What Price Cheese?
Tommy Krasker
The audience that gathered at Philadelphia's Shubert Theatre on September 5, 1927, had reason to be optimistic. Strike Up the Band, the new musical beginning an extended pre-Broadway tryout that evening (following a handful of performances the previous week in Long Branch, New Jersey) boasted impressive credentials. The script was by George S. Kaufman, whose Broadway credits included Merton of the Movies, Beggar on Horseback, and the riotous Marx Brothers farce The Cocoanuts, which had just enjoyed a successful return engagement at the Garrick. The score was by George and Ira Gershwin, creators of such hit shows as Lady, Be Good', Tip-Toes, and the recent Oh, Kay!, a lark about rumrunning that had sailed through town the previous fall. The three authors had among them penned nine hits in five years; small wonder that producer Edgar Selwyn was proclaiming their first joint venture "the ultimate collaboration of the generation."
The casting seemed equally promising. The leading role of entrepreneur Horace J. Fletcher was played by Broadway veteran Herbert Corthell, whose antics had most recently been unleashed in Friml's Vagabond King; knockabout comic Lew Hearn was cast as the President's unofficial spokesman Colonel Holmes. As society matron Grace Draper, Selwyn had chosen Edna May Oliver, whose angular features and dry-spoken manner had so amused New York audiences the previous season in The Cradle Snatchers, while Jimmy Savo, best known in vaudeville circles, had been tapped to portray an enigmatic sprite named George Spelvin.
The opening-night curtain rose on a factory in which workers extolled their profession in song. From there, the show developed into something remarkable, a daring departure from the conventional musicals of the Twenties. There were no cheery bootleggers, no rags-to-riches ingenues, no stalled vaudeville troupes, no campus frolics or get-rich quick schemes or mistaken identities. Instead, Kaufman's book depicted a world of misguided businessmen, fatuous bureaucrats, and over-zealous patriots – all enacting a satiric fable about a U.S. war with Switzerland over the price of cheese.
A musical comedy about war? Kaufman was not the first American playwright to conceive an anti-war tract for the stage: In 1924, Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings' What Price Glory? had offered a vigorous, unsentimental look at the life of the professional soldier, and a mere five months prior to Strike Up the Band, the searing melodrama Spread Eagle had focused on a Wall Street tycoon who provokes a U.S. war with Mexico in order to protect his mine holdings. But Kaufman was the first to de-glorify war in a musical comedy format, and as he imbued the timely subject matter with his usual mischievous wit, he set new standards for the American musical stage.
The Gershwins matched Kaufman's script with their most ambitious score to date. The underlying concept was an Americanization of Gilbert and Sullivan, but George embraced a broader musical tradition, with echoes of Wagner, Herbert, and Kern, as well as the driving rhythms and ebullient melodies that were his own trademark – all woven into a unique fabric. Ira, reveling in the lyric possibilities presented by the text, supplied effortless verse that burlesqued employee loyalty, government duplicity, even the time-honored Horatio Alger myth. In one impressive sequence, the Gershwins picked up Kaufman's story-line near the end of Act I (just before Congress declares war on Switzerland) and – in an uncommon integration of script and score – advanced it musically for nearly eight minutes.
If the clever lyrics and bold melodies heightened Kaufman's vision, the ballads deepened it. Perhaps no moment in Strike Up the Band was more affecting than an Act II soliloquy by a soldier anticipating his return home from battle: Just as the plot threatened to become too farfetched (with yodeling heroes, Stolen buttons, and imaginary cheese bonds), the song spoke eloquently to those who had experienced separation during wartime. Like the other ballads, it infused the show with an unexpected warmth and kept the more outrageous elements of the plot in check.
The morning after the Philadelphia premiere, the critical notices ranged from appreciative to enthusiastic. Variety! reviewer led the cheers: "One must hand it to Kaufman and the Gershwins. They have attempted the impossible and got away with it." He found the show alternately "good-humored" and "stinging," but suspected that its political stance would "cause a furor."
Philadelphia theatregoers, however, proved undisturbed by the show's condemnation of war profiteering and send-up of jingoism – they weren't even listening. Unlike the critics, audiences routinely ignored musical comedy story-lines. They were quite content with the usual showbiz hokum – the very element, unfortunately, that Strike Up the Band sought to avoid. Critic Arthur B. Waters, who found the show "so out-of-the-ordinary that it wins out triumphantly over its defects," accurately predicted, "Those who thought Manhattan Mary and Rio Rita were the aristocrats of musical comedy will very likely walk out on this offering." Within a few days, the public had turned on Strike Up the Band, and further critical praise was almost defiantly rejected: At the end of the first week, several reviewers lauded the show vigorously in their "second thoughts" columns; the following week, attendance dropped in half.
