Annie Cohen Kopchovsky seems at first to embody the American dream: a Latvian Jewish immigrant in Boston, she became in 1895 “the first woman to cycle around the world” after reinventing herself as Annie Londonderry. The new surname was based on a sponsorship deal and she placed advertisements on her body as she circumnavigated the globe.
But there was much more to Annie than the rugged individualism and capitalist “can do” brawn. This musical by Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams, directed by Sarah Meadows, reveals her to be far more nuanced than the female Phileas Fogg she appears at first, or even the simple symbol of feminist self-determination for which she came to be known at the turn of the 20th century.
