--- title: Old Musicals Like New description: They were, the showman in 42nd Street proclaimed, "the most glorious words in the English language: musical comedy!" But for a couple of decades, the... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6907899/old-musicals-like-new/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2006-05-12T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T15:12:30.386Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Old Musicals Like New og:description: They were, the showman in 42nd Street proclaimed, "the most glorious words in the English language: musical comedy!" But for a couple of decades, the... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6907899/old-musicals-like-new/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Old Musicals Like New twitter:description: They were, the showman in 42nd Street proclaimed, "the most glorious words in the English language: musical comedy!" But for a couple of decades, the... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Old Musicals Like New > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with Ally. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) May 12, 2006 4:00 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) May 12, 2006 4:00 AM UTC They were, the showman in _42nd Street_ proclaimed, “the most glorious words in the English language: musical comedy!” But for a couple of decades, the people who made Broadway-style musicals forgot about the comedy and went super-serious, telling song-stories about the murderous (_Sweeney Todd_), the morose (_The Phantom of the Opera_) and the miserable (_Les Miz_ and dozens more). The Great White Way never sounded so gloomy. We can thank Mel Brooks, of all unlikely souls — thank you, Mel Brooks — for prodding Broadway back to life in 2001 with _The Producers_. That staging of his 1968 movie was full-throttle farce with generically catchy songs, and it presaged the next generation of smart-silly musical _comedies_. Among its spawn were _Hairspray_ and _Spamalot_, shows that put a post-modern twist on the antique shows of the ’20s and ’30s. Back then, plots were dental-floss clotheslines on which to hang a dozen chipper songs, and the audiences were meant to go out humming and smiling. So everything old is new again. And some of the new is old. The surprise hit of the current season, which ended Wednesday, is _The Drowsy Chaperone_, in which a friendly hermit known only as Man in Chair (co-author Bob Martin) slips a 33-1/3 rpm record out of its sleeve and tells us we are about to hear A 1928 musical called guess what. In a trice, the gent’s apartment is converted into a Broadway stage and the musical is performed, with Man in Chair’s frequent interpolations on the biographies of the stars. It’s all faux, you know, and as directed by Casey Nicolaw (who choreographed _Spamalot_) the evening has an airy confidence worthy of the old shows. I’ll say little more about it, partly because friend Zoglin, the magazine’s theater critic, will weigh in with his words in the issue out Monday; partly because I can’t find my notes and the _Chaperone_ publicists said they don’t have a script for me to consult. Just one thing: it’s odd to evoke the memory of old musicals whose books were inane but whose songs were classics in a new musical whose book is stuffy but whose songs are ordinary. They’re knowing pastiche, like the ones in _The Producers_ and its progeny, but not, it’s fair to say, up there with the stuff churned out by George and [Ira Gershwin](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306808560/qid=1147445035/sr=1-1/ref=sr%5F1%5F1/104-4626108-1620703?s=books&v=glance&n=283155), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II and Cole Porter all by himself. Or with the fabulous songs written in the ’30s and ’40s by such Hollywood tunesmiths as Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer. For those songs, and the bliss they induce, you must stray off Broadway. Walk a half block down 55th Street to the invaluable [City Centers Encores!](http://www.nycitycenter.org/encores/index.cfm) series, which last night premiered its concert version of the Gershwins’ 1931 hit _Of Thee I Sing_. Or go further northeast to one of the city’s magnificent cultural resources, [the 92nd Street Y](http://www.92y.org/), which last weekend presented “Hooray for Hollywood: Johnny Mercer at the Movies.” Those are the places I was this week, in heaven. Read on, and sing along. **THE ATCHISON, TOPEKA AND THE UPTOWN Y** Johnny Mercer, _Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories 1890-1954_ informs us, was “the lyricist for more popular songs than any other songwriter in history.” In the mid-’40s, Mercer, a founder of Capitol Records, also had three No. 1 hits as a