Word: singings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...Remember that, in 1931, the Wall Street crash had lately idled nearly a fifth of the work force and wonder that Ira Gershwin could have Wintergreen sing, in a perky love ballad, "Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers, / Long as you've got a kiss that conquers?" The Senators are less discreet: "If you think you've got depression, / Wait until we get in session, / And you'll find out what depression really means!" The reporters care not about The Issues; they pepper the Prez with questions only about his love life. "We don't want to know about...
...However dismissive Kaufman the writer was to the political process, Kaufman the director knew how to put on a splendid show. Of Thee In Sing, then and now, begins with convention delegates bearing such placards as "Wintergreen - the Flavor Lasts," "Vote for Posterity and See What You Get" and the meta-cynical "Turn the Reformers Out." The first act climax, set in Madison Square Garden, intersperses the political rhetoric with a wrestling match; the combatants briefly pause in a double-scissors lock to applaud one of the speeches, which is interrupted by the announcement of a hockey or baseball score...
...each song fits into the plot, advances the improbable story and fleshes out the characters, all the while parading its jazzy insouciance. Sometimes Ira can be just on the lyric side of lewd. In "Never Was a Girl So Fair," a hymn to Miss Devereaux's allure, the pols sing: "What a charming epiglottis! / What a lovely coat of tan! / Oh, the man who isn't hot is / Not a man!" The Encores! production, staged by John Rando (who directed the wonderful 1998 revival of the Kaufman-Gershwin Strike Up the Band), makes Kaufman's old whine bubble like...