The authors, meanwhile, held to their vision and worked to bolster an admittedly shaky second act. Unfortunately, there were few performers left to rehearse it. Edna May Oliver, ill-at-ease as the fluttery Mrs. Draper, handed in her notice on opening night; Lew Hearn, equally miscast, soon followed suit. Herbert Corthell was fired at the insistence of Kaufman, who told the press he envisioned a "straight man" rather than a comedian in the role of Fletcher. A replacement was hired, then fired after three performances – at which point Corthell was summoned back from New York. Then Jimmy Savo gave notice ...
With his production in chaos and attendance dwindling, Selwyn was forced to post a closing notice after two weeks in Philadelphia. Some rewrites might have made the show more accessible, but there was neither the cast to rehearse them nor the audience receive them. As Variety succinctly reported, "Although the critics raved, there wasn't a chance."
Two years later, Selwyn tried again. When the popular burlesque team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough became available for stage work (following a brief foray in talking pictures), Selwyn hit upon the notion of featuring them in a new version of Strike Up the Band, one adapted to their brand of rowdy buffoonery. Kaufman, who had no interest in revising his libretto, entrusted the work to his Animal Crackers collaborator Morrie Ryskind.
Ryskind carefully reworked the story-line. He relegated the war plot to a dream sequence and subordinated Kaufman's satiric repartee to the antics of Clark and McCullough, cast here as Holmes and his sidekick Gideon (a rewrite of the Spelvin role). Timothy and Anne, the requisite dancing couple once relegated to the background, now interrupted the proceedings regularly with lavish production numbers. Everything was made more palatable: Even Fletcher's product was sweetened from cheese to chocolate.
The Gershwins, in turn, rewrote over half their score. They streamlined the Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche, dulled the cutting edge of the some of the lyrics, and eliminated almost a dozen numbers, including, most regrettably, all of the ballads. (The new love theme, "Soon," was fashioned from a short musical phrase in the Act I Finaletto and from the verse of the discarded "Hoping That Someday You'd Care.") As substitutes, they came up with a set of direct, exuberant songs that were much more in keeping with their previous musical comedy efforts.
The end result, a more innocuous Strike Up the Band, opened in Boston on Christmas night, 1929, before arriving in New York on January 14. The critics raved over Clark and McCullough's return to Broadway; they also had kind words for the show. The authors' work no longer dominated the notices: This time around, the stars stole - and sold - the show.
The new Strike Up the Band achieved a respectable run of 191 performances on Broadway. Clark and McCullough took it on tour in the fall, but after engagements in Newark, Detroit, and Chicago, it closed for lack of business. Although a hit on Broadway, the show was never picked up by a theatrical rental library and made available to regional, stock and amateur companies. Perhaps it was seen as a star vehicle, one that needed Clark and McCullough to succeed – and perhaps, in its final version, it had become just that. As a result, though, most of the original performance materials vanished upon its demise, and a chapter closed decisively on Strike Up the Band.
* * *
Through the years, the reputation of the 1927 Strike Up the Band steadily grew, as did the opinion that its adventurous spirit was ahead of its time. But the later score acquired its own enthusiasts, who viewed it as a pivotal work that ushered the Gershwins into the early swing era. When the possibility of recording Strike Up the Band was presented to me in the spring of 1989, it seemed clear that both scores needed to be preserved. This initial release features the complete 1927 show, as well as several selections from the 1930 version that illustrate the nature of the authors' revisions. The full 1930 score (already recorded) will be released at a later date.
Restoring the original Strike Up the Band meant locating materials that had been widely scattered and assembling them piece by piece. A version of Kaufman's libretto had been donated to the New York Public Library by R.H. Burnside, the show's original director. Several of the songs had been published – either as sheet music or with the vocal score from the 1930 production – and were readily accessible. A piano arrangement of "Hoping That Someday You'd Care," a bittersweet ballad, had been preserved in the private collection of Ira Gershwin; the orchestration of' "The Man I Love" (by William Daly) turned up in orchestrator Hans Spialek's basement.
A restoration would have been impossible, however, without the 1982 discovery of a treasure trove of musical theatre manuscripts at the Warner Brothers Music Warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey. This material, which took almost five years to catalogue, included piano-vocal sketches for several numbers from Strike Up the Band that had been lost for over fifty years, as well as orchestral parts for seven songs. (The Secaucus discovery inspired two stage revivals of Strike Up the Band: a 1984 production by the American Music Theatre Festival in Philadelphia, and a 1988 production by California Music Theatre in Pasadena. The Philadelphia version, presented before the Secaucus inventory was completed, was as much a revision as a revival; nothing from that effort has been utilized in the current restoration. The California production, on the other hand, was supervised by the Estate of Ira Gershwin, and was very much a stepping-stone toward this recording.)