vocalist: “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” “Candy” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe” — a record, I believe, for a classic pop songwriter. The Savannah native with the gap-toothed smile was the author or co-author of more than 1,000 songs, which scaled the charts for 30 years, in the prime of the Great American Songbook. His songs lasted well into the Age of Rock, with ’60s hits in revival (Bobby Darin’s rockin’ “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” Frank Ifield’s yodelin’ “I Remember You”) and original versions (“Moon River” and “The Days of Wine and Roses,” both Oscar winners). The genesis of another late Mercer hit shows the songwriter’s generosity. In 1958 he received, on two pages torn from a desk calendar, a scrawled suggestion from a Youngstown, Ohio, housewife, Sadie Vimmerstedt. “I want you to write a song for me,” she wrote. “Based on ‘I want to to be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart.’ I know you could add a little story to the title and please me.” Not only did Mercer add a little — no, a lot (“And that’s when I’ll discover that revenge is sweet, / When I sit there applauding from a front row seat, / When somebody breaks your heart / Like you broke mine”) — he assigned Mrs. Vimmerstedt co-authorship and 50% of the royalties. Sadie was pleased. So was Tony Bennett, when he made a hit of “I Wanna Be Around.” Mercer’s gift was for insinuating slang and Southern patois into his songs; his writing voice, like his vocal style, was that of a hip yokel. The songs performed at the Y by a quartet of soloists (Christine Ebersole, Jason Graae, Lewis Cleale and Amber Edwards) and, at the end, host Charles Osgood, displayed Mercer’s ability to be sho’-nuff without showing off. “Have You Got Any Castles, Baby?” gets rhymes out of “mountains I clum … oceans I swum.” Another Oscar winner, “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” swings easy with “In the shank of the night, / When the doin’s are right, / You can tell ’em I’ll be there.” Graae made an evening-long shtick of interrupting Osgood to sing yet more stanzas of “Spring, Spring, Spring,” a Mercer-Gene DePaul number from “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” that shows the lyricist at his most puckish. Consider these couplets that lead up to the title in five verses: “Ma Nature’s lyrical / With her yearly miracle … Each nest is twittering, / They’re all baby-sittering … Sun’s getting’ shinery / To spotlight the finery … Even the catamount / Is nonplussed at that amount … This home my momma’s, I’ll / Soon have my own domicile …” When romance was called for, Mercer was there too. “How Little We Know,” for which Hoagy Carmichael provided the plangent melody, boasts a lovely sense of ignorance toward a potential affair: “Who knows why an April breeze never remains? / Why the stars in the trees hide when it rains? / Love comes along casting a spell, / Will it sing you a song, / Will it say a farewell? / Who can tell?” And at times, Mercer could twist a song’s kicker. “Tangerine,” written with Victor Schertzinger for _The Fleet’s In,_ sounds for most of its length like a standard number about an elusive goddess. The codas: “Yes, she has them all on the run, / But her heart belongs to just one. / Her heart belongs to Tangerine.” It’s a love song to an egotist. The Y show, assembled by that preeminent scholar of Broadway music, Robert Kimball, had some nice arcana, like Mercer’s rejected lyric for a Harold Arlen tune that, thanks to Ira Gershwin, became “The Man That Got Away.” And at the end, one of Mercer’s most important interpreters came on stage: Margaret Whiting, still a pistol at 81\. The night I attended, she went dry on some lyrics to “One for My Baby,” then won the audience back by muttering, in her best saloon-chanteuse alto, “Of all the songs to blow, it had to be this one!” Whiting should have told a story dating back to 1940, when Arlen and Mercer came to her home (Margaret’s father was another Mercer collaborator, Richard Whiting; they wrote “Hooray for Hollywood”) eager to play a song they had just composed for a Warner Bros. melodrama. From the first bars of “Blues in the Night” (“My momma done tol’ me…”) everybody knew the song was gold. Inexplicably, it was left off the song list at the Y. But the audience, of which an estimated 80% were older than I am (and I’ve been humming these songs for 50 years or more), was indulgent, enthralled, in the moment — at once in the present and the beloved past. When an on-stage screen flashed the lyrics to “Moon River,” almost everyone sang along, in tribute to Mercer, their huckleberry friend, and to the avid consumers of great pop music they all, we all, were. **OF THEM I SING** With a book by director