THE LAST MUSICAL COMEDY (1933)
REVIEWING THE PREMIERE of Pardon My English in Philadelphia, critic Robert Reiss watched “lantern-jawed and sweet-eyed George Gershwin” conduct the orchestra for the first act, “and then spend the second walking nervously up and down the lobby with his hands behind his back and his chin in a figurative third hand.”1 Reiss’s glimpse of an anxious composer is the only known evidence of Gershwin’s feelings about a show that failed. Its last performance took place on February 25, 1933. While the failure cannot have pleased the Gershwin brothers, the regrets that Ira expressed later show that they had never had much hope for that one in the first place. Nor, given the success of Of Thee I Sing, did they have reason to worry about finances. By the end of its first year, that show’s gross intake stood at $1.4 million, and by spring 1933 the same creative team was at work on a Wintergreen sequel.
Let ’Em Eat Cake begins with an overture previewing several of the show’s melodies, while also striking a martial note that sets the stage for the events that lie ahead—from comic to grim. The curtain rises on a night scene familiar to anyone who had seen Of Thee I Sing: a street in an American city during election season. Supporters of two presidential candidates, carrying placards, march and sing in separate groups. One group touts President John P. Wintergreen (“Keep Love in the White House”), who is running for a second term, and the other supports his opponent, John P. Tweedledee (“More Promises Than Wintergreen”). “Wintergreen for President,” sung to the original music for Of Thee I Sing but with lyrics updated for the incumbent, quotes familiar melodies—“The Stars and Stripes Forever,” “The Sidewalks of New York,” “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and “Of Thee I Sing”—as the Tweedledee forces borrow from “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Over There.” Moving quickly, this number—a fresh take with densely packed lyrics, a minor-mode cast with a barrage of tune references in major, and a busy orchestral accompaniment—nears the brink of overload. But when the opposing groups converge onstage, the result is more clarifying than anarchic. For Gershwin has composed another double song—a Tweedledee melody singable against the Wintergreen melody. A student of Russian-born composer and music theorist Joseph Schillinger at the time, he had prepared himself for Let ’Em Eat Cake by studying counterpoint, which seemed to him “in keeping with the satire of the piece” and an essential tool for executing “what I am trying to do.”2
The next musical number follows an extended three-part form (ABA) to make its own satirical point. The scene is set in New York’s Union Square, where John and Mary Wintergreen—he has lost the election to Tweedledee—have opened a store featuring “Maryblue” shirts to take advantage of the sewing skills of the ex–first lady. Passersby stroll through the square singing a graceful ditty about its merits as a forum where political and social matters are debated in open public discourse. Their serene melody is a rare case in which Gershwin has borrowed from a classical source: the first movement of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major.3 But the strollers’ amiable music is disrupted by a fiery song-within-a-song: “Down with Everyone Who’s Up.” A radical activist named Kruger leads a fiery attack on “conditions as they are.” By his lights, the notion that one plus one makes two is debatable, majorities deserve no deference, and minorities are no less corrupt. As Kruger’s litany of society’s failures continues, compatriots echo his hit list in a fierce call-and-response exchange that ends in a skirmish among the radicals. This number embodies the social struggle that Kaufman and Ryskind’s plot satirizes: the A section, with its relaxed dotted rhythms, is apt strolling music for New Yorkers at peace with their lives, while the frenetic B section deems their satisfaction simply a façade disguising the corruption and exploitation that seethe beneath the surface.
John P. Wintergreen decides that the time to stage a revolution is at hand, and he makes Maryblue shirts his rallying point. “Italy—black shirts! Germany—brown shirts! America—blue shirts!” he declaims.4 Blue shirts selling for a dollar become a national fad. Alexander Throttlebottom, now a floorwalker in the Maryblue flagship store, joins with coworkers to sing about the future of America: “Comes the revolution, we’ll be eating cake!”5 But even as the Wintergreens are hailed as visionaries, the ex-president’s thoughts dwell on his wife. “Mine,” the show’s only love song, doubles down on Gershwin’s attachment to counterpoint. Its main melody relies on sustained notes, to the point that the first phrase requires only four syllables (“Mine, love is mine”), as does the third (“Mine, you are mine”). Because the countermelodic musical voice behind this melody fits the personas of John and Mary equally well, either can sing it alone, both can sing it together, or they can deliver it in alternation. The devoted connection affirmed by the music is built to last—an affirmative sequel of sorts to Of Thee I Sing’s “Who Cares?”
Well aware that a revolution needs an army, Wintergreen and Throttlebottom plan a military coup with the Union League, an ultraconservative men’s club with military roots, as the core of their force. On arrival at the club’s headquarters, however, the conspirators encounter a room of rich, doddering oldsters who claim Rip Van Winkle as their idol and spend their days napping, eating lunch, and reading the New York Tribune, which had ceased to exist as an independent newspaper in 1924. The members describe their time-honored way of life in unison singing that evokes a remote past—complete with an extended Handelian melisma. Should the outside world trouble their settled existence, they have a strategy for political engagement (“Don’t change horses in the river”) and another for combat (“Watch your kidneys, watch your liver!”).