After amassing all extant manuscripts (many of them contradictory, dating from different stages in the show's development), I began to assemble them, piece by piece, into a piano-vocal score. (Secondary sources – reviews, newspaper articles, correspondence, photographs, scrapbooks – proved vital in guiding me where original performance materials were lost.) Because the score, in operetta fashion, carried elements of the plot, much of the story-line emerged through these songs – but not enough to fully reveal the richness of the authors' work. In order create a more coherent narrative, I edited and inserted key passages from Kaufman's script.
The formation of a piano-vocal score was merely the first step: New orchestrations had to be commissioned where the originals were lost. The number of orchestrators who contributed to the two versions of Strike Up the Band is not documented, but most shows of the 1920's and 30's had multiple arrangers. (Lady, Be Good! had at least six.) With this in mind, I decided to seek out several of the finest orchestrators currently working in musical theatre to lend their talents to Strike Up the Band. With the addition of these new collaborators (as well as vocal and dance arrangers), the restoration became more extensive than anything previously attempted in this field: The sort of energy that normally accompanies the creation of a show was instead channeled into the recreation of one.
Perhaps no achievement proved as satisfying as the realization of one simple ballad: "Meadow Serenade." Although Ira retained a lyric sheet in his private collection, the only surviving musical manuscript was a refrain that composer and longtime Gershwin friend Kay Swift had reconstructed from memory in the 1940's. With George’s original verse missing, Burton Lane, esteemed composer of such theatrical works as Finian's Rainbow and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (and a collaborator of Ira's on the 1953 film Give a Girl a Break), agreed to set a new verse to Ira's lyric especially for this recording. Next, a vocal arrangement was fashioned in the style of the original, which, according to several of the 1927 reviews, showcased the leading lady's coloratura skills during the final refrain. Finally, Sid Ramin, whose theatrical work spans four decades, supplied the elegant, evocative orchestration.
Where original performance materials proved scarce, the restoration sought to capture the essence of the show. The 1927 program, for example, paired two numbers near the end of Act II: "The War That Ended War" and "Band Specialty by the Waco Orchestra."Nothing of this band specialty survives, but the original reviews hinted at its spirit and function, if not its actual content: The "largely brass" ensemble led by Will Waco was "used as the Marine Band" to put "a military kick into the program." For this recording, Steve Bowen created a band specialty using military marches by John Philip Sousa (the Marine Band's most celebrated leader) and Arthur Pryor (the trombone soloist with Sousa's band).
All told, the restoration of Strike Up the Band took almost two years, and fittingly, the Finale Ultimo was assembled last. No musical manuscripts survive for the original finale; Kaufman's script offers only a simple stage direction: "They go into Strike Up the Band." The routine heard on this recording – with its responsive opening, its final choral surge, its repetition of motifs heard throughout the album, and its martial quote from the Tsar's Hymn – was devised bit by bit over the three months prior to the sessions in December of 1990. It was further refined after the first orchestra reading and ultimately completed just three hours before the scheduled recording.
* * *
Nearly sixty-five years have passed since the original staging of Strike Up the Band, but Kaufman and the Gershwins' cautionary tale – of a self-serving businessman, an accommodating Administration, a jingoistic public, and the war that unites them – has remained astonishingly timely. This past decade, has seen trade wars waged in Congress, and military strategies conducted before an unsuspecting President. The Pledge of Allegiance became a useful political tool during the 1988 Presidential campaign; a year later, a public outcry over flag-burning had some politicians calling for a rewrite of the First Amendment. And the revolving door between the Pentagon and the military industrial sector remains firmly in place.
The show has proven equally significant in other ways. Its concern with characterization, content, and point of view clearly anticipated the musical plays of the 1940's and 50's; the political satire, extended musical scenes, and Gilbert-and-Sullivan pastiche paved the way for the authors' Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Thee I Sing in 1931. As Edward Jablonski writes in his biography Gershwin, "Had [the original] version of Strike Up the Band survived, it would have been one of the first important 'book' musicals of the pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein era." This new recording gives audiences their first opportunity in over sixty years to hear a landmark work of the American musical theatre.
Tommy Krasker is a musical theatre archivist who specializes in restoring shows of the 1920's and 30's. He is producer of the Gershwin recording series and archivist for the Estate of Ira Gershwin.