The Gershwins Go To War
By Edward Jablonski
The Twenties ended for the Gershwins in 1927 when they ventured, eyes wide open and tongues in cheek, into a musical No Man's Land. Three years before, their first major Broadway collaboration, Lady Be Good!, had introduced a new tone and touch to the Jazz Age musical comedy: sophistication, musical polish, and literacy. They took another trailblazing turn with their score for Strike Up the Band. Working hand in hand with George S. Kaufman, whose libretto dealt mercilessly with war, warriors, diplomats and profiteers, they virtually invented the American musical satire.
Such barbed social commentary was considered the special province of Britain's Gilbert and Sullivan, who were no strangers to the Gershwins. They had known the works of the British duo from their teens, when their opera-loving father acquired a windup phonograph for their Lower East Side flat. Ira, then turning out witty cartoons and light verse, brought the Gilbert and Sullivan recordings into the house.
He especially admired Gilbert's incisive words, precise rhymes, and seamless blend of words and music that made great comic and satiric sense. Ira Gershwin's early light verse written during his high school and college years were conceived under W.S. Gilbert's influence.
The wit, polish, and social commentary found in Strike Up the Band had their roots in the Gershwins' recent stage work. Tip-Toes (1925), for example, replete as it was with the usual Gershwin gems ("Looking for a Boy;" "That Certain Feeling;" "Sweet and Low-Down"), also brought such plot songs as "These Charming People;" a caustic look at social pretensions, and "Harlem River Chanry;" a delightful parody of a land-lubbers' sea song that would have been quire at home in The Pirates of Penzance. The next year's Oh, Kay! offered an Act I opening ("The Woman's Touch") that, decades later, would be labeled an "integrated song": It instantly set the scene, got the plot moving, established the character of the leading man, and, Twenties style, brought on the girls. The Gershwins were, in a phrase, ahead of their time.
It was during the tryout tour of Oh, Kay! that the Gershwins were invited to Atlantic City to celebrate the birthday (October 20, 1926) of producer Edgar Selwyn. Selwyn's variegated career encompassed acting (stage and silent films), writing (including libretti for the early Jerome Kern musicals), direction, and ultimately, production. His next venture, he told them, was to be a satire on war written by the sharpwitted George S. Kaufman. Were they interested? Indeed they were, and soon it was announced in the press that the Gershwins would score a musical "of an entirely new genre" (for Broadway, at least).
To accomplish this, they did something extraorinary: Early in April of 1927, with Oh, Kay! nicely prospering at the Imperial, they rented a house on forty-acre Chumleigh Farm near Ossining, New York. This was an atypical move, for if there existed such a thing as the quintessential New Yorker, his name would be Gershwin. The placid Ira may have enjoyed the role of the gentleman farmer (his friend-collaborator Harold Arlen later referred to the Gershwin home in Beverly Hills as the "Gershwin Plantation"), but not dynamic George. He found country sounds distracting and the countryside too inviting. As he put it, he loved London for "quietude;' Paris for beauty;' and New York for "work."
The Gershwin brownstone on West 103rd Street was the ideal workplace - most of the time. George had the entire fifth (top) floor to himself. But family and friends, and friends of each, and often friends of friends of friends, gravitated to the hospitable Gershwins for card games, ping-pong, music and talk – which could at times be as disconcerting as any cricket or bull frog. With rehearsals scheduled for late summer, the Gershwins agreed they would need to decamp the clamorous Gershwin house and get to Kaufman's book.
With this script in hand, the Gershwins settled into their new farm house. The sardonic jocularity of the libretto generated their most inspired score to date. Unlike their earlier musicals, Strike Up the Band presented the Gershwins with the chance to let their creativity flow and unfold: extended choral passages, patter songs (Ira's favorite form to demonstrate his sly, understated wit), ballads, a couple of marches, dances, rhythm numbers - a rich panoply of innovative musical theatre.
The influence of Gilbert and Sullivan is evident throughout. The mordant "Typical Self-Made American," obviously inspired by "I Am an Englishman" from the second act of H.M.S. Pinafore, is presented in a proper, authentic, Savoyard manner. The soloist declaims and the chorus underscores his statements by repeating phrases and summarizing his true blue Americanisms. In the same vein is the incisive "Unofficial Spokesman," Colonel Holmes' acknowledgement that he got to his high position by keeping his mouth shut – an allusion to President Coolidge, better known as "Silent Cal." (This song is a Gershwin rarity, one of the few songs for which the words came first. Once he set Ira's lyric, George sensed the result to be too Gilbert and Sullivanish. By simply repeating four syllables – "unofficial," "interview me," "tell 'em nothing," etc. – he created a stammering effect that transformed the song from English to American.)
It was not all work that spring at Chumleigh Farm. While they had eluded the tumult of the Gershwin house in New York, New York came to them. Weekends especially were enlivened by such guests as Kaufman, songwriters Howard Dietz and Harry Ruby (with his baseball and mitts to toss a few with George), Leonore Gershwin's sister Emily Strunsky Paley and husband Lou, long-time friend Mabel Schirmer, the show's future conductor and close friend William Daly, and celebrated columnist Franklin P. Adams.
Despite such diversions, the score was completed in time for July rehearsals and the first tryout in Long Branch, New Jersey, late in August. Then came Philadelphia, and by the end of the first week, it was clear that their work that spring had been for naught (at least at the box office). The critics were impressed, but audiences dwindled. Obviously a musical comedy with a stinging anti-war theme was not the public's idea of a fun-filled evening or matinee. Revisions did not perk up the box office, and the fate of Strike Up the Band was dismal – and obviously terminal.
A depressed trio, the Gershwins and Kaufman stood one evening outside the theatre observing a trickle of humanity entering the lobby. A cab drew up, and, as reported by Lawrence D. Stewart, "two elegant Edwardian clubmen, dressed to the nines, got out, bought tickets, and entered the theatre."
Ira spoke: "That must be Gilbert and Sullivan coming to fix the show."
The Gershwins had no time for regrets; they were already deep in writing another show which would be the hit Funny Face. They contributed to another, Ziegfeld's Rosalie (1928), and to a couple of non-hits, the magically scored Treasure Girl (1928) and the hapless Show Girl (1929). Then came the revised Strike Up the Band, with a new libretto by Morrie Ryskind and a cast headed by the highly popular comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough. This was the beginning of a long run and series of extraordinary musical adventures leading from Strike Up the Band into Of Thee I Sing (1931), Pardon My English (1933), and Let 'Em Eat Cake (1933), and culminating in Porgy and Bess in 1935. No longer content with frivolous entertainments, the Gershwins introduced new and enduring forms to the theatre public.
Edward Jablonski, co-author with Lawrence D. Stewart of The Gershwin Years, is the author of Gershwin, Harold Arlen: Happy With the Blues, and Encyclopedia of American Music.
