Anton BRUEHL
Australia 1900 – United States of America 1982
United States from 1919

Puerto Rican singer and rumba dancer Marga and accordionist puppeteer Bil Baird of the Ziegfeld Folies 1944
half-tone
image 33.6 (h) x 25.4 (w) cm

The Esquire Canteen was a very popular series running from 1943 to 1945 in Esquire men’s magazine. It was inspired by the shows put on for the troops in the field. This was an ideal scenario for Bruehl who could create cabaret scenes that were not tied to particular performances. Marga was a Puerto Rican-born singer who arrived in America around 1941 after living in Mexico and Spain. She sang nightly at the Monte Carlo Beach Club in New York with the Ralph Rotgers Band. Bil Baird was the star puppeteer of the Ziegfeld Follies: he and his wife Cora performed The Lonely Goatherd puppetry sequence in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. But he also enjoyed playing the accordion which accounts for the musical instrument here. It is unlikely that the two performed together, yet in this tableau the combination is seamless.