Gershwin's Classic Musicals Come Back to Life in the 1980's

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In lieu of watcvhing one or more Lifetime movies – wth the holidays over they’re back to doing the usual “pussies in peril” crap but I wanted lighter fare – I was inspired to dig out the 1980’s recordings of the complete scores of the George and Ira Gershwin musicals Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Let “Em Eat Cake (1933). Of Thee I Sing was a huge success and won the Pulitzer Prize for best play – the first time it was given for a musical, though since the Pulitzers didn’t give a prize for music for another decade the prizes went to George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind for the book and Ira Gershwin for the lyrics, but not to brother George even though the score is among the Gershwins’ best. >Of Thee I Sing concerns the Presidential candidacy of John P. Wintergreen, whose campaign song featires the refrain, “He’s the man the people choose/Loves the Irish and the Jews.” (One wonders about that line given that all four of the show’s creators were Jewish.)

The plot of Of Thee I Sing deals with Presidential candidate Wintergreen, who’s running on a platform that “Love Is Sweeping the Country,” having agreed to marry the winner of a beauty contest, French girl Diana Devereaux, only he refuses because he’s already in love with U.S. girl Mary Turner, who’s won his heart with her incredible corn muffins. (I’m not making this up, you know.) This causes the French ambassador to break off diplomatic relations and threaten to declare war on the grounds that Diana is “the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate son of an illegitimate nephew of Napoleon” and therefore Wintergreen’s rejection of her is an insult to all France. War is averted only when Mary announces that she and Wintergreen are going to have a baby, and the characters gather around her to determine the baby’s gender. (This reminded me of my own stint in the hospital, when I had at least two nurses who were visibly pregnant. I asked them both, “Boy or girl?” One told me definitively it was a boy, while the other said she and her husband had to wait and let nature describe them.) In the end war is averted when Mary gives birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl.

The plot of Let ‘Em Eat Cake is considerably darker: Whitergreen has just lost his re-election bid to John P. Tweedledee, only he works with the Secretary of War to foment a revolution and declare himself dictator. He’s also gone into the shirt-manufacturing business to finance the revolution and, once he gets back in office, he issues a decree that not only is he going to have the White House repainted blue, but everyone in the country is going to have to wear the blue shirt of freedom. (This reminded me of China during the 1960’s Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong decreed that everyone should show their support for his regime by going about in properly “proletarian” overalls.) There is also a baseball game between the U.S. and the League of Nations over who wll pay up the war debt other nations of tle world will repay the war debts, double or nothing. Vice-president Alexander Throttlebottom calls the game and in the end allows the League to win on a ball he called fair and everyone else thought was foul, and the army – who were hoping to divide up the war debt in what was obviously a parody of the Bonus March real-life veterans had staged in Washington, D.C. the year before and the action of then-general Douglas MacArthur in having firehoses to get them to disperse – goes to demahd that Throttlebottom be arrested and executed for treason. Only at the end Wintergreen and Mary step down from the White House to concentrate on their fashion business and Throttlebottom assumes the presidency.

The books of both shows are full of what Marx Brothers biographer Joe Adamson called Kaufman’s “cold-soup negativity that passes for wit,” and in 1947 Kaufman returned to political satire with his film The Senator Was Indiscreet, in which a dark-horse U.S. Senator and presidential candidate was derailed by a sex scandal. (This time Nunnally Johnson was his collaborator.) Heard today, Of Thee I Sing and Let ‘Em Eat Cake date very badly – one is astounded to think that this silly stuff is considered cutting-edge political satire of this time, especially when Kaufman’s and Ryskind’s former stars, the Marx Brothers, made Duck Soup in 1933 and it holds up a lot better than this. There are a few zingers in the scripts for these shows, but what strikes me as most interesting about them is George Gershwin’s writing as a choral composer. Much of the plot is driven by choruses, and though these are from half a century later and from a different social, cultural and political Zeitgeist the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan hangs heavily over them.

These recordings were made during a short-lived fad for complete records of classic American musicals, from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s kicked off largely by the discovery of the archives of one man, Hans Spialek, who had worked on the original orchestrations of these scores and had saved everything, until he turned over his archives to Gershwin’s and others’ publishers just a year before his death in 1983. The record of Of Thee I Sing and Let ‘Em Eat Cake was made by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas for what was still called “CBS Records” before its acquisition by Sony in 1987, and it featured the CBS nameplate on the labels. It was a relatively sensitive reading for me, who has become annoyed at all hell with companies like Sony and Warners who claim credit for records they didn’t have a thing with actually making!