Word: singing
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...