When Wintergreen and Throttlebottom spread a rumor among club members that the British are ready to march again on Bunker Hill, the Union Leaguers are jarred from their torpor and begin toning their aging bodies for battle. Soon thereafter, Wintergreen and his “Blue Shirts” begin a march toward Washington, where they expect to meet Gen. Adam Snookfield and the U.S. Army, who have joined forces to depose President Tweedledee. The music they sing on the way is a military march with a brisk gait and a genial tone that affirm two facts laid out in the verse: musical comedy armies march a lot, and when they do, they sing. By marching “on and on and on,” down hills (D to G to D) and then up hills (D to G to D), this soldierly corps covers territory “hither and thither and yon.”
When Wintergreen and his troops arrive at the White House on the Fourth of July, General Snookfield is nowhere to be seen, having headed off to a party with his girlfriend, Trixie. So Wintergreen cuts his own deal with the troops: “Make me your Dictator, and the war debts are yours!” His forces take President Tweedledee into custody, Independence Day bombs burst in the air, and Wintergreen proclaims a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” As Act I ends, he leads the crowd in singing “Let ’Em Eat Cake!,” an anthem claiming the legacy of the French Revolution as his own.
Act II begins with the chorus singing “Blue, Blue, Blue,” lauding the “sainted” color with which “heaven is painted” as another Wintergreen innovation. Dictator Wintergreen—now dressed in a gaudy uniform, demanding Nazi-style salutes (until they put too much strain on his arm), and striking Napoleonic poses in front of mirrors—has reassembled, in the renamed and redecorated Blue House, cronies from his presidential team and shirt business. A new ritual calls for the Blue House workforce to start their day with a sung tribute to the excellence of “our dictator Wintergreen,” set by Gershwin in solemn counterpoint.6 The boss has also come up with “Who’s the Greatest?,” a sprightly quiz in 6/8 time for which the staff has all the right answers: chiefly “Wintergreen.”
Nine delegates to the League of Nations arrive for a conference on international finance. When questioned about paying their war debts, the League members respond with a sung stew of feigned incomprehension: “No comprenez, no capish, no versteh!” Wintergreen decides to settle the debt on a baseball diamond, pitting the nine Supreme Court justices against the nine debtor nations, with the spoils going to the winners, double or nothing. Improbably, the visitors win on a disputable call by the umpire, with results so financially ruinous to the losing American side that a courtroom trial is convened.7 The judge in the case is Wintergreen, the prosecutor the renegade Kruger, the plaintiff the army, and the defendant the umpire, Alexander Throttlebottom, who stands accused of taking a bribe from the League of Nations. But once a legal and punitive emphasis shows up in the form of capital punishment, a story brimming with cleverly contrived absurdities curdles in the direction of a sour parable of justice gone amok.
The show’s last scene opens on a stage dominated by a guillotine, with beheadings on the day’s docket. The crowd joins in a threnody, “Hanging Throttlebottom in the Morning,” a solemn blues-tinged processional reckoning the cost of what radical politics has wrought.8 In the end, however, the story reclaims its comic-opera roots, and the guillotine, looming ominously on the stage, goes unused. As in Of Thee I Sing, Mary Wintergreen emerges as the plot’s deus ex machina; this time, she represents the fashion consciousness of the women of America, who have had their fill of blue. Behind Mary’s invitation to all women to appreciate beauty and style wherever they appear, and in whatever color, sounds the reassuring melody of “Blue, Blue, Blue,” undercutting the deadly symbolism of the guillotine that hovers over the scene.9 The political crisis is resolved and the republic restored, now under the leadership of President Throttlebottom. To celebrate the reconciliation, the entire cast ends the show by singing the refrain of “Of Thee I Sing.”
After a run in Boston that began on October 2, Let ’Em Eat Cake opened at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre on October 21. Some two weeks later Gershwin wrote George Pallay that “the show is going along very well, and I think it has a good chance of running for some time.”10 But the sequel to Of Thee I Sing ran only until January 6, 1934—a total of ninety performances—and it closed without touring at all. More than one New York critic, recalling the tide of laughter that had carried Of Thee I Sing through a joyous evening in the theater, had anticipated more of the same but failed to find it. Gilbert W. Gabriel of the New York American did his best to explain why the sequel’s humor flunked the test:
Funny? Yes, often immensely, occasionally magnificently funny, especially in the greater gusto of the first act. But a brand of funniness which, for all its freedom from the old musical show formula, is apt to make you chaw your fingernails, apologize for living and wonder whether you yourself don’t belong up there on the stage below the guillotine’s wit-edged blade.11
A tour de force of musical craft and dexterity of wit, the satirical Let ’Em Eat Cake failed on Broadway: doomed at the end, it seems, by the curdling of its humor, but perhaps too for lack of a hero more commanding than America’s President Alexander Throttlebottom.
AS LET ’EM EAT CAKE approached its first public performance, George Gershwin turned thirty-five and was reflecting on the course of his career. Now, having made a significant mark in both the classical and the popular spheres, and one of the few American composers whose music aroused interest both within and outside the United States, Gershwin set his sights on a project—the opera with DuBose Heyward—in an arena that he now was sure he was ready to enter.