Modiste is a 1926 American silent romantic comedy film produced by and starring Corinne Griffith and distributed by First National Pictures. Robert Z. Leonard directed Griffith in a story based on a popular 1905 Victor Herbert operetta on Broadway, Mlle. Modiste, with a libretto by Henry Martyn Blossom, which was similar to the MGM film The Merry Widow. It is now considered a lost film. The story was refilmed in 1931 as the talkie Kiss Me Again.

Naughty Marietta is an operetta in two acts, with libretto by Rida Johnson Young and music by Victor Herbert, written as a vehicle for Emma Trentini and produced by Oscar Hammerstein I. Set in 18th century New Orleans, it tells how Captain Richard Warrington is commissioned to unmask and capture a notorious French pirate calling himself "Bras Pique". Warrington is helped and hindered by a high-spirited runaway, Contessa Marietta. The score includes several well-known songs, including "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life". After a tryout in October 1910, in Syracuse, New York, it opened on Broadway in November to mostly strong reviews, ran for 136 performances and then toured. The operetta was revived on Broadway in 1929 and 1931 and has been adapted for film and television and recorded several times. It has been called Herbert's masterpiece and the first true American operetta.

Sweethearts is a 1938 American Technicolor musical romance film directed by W.S. Van Dyke and starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. The screenplay, by Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, uses the “play within a play” device: a Broadway production of the 1913 Victor Herbert operetta is the setting for another pair of sweethearts, the stars of the show. It was the first color film for Nelson or Jeanette (as well as MGM's first three strip Technicolor feature). It was their first film together without uniforms or period costumes.

The Enchantress is an operetta in two acts with music by Victor Herbert, lyrics by Harry B. Smith and a book by Fred de Gresac. To prevent spoiled Prince Ivan from ascending to his rightful throne, Zergovia's regent and war minister scheme to have him "enchanted" by an alluring opera singer, Vivien Savary, as marriage to a commoner would require him to abdicate. The head of the secret service helps to thwart the plan, as does Vivien, who falls for the prince; meanwhile, several princesses and an American heiress also vie for the prince's hand. The operetta premiered in Washington, D.C., and quickly moved to Broadway in October 1911, where it played for 104 performances, followed two years of touring in North America. Revivals followed in 1929 at The Muny and later off-off-Broadway and elsewhere. Historian Ken Wlaschin in the Encyclopedia of American Opera described the work as a "neglected comic opera" best known for the coloratura soprano aria "Art Is Calling for Me", which has become a frequently programmed recital piece recorded by sopranos like Beverly Sills and Kiri Te Kanawa. Historian Kurt Gänzl stated the song "To The Land of My Own Romance" was the hit song of the show during its performances in the 1910s, but that only the song "Art Is Calling for Me" has maintained enduring relevance in the modern era.

A fortune teller is someone who practices fortune-telling. Fortune teller may also refer to:

The Red Mill is an operetta written by Victor Herbert, with a libretto by Henry Blossom. The farcical story concerns two American vaudevillians who wreak havoc at an inn in the Netherlands, interfering with two marriages; but all ends well. The musical premiered on Broadway on September 24, 1906, at the Knickerbocker Theatre and ran for 274 performances, starring comedians Fred Stone and David C. Montgomery. It also had a London run and toured extensively, and in 1945 had a long-running Broadway revival. The Red Mill includes the famous songs "Every Day is Lady's Day with Me", "The Streets of New York", "You Never Can Tell About a Woman", and "Because You're You".

"The Phrenologist Coon" is a 1901 song written by African-American entertainer Ernest Hogan with music by Will Accooe. Bert Williams recorded it on Victor Records and sheet music was published for it. It was produced by Williams and Walker Co. and published by Jos. W. Stern & Co. in New York City. The song's lyrics describe a "conjureman" ironically engaging in phrenology – the pseudoscientific study of human characteristics according to the shape of the skull. Paula J. Massood hypothesizes in Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film (2013) that "In what is at first glance a demeaning stereotype, 'The Phrenologist's Coon' might, indeed, be something much more involved, because it suggests that black artists were self-consciously dialoging with political context prior to the modernist explorations of affirmative black identity by the Harlem Renaissance writers". The tune as a schottische was used for the 1902 song "Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes" by Cole and Johnson.