The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [40]
One of the running jokes of June Moon is the musical hack who predicts, “Gershwin will be a nobody in ten years,” and then, when Gershwin actually shows up, complains, “He stole my rhapsody.” Kaufman had in fact begun collaborating with Gershwin on the musical Strike Up the Band, which first appeared in 1927. The Broadway musical as it has since come down to us essentially dates from this year. As if by harmonic convergence, George and Ira Gershwin’s Funny Face, starring Fred and Adele Astaire, also appeared that year, as did Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee, adapted from Mark Twain, and Show Boat, the epic musical of black life on a Mississippi riverboat written by Edna Ferber, with songs by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, son of Willie and grandson of the original Oscar. What distinguished all these works from their predecessors was the sheer sophistication of the music and songs; they also began to move in the direction of integrating music, song, and narrative, rather than stitching together a patchwork of gags and skits and showstoppers, as Berlin, Kern, and others had largely done before.
Strike Up the Band is such a ferocious piece of work that it had to be withdrawn from the stage; it succeeded only after Kaufman and Gershwin had toned down its sarcasm. The main character, Horace K. Fletcher, is a butter-and-egg man on a monstrous scale, a cheese manufacturer who inveigles the dim-witted President Coolidge into declaring war against Switzerland in order to block imported Swiss cheese. The premise is vintage Kaufman, since its very ludicrousness has the effect of liberating the author’s satirical imagination. Horace offers to pay for the entire war, and return a 25 percent profit, so long as the war is named after him. “It’s a go!” cries the president’s chief adviser. “Strike Up the Band,” a typically ingenious Gershwin pastiche of patriotic tunes, is the musical device Horace uses to whip up war fever and thus further his shameless profiteering. Horace soon has the young men of America marching off to bloody the Swiss, who have the good sense to hide in the mountains, and ultimately to surrender. The Gershwins’ score includes “The Man I Love” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” as well as a Gilbert and Sullivan sound-alike in rhyming couplets and a ragtime tune celebrating the triumph of jazz. For all the virtuoso eclecticism, Strike Up the Band is generally considered the first musical in which the songs emerge directly from the narrative, just as June Moon was one of the first Broadway plays in which the humor is rooted in character.
Nineteen twenty-seven was an astonishing year. Broadway theaters staged an average of 225 shows a year during the decade; in 1927 the figure reached 264, a figure never equaled before or since. It was not only one of the greatest seasons in the history of Broadway, but the year of Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs and Charles Lindbergh’s successful transatlantic flight, a year of heroes and parades and headlines. The stock market was making everybody rich, elevator boys as well as bankers. “The uncertainties of 1920 were drowned out in a steady golden roar,” Fitzgerald later wrote. “The parties were bigger . . . the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper.” It was a moment of frenzy that was bound to spend itself, though you would think, from Fitzgerald’s apocalyptic disgust, that the catastrophe of the Depression arrived as a biblical punishment for wantonness. Indeed, he writes, “The city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cake and circuses.” Yet Broadway would never again be so entrancing as it had been in those dazzling