George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, music by George Gershwin and lyrics by his brother Ira, _Of Thee I Sing_ opened Dec. 26, 1931, with George conducting the orchestra, and ran for 441 performances. It would be the Gershwin’s biggest hit, and the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama. The award went to Kaufman, Ryskind and Ira Gershwin for supplying the words; George, who supplied the immortal music, was not eligible. (The decision chafed him.) Set in what seemed the depths of the Depression — how little they knew — the play relates the machinations of political bosses to get its man, John Wintergreen (here, Broadway veteran Victor Garber), into the White House. Bereft of ideas or ideals, they take the advice of a chambermaid and run on a platform of Love. Their scheme is to stage an Atlantic City beauty contest and marry off the winner, a Southern honeypot named Diana Devereaux (wowser Jenny Powers), to the bachelor Wintergreen. The candidate, though, has fallen for his secretary, Mary Turner (Jennifer Laura Thompson, fresh from playing Glinda the Good Witch in _Wicked_). The John-loves-Mary affair wins the hearts of the electorate, and Wintergreen is soon President. But an international scandal explodes when the French Ambassador reveals that the spurned Miss Devereaux is “the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate son of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon.” The President is impeached, with proceedings chaired by the comically anonymous Vice President Throttlebottom (Jefferson Mays, of _I Am My Own Wife_, in an endearing Mr. Cellophane turn). All is resolved when Mary announces she is pregnant, with twins. Posterity is just around the corner. Of thee I sing, babies! According to Gershwin biographer [Edward Jablonski](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155553077X/qid=1147444301/sr=1-4/ref=sr%5F1%5F4/104-4626108-1620703?s=books&v=glance&n=283155), Kaufman and Ryskind wrote the whole first act in 16 days. Seeing the show today, smiling at some jokes, groaning at others, you may ask, “It took that long?” This was a script built for laughs, not to last. It’s less a Petronian satire than a Catskills burlesque, reveling in fake French (“Garcon, s’il vous plait, / Encore, Chevrolet coupe”) and real Yiddish, as when French soldiers sing, “A vous toot dir veh, a vous?” and the nine Supreme Court justices declare, “We’re the A.K.’s / Who give the O.K.’s” — A.K.’s meaning alterkockers. (For this lore I thank Alan Abrams, Time’s Broadway-musical scholar in residence, who played Wintergreen in summer stock a few years back.) Yet the enterprise retains its blithe bite nearly three quarters of a century later. It has a smiling contempt for the electoral process and an acute ear for political B.S. Realizing that stump speechifying is the art of couching nonsense in stentorian cadences, they have a Southern Senator intone this bilgewater: “Not for us the entangling alliances of Europe, not for us the allying entanglances of Asia.” Wintergreen, who gets high marks for oratory if not for geography, tells voters that he has campaigned “in the cornfields of Kansas, on the plains of Arizona, in the mountains of Nebraska…” Once in a while, truth breaks through the truthiness. A political boss tells the voters, “We do not talk to you about war debts or wheat or immigration — we appeal to your hearts, not your intelligence.” Confronted with Lincoln’s quote about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time, the boss snorts, “It’s different nowadays. People are bigger suckers.” (That got a conspiratorial roar from the opening night Encores! crowd.) Toward the end, Wintergreen lapses into candor when he confides to Throttlebottom the basics of White House governance: “Of course the first four years are easy. You don’t do anything except try to get re-elected. … The next four years you wonder why the hell you wanted to be re-elected.” For our last two Presidents, that bit of wisdom might hit home. The plot, lassoing the President into a sexual triangle that leads to his impeachment, needs no footnote from me for its relevance to recent White House history. True, the image of a Vice President with neither power nor notoriety may seem anachronistic, not to say utopian, these days (though at the end, Throttlebottom does say to Wintergreen, in a neat presentiment of Maureen Dowd, “You can be the President and I’ll go back to Vice.”) But the pertinence of the show’s disdain for the motives of the President, the Congress and the press carried a wallop then, and retain a sting today. Remember that, in 1931, the Wall Street crash had lately idled nearly a fifth of the work force and wonder that Ira Gershwin could have Wintergreen sing, in a perky love