by Laurence Maslon
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| Irving Berlin with Moss Hart and a scene from their musical "As Thousands Cheer." |
Irving Berlin's patriotic belief in his adopted country would seem to be an affectionate constant in his career, but as the crisis of the depression deepened, even Berlin could see the box office appeal in some good old-fashioned social satire. In 1932, he teamed up with the bright young playwright Moss Hart, who had become a rising star on Broadway when he co-authored the Hollywood satire "Once in a Lifetime" with George S. Kaufman two years earlier. Kaufman's own satirical musical, "Of Thee I Sing," was playing to big business at the Music Box Theater, which Berlin owned, and the composer thought there might be room for another sharp show in town.
As concocted by Hart and Berlin, the plot of "Face the Music" is really a triptych of three slight social satires on the depression, the Seabury investigations -- started in 1930 by then New York governor FDR to examine corruption in the mayoral administration of James J. Walker, who was eventually forced to resign -- and the "Ziegfeld Follies," tentatively stitched together. "Face the Music" opens at the Automat, where the recently humbled rich are being forced to share their modest repasts among the hoi polloi. This gave birth to the show's biggest hit, "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," which became one of the gentler anthems of the depression.
The show's lack of conceptual clarity is obvious from its subtitle, "A Musical Comedy Revue," and it was not the smash return to Broadway that Berlin had anticipated. In the end, Berlin was more comfortable with the revue format -- short, sharp, and quick -- as he himself would be the first to admit.
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| Marilyn Miller, Clifton Webb, and Ethel Waters were some of the stars featured in "As Thousands Cheer." |
The next season, Hart and Berlin tried again for a topical revue, and this time they kept their target well within sight and hit the bull's-eye. "As Thousands Cheer" was typical of the general trend in the 1930s of giving the revue form some kind of structural or thematic unity. In this, the team achieved a kind of brilliance; "As Thousands Cheer" took as its "concept" the form of a daily newspaper, with each number and skit taken from (or performed in ironic contrast to) a particular headline or column -- which was projected across the proscenium. (This was several years before the Federal Theatre Project created a unit called "The Living Newspaper" that dramatized political stories in documentary form.) This allowed Hart to parody such wet-ink-fresh subjects as the building of Rockefeller Center ("World's Wealthiest Man Celebrates 94th Birthday") and the outgoing Hoover administration, where the ex-president and his wife run up a huge last-minute long-distance phone bill ("Franklin D. Roosevelt Inaugurated Tomorrow"). Berlin took a gentler swipe at society -- with the extraordinary exception of "Supper Time" for Ethel Waters -- by kidding Josephine Baker ("Harlem on My Mind"), Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton ("How's Chances?"), and even the hoary conventions of the revue format itself ("Supreme Court Hands Down Important Decision") that forbid revues from reprising their most memorable songs in the finale.
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| The creators of "Of Thee I Sing," and Hy Gardner in "Pins and Needles." |
A month after "As Thousands Cheer" opened on Broadway, in September 1933, Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and the Gershwins returned with "Let 'Em Eat Cake," a rare musical sequel to "Of Thee I Sing," with the same cast of characters. The score was even more sophisticated than the original show's, but the book's often depressing take on fascism -- President Wintergreen overthrows the government after losing reelection -- ground audiences down rather than inspiring them. And it's likely the show was simply a formalistic copy of the original. It was a costly failure, opening and closing after 90 performances at the Imperial Theater, while Berlin was clocking 400 performances of "As Thousands Cheer" at his very own Music Box Theater.
But all this was probably more a matter of craft than sentiment; as the 1930s wore on, political satire on Broadway became more, rather than less, popular. Times were getting more complex, and the Broadway musical was never more topical than it became in the latter part of the decade. In late 1937, four intensely political musicals opened on Broadway: "The Cradle Will Rock," "Pins and Needles," "I'd Rather Be Right," and an antiwar satire starring Ed Wynn called "Hooray for What." The style of the shows ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous -- but they each caught a different facet of the American consciousness. By the fall of 1937, it looked as if the depression would be forever clouding the skies. A whopping budget deficit, a series of explosive struggles between management and labor, the progressive unionization of America -- these events filled the headlines and made their appearance, one way or another, on the Broadway musical stage.
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Theater historian Robert Kimball explains why he thinks "Of Thee I Sing" is the Gershwins' greatest musical, and hear a song excerpt from it.
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