STRIKE UP THE BAND
Fresh in its impudence as well as unfamiliarity, this little-known quatrain is one of several discoveries offered by the recently restored stage musical Strike Up the Band, a vastly different animal from the film. A collaboration between songwriters George and Ira Gershwin, playwright George S. Kaufman, and producer Edgar Selwyn, this antiwar operetta epitomized Kaufman’s famous dictum that “satire is what closes Saturday night”: despite critical admiration, it was a commercial flop in its Philadelphia tryout and never made it to Broadway. A considerably revised version, with a new script by Kaufman’s Animal Crackers collaborator Morrie Ryskind, was a moderate New York success in 1930 as a vehicle for burlesque comedians Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough but didn’t show much staying power without them. Meanwhile, the 1927 work went into the history books as a succes d’estime–a term Kaufman once sarcastically defined as “a success that runs out of steam.” Only in the mid-1980s was Gershwin estate archivist Tommy Krasker able to reconstruct the long-lost work, thanks to the 1982 discovery of a New Jersey warehouse full of manuscripts.
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Much of the script is formulaic screwball comedy from the playwright who scripted the Marx Brothers’ first hits; indeed, Spelvin’s wacky antics are very much in the Groucho mold, and Mrs. Draper is close kin to the doyennes played by Groucho’s perennial foil Margaret Dumont. Some of Kaufman’s writing is flawed, especially in the choppy second act; if Strike hadn’t closed so early the problems might have been solved, but they weren’t. Yet every so often the script delivers a zinger that still rings nastily true. Praising the returning doughboys for winning the war, Fletcher expresses his regret that there aren’t any jobs for them (automation, you know); Colonel Holmes attributes his reputation as a presidential confidant to discretion, then goes around hawking his “I was there” memoirs. And a nation doesn’t have to be at war to be ripe for the smear-and-scare tactics of businessmen like Fletcher and his political and media allies–look at the insurance industry’s and congressional Republicans’ personally and ideologically charged campaign against health-care reform.
