Since taking over as artistic director of MasterVoices in 2013, Ted Sperling has staged and produced concert versions of such vintage musicals as Of Thee I Sing, Let ’em Eat Cake, The Firebrand of Florence, and Lady in the Dark. All of which, not coincidentally, had lyrics by Ira Gershwin (writing initially with his brother George and later with Kurt Weill). These and Sperling’s other MasterVoices ventures have been carefully assembled, professionally produced, and generally delightful.
This season’s offering, George and Ira Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band, was presented at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday. Musical values were up to the group’s usual quality, enhanced by performances from five Broadway veterans. The text, alas, was not quite up to the rest of the venture. There are two distinct versions of the show. Sperling and Laurence Maslon (a highly respected musicologist, arts professor, and expert on the work of George S. Kaufman ) have endeavored to merge the material into a new version suitable for future life.
The original, 1927 production featured a satirical libretto by playwright George S. Kaufman, centered around America going to war with Switzerland over a cheese tariff. The show folded after two weeks of the tryout, Kaufman himself observing that “satire is what closes on Saturday night.” When the producer urged the writers to revisit the material, Kaufman chose not to participate, handing it to recent collaborator Morrie Ryskind, who fashioned a new satiric libretto about America going to war with Switzerland over a tariff on chocolate. The Gershwins, meanwhile, discarded much of their score and wrote a clutch of new songs. This 1930 version was a hit, or at least what passed for a hit in the first months after the stock market crash. It closed after 24 weeks with what was described as a “good” profit; Strike Up the Band was one of eight shows that closed that week, leaving only 14 remaining on Broadway over that first summer of the Depression.
The success of the second version, and the increasing musico-dramatic skill of the still-young Gershwins, resulted in a new political satire. The 1931 Of Thee I Sing, with libretto by Kaufman and Ryskind, was the Gershwin’s longest-running hit and became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize. The outsized success was substantial enough to relegate the not-nearly-as-accomplished Strike Up the Band to the shelf of unproduceable musicals. (The final Gershwin-Kaufman-Ryskind musical, Let ’em Eat Cake, in which Of Thee I Sing’s cheerful President John P. Wintergreen turned dictator, was a dire 1933 failure that permanently ended the collaboration.)
If we have taken a circuitous detour in our discussion of the MasterVoices offering, it is in an attempt to delay the inevitable. This new Strike Up the Band is neither the Kaufman “cheese” nor the Ryskind “chocolate” version. It is a combination of the two, consisting of swaths from both. Patching together elements from the two scripts, with some songs from Column A and others from Column B, leaves results that are unworkable and sometimes baffling. Only two of the songs, other than the title tune, remain familiar: “The Man I Love,” which was cut from a 1924 musical and only used in the 1927 version; and “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” which was rescued from the score of one of the Gershwins’ 1928 failures. The hit song of the show, the 1930 “Soon”—which can be considered the beginning of what you might call George’s mature musical style, seven years before his death—is unaccountably missing.
The problem seems to be that the 1930 solution was to lighten the pessimism of the original by changing cheese to chocolate and shoehorning in a star comedian. Bobby Clark was his name; if Groucho (who had achieved pre-Hollywood fame in Broadway musicals by Kaufman and Ryskind) was known for using a greasepaint mustache, Bobby’s trademark was a pair of horn-rim glasses drawn onto his face. Clark was an anarchic clown, in the W. C. Fields/Jimmy Durante tradition; he worked in tandem with a relatively quite straight-man named Paul McCullough. Until the latter, after 25 years in the act, sat down in a barber’s chair and sliced his throat.
While most of Clark’s film work has vanished, rehearsal footage of him (wearing a bow tie) and McCullough (in a sweater) performing the second-act novelty “Mademoiselle from New Rochelle,” with George Gershwin (in a suit) at the piano and feeding Clark straight lines, can be found here.
Sitting at Carnegie Hall, the audience might have wondered: who were those two strange characters—Colonel Holmes (David Pittu) and George Spelvin (Christopher Fitzgerald)—supposed to be? Clark was a performer who—like Groucho, Lahr, Mostel, and maybe even Nathan Lane—garnered laughs from start to finish, monopolizing the show even when he was off in his dressing room. Here, the accomplished Pittu mostly just stood around; whatever comic business Clark sparked the show with in 1930 is long evaporated. Fitzgerald had a fair amount of trouble in Act One, playing an enigmatic bystander fixing broken telephones and tossing out antique jokes that likely never were funny. In the second act, though, Fitzgerald-the-clown was suddenly up to his usual excellence. Without access to the original materials I can’t prove it, but it appears to me that they took much of Bobby Clark’s second act—including the yodeling sequence and the lead part in the “New Rochelle” number—from Pittu and gave it to McCullough, or, rather, Fitzgerald.
The crux of the issue, though, is that the success of the 1930 “chocolate” version came by overhauling the script as a vehicle for Clark and McCullough and turning the extended war scenes into a dream sequence. By reverting more or less to the 1927 non-star “cheese” version with a more or less real war, the adaptors more or less shot themselves in the hot-foot. We can add that the plot—about American boys going over to Europe to fight a humorous, fatality-free war contrived to earn profits for American industry—would have already been unpalatable even by 1943. Nowadays, it is even more non-funny.
Bryce Pinkham (Gentleman’s Guide), as Jim Townsend, the conscience of the piece, came off best among the performers. (We first noted his affinity for musical theater in MasterVoices 2011 Knickerbocker Holiday—working with Sperling and Fitzgerald, as it happens.) Shereen Ahmed, who played Eliza in the tour of Sperling’s recent My Fair Lady, made a strong impression as his romantic counterpart. John Ellison Conlee (from Sperling’s The Full Monty) did well with the role of cheesemaker Horace J. Fletcher, albeit saddled with an uncomfortably expanded role in this adaptation. Phillip Attmore and Lissa deGuzman sparkled in their boy/girl duets, with Attmore providing some fine dancing along the way. Also on hand was Victoria Clark as a stock dowager-heiress; a long-time associate of Sperling, she likely came along for the fun of it, but you wouldn’t glean from what’s on evidence that she is one of the finest stage performers of our time.
Choreographer Alison Solomon made the most of her opportunities, limited by a mere apron of floor space and a dance corps of four boys and two girls. (The 1930 show had 24 boy dancers, plus girls and showgirls.) Sperling’s 31-piece orchestra sounded great, working from Tommy Krasker’s excellent 1991 restoration for Nonesuch Records. This featured new orchestrations by Russell Warner, William D. Brohn, Dick Hyman, Sid Ramin, Larry Wilcox, and Don Johnson, along with some of the existing originals by William Daly. If the early songs and the later songs are not quite compatible—Ira, especially, had notably enhanced his skill in the interim—it made for an exciting recording.
Also on hand was the MasterVoices Chorus. I counted 133 singers, which—this being a MasterVoices concert—goes with the territory but is overkill when you have a cast of nine principals and six dancers. And without the omnipresent surtitles, Ira Gershwin’s sterling pun-laden lyrics would have been frequently indecipherable.
The opportunity to hear a Gershwin score with a full orchestra—and led by someone like Ted Sperling, who understands just how to conduct it—is not to be missed. I wouldn’t say that the myriad Gershwin fans (along with the MasterVoices regulars) left Carnegie Hall disappointed, exactly. But the evening—which with the late start and the intermission tipped the scales at about three hours—was a hit or miss thing of shreds and patches.
Strike Up the Band was presented for one performance on October 29, 2024 at Carnegie Hall. Information: mastervoices.org
