September 15, 2007
Wodehousiana II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:40 PM EST Like every civilized, decent, God-fearing, English-speaking individual, I love Bertie and Jeeves (now nearly a generic term for “manservant”) and the other denizens of P. G. Wodehouse’s antic imagination. I especially remember for some reason a line—I haven’t the faintest idea which book it’s from—in which Bertie describes a local restaurant as being “owned by a branch of the Borgia family.” But it is as a Broadway lyricist that I especially appreciate him. Fredric Smoler writes, “A lot of American popular culture would not have existed without him. He collaborated with Cole Porter on Anything Goes, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern (he wrote the lyrics to Show Boat’s “Bill”) and Guy Bolton.” Indeed, Wodehouse’s contribution to the history of the Broadway musical has never received its due. “Bill” is certainly his best-known song, probably because it was dropped from the now mostly forgotten Oh, Lady! Lady!! and later inserted in the immortal Show Boat (its lyric slightly tweaked by Hammerstein). But he wrote many others that became standards, such as “As the Clouds Roll By,” and “The Land Where the Good Songs Go.” One of my favorites is “Tulip Time in Sing Sing,” where Wodehouse treats a well known institution a few miles up the Hudson from Manhattan as a sort of college, much loved by its alumni: How I wish that there I’d waited,
Wished I’d never graduated,
For the memory of those days still stirs me so.
And the birdies every Spring sing,
Aren’t you coming back to Sing Sing
Where you used to be so happy long ago? We were just a band of brothers,
Each as good as all the others.
As the humblest sort of sneak thief you might rank,
But when you’d been there a week, well,
We were treated as an equal
By the high and mighty swells who’d robbed a bank. But he did more than write good lyrics. Wodehouse’s partnership with Guy Bolton (who wrote the librettos) and Jerome Kern in what are known as the Princess Theatre shows during the years of World War I changed muscial comedy profoundly. Musicals in the first years of the twentieth century were usually either operettas, set in Europe, with princes falling in love with milkmaids and such, or straight plays with songs inserted here and there that had nothing to do with the plot. Often major stars had a contractual right to do their particular shtick, such as play the ukulele, at a particular time. But the Princess Theatre, 104 West 39th Street, was tiny, only 299 seats. Therefore there was no room for elaborate costumes, scenery or theatrical effects and no money for major stars. For shows to make money there, they had to rely on the plays themselves. The Princess Theatre shows were set in contemporary America (period costumes are expensive) and, while the plots hardly plumbed the depths of the human soul, involved people who were neither milkmaids nor princes. And the songs had something to do with the plot. The result was something very new indeed. The critics liked what they saw. George Kaufmann, no mean playwright himself (he and Ira Gershwin would win the first Pulitzer for drama ever awarded to a musical) wrote: This is the trio of musical fame,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern:
Better than anyone else you can name,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern. Dorothy Parker wrote that “Wodehouse, Bolton, and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. . . . I like the way they go about a musical comedy. . . . I like the way the action slides casually into the songs. . . . I like the deft rhyming. . . . and, oh, how I do like Jerome Kern’s music.” Younger writers and musicians flocked to the Princess Theatre to see these brightly original shows and were greatly influenced by what they heard. Both Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin owe much to the witty, intricate rhymes of Wodehouse, who brought Gilbert and Sullivan wordplay to America. Oh, by the way. The rehearsal pianist at the Princess Theatre at one point was a teenager named George Gershwin. I wonder what ever happened to him.
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