William Gillette's three-act comedy opened on 26 November 1894 at the Standard Theatre for 216 performances, produced by Charles Frohman. Based on a French play, La Plantation Thomasin, Too Much Johnson starred Gillette as Augustus Billings, a confirmed philanderer, who dallies with his French mistress in New York while his wife and disapproving mother-in-law are told he is in Cuba managing a plantation. When the women insist on accompanying him on a trip to Cuba, he is forced to take them and pulls off the subterfuge by borrowing a friend's hacienda and befriending an irascible old man, Johnson, whom Billings presents as his overseer. After a few close calls, Billings manages to convince his wife and her mother. Gillette appeared in a short-lived Broadway revival in 1910.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.