ballad, “Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers, / Long as you’ve got a kiss that conquers?” The Senators are less discreet: “If you think you’ve got depression, / Wait until we get in session, / And you’ll find out what depression really means!” The reporters care not about The Issues; they pepper the Prez with questions only about his love life. “We don’t want to know about the moratorium, / Or how near we are to beer, / Or about the League of Nations, / Or the seventeen vacations / You have had since you’ve been here.” (In the 1952 revival, Ira tweaked the first lines into: “We don’t want to know about your foreign policy / Or the latest Party smear, / Or the budget innovations / Or the seventeen vacations / You have had since you’ve been here.” However dismissive Kaufman the writer was to the political process, Kaufman the director knew how to put on a splendid show. _Of Thee In Sing_, then and now, begins with convention delegates bearing such placards as “Wintergreen — the Flavor Lasts,” “Vote for Posterity and See What You Get” and the meta-cynical “Turn the Reformers Out.” The first act climax, set in Madison Square Garden, intersperses the political rhetoric with a wrestling match; the combatants briefly pause in a double-scissors lock to applaud one of the speeches, which is interrupted by the announcement of a hockey or baseball score — Boston Bruins 3, Chicago White Sox 1 — voiced here by Bob Sheppard, the ageless (95) voice of the New York Yankees. A large screened is lowered onto the stage to highlight the election (“Wintergreen four votes short of winning!” … “Wintergreen casts last four votes and wins!”) It’s all very, to use an innocent word from the show, gay. Just as buoyant is the score. How could it not be, with Broadway’s premier songwriting siblings near the top of their form? The title tune got to #8 on the hit parade, and two others, “Who Cares?” and “Love Is Sweeping the Country,” still put a 2/4 spring in the step of many a geriatric. But the score was no succession of stand-alone ballads and dance tunes. Ira referred to the show as an operetta and, in the Gilbert and Sullivan mode, each song fits into the plot, advances the improbable story and fleshes out the characters, all the while parading its jazzy insouciance. Sometimes Ira can be just on the lyric side of lewd. In “Never Was a Girl So Fair,” a hymn to Miss Devereaux’s allure, the pols sing: “What a charming epiglottis! / What a lovely coat of tan! / Oh, the man who isn’t hot is / Not a man!” The Encores! production, staged by John Rando (who directed the wonderful 1998 revival of the Kaufman-Gershwin _Strike Up the Band_), makes Kaufman’s old whine bubble like new wine. Pristinely faithful to the original, down to a film clip of the MGM lion, crowing instead of roaring, the show has a brisk, canny bounce matched only by … well, by _The Drowsy Chaperone._ Rando festoons John Lee Beatty’s balconied set with streamers, packs the stage with sight gags and sex appeal — 10 gals in bathing suits, courted by boys with press cards in their hat bands. The cast and orchestra, under the vigorous baton of Paul Gemignani, rise to the material, then skate on it. Garber does justice to one of the all-time rousing musical-comedy lines, “Did you say _corn muffins?_” (Mary had won his heart by revealing she makes the best corn muffins. When they reach the White House, Mary says she’ll bake “corn muffins for the unemployed!” Wintergreen cries, “That’s my girl! You feed ’em and I’ll sing to them!”) Political parties have conventions, and concert versions of Broadway shows do too. The main requirement is that each actor-singer holds the script in a black loose-leaf binder, but after 10 days’ rehearsal, most of the performers have memorized their parts and use the book as a prop. Last night, one actor, feigning tears, ripped a page from the script and wiped his pseudo-tears. Near the finale, Powers, her body frozen in a jackknife posture with her hands on the floor, adjusted her position slightly and turned a page in the script. Broadway songs don’t swing votes. Ira Gershwin discovered that when he rewrote his “Love Is Sweeping the Country” lyrics for Adlai Stevenson’s noble but doomed 1952 campaign against Dwight D. Eisenhower. (A sample, from Kimball’s _The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin_: “What a man for our future! / Equal him if you can. / Fearless attitudes / With no platitudes; / Inspirational — / He’s sensational! / Adlai’s sweeping the country! / America — here’s your man!”) But they can buoy spirits. Mel Brooks knows that, as do the _Drowsy Chaperone_ team. All the 21st century fashioners of musical comedy are marching in the footsteps of the Gershwins and Mercer. 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