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Gershwin: 'Of Thee I Sing' and 'Let ‘Em Eat Cake' : Opera North, Wyn Davies, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, 18.2.2009 and 20.2.2009 (BBr)


Of Thee I Sing is a political satire which ran for a respectable 441 performances at the Music Box in New York. The plot is simplicity itself – John P Wintergreen is running for president on the love ticket, so he must find a wife. A beauty contest is held in Atlantic City and Wintergreen is supposed to marry the winner but falls for a secretary instead – because she can cook corn muffins. Diana Devereux, who wins the pageant, sues for breach of promise and the Senate is about to impeach the President when it is announced that he is about to become a father, and expectant fathers cannot be called to book.

Following two years later, but set four years later, and running for only 90 performances at the Imperial Theater, Let ‘Em Eat Cake tells of how Wintergreen loses the next election, starts selling blue shirts made by his wife, organises a revolution with everybody wearing blue shirts, becomes dictator, is deposed and sentenced to be beheaded:  but his wife wins the day when she imports the latest Paris fashions.

The productions kept the shows in the times they were written – the early thirties – and both have a book written by the great George S Kaufman (one of the funniest men to put pen to paper) and Morrie Ryskind but throughout there were little things which niggled. In the opening scene of Of Thee, Wintergreen for President, a member of the cast was carrying a placard with a picture of Osama bin Laden on it. Later, in the Senate, the Senator for Alaska is mentioned when Alaska didn’t become a state until 1959! In Cake there were two very blatant reminders of Marx Brothers films; Captain Spaulding’s entrance in Animal Crackers and Chico’s Tootsie Frootsie Ice Cream call from A Day at the Races (a film not made until 1937). These are small points, to be sure, but as both shows were sadly lacking in everything which makes a good evening – great hummable tunes (on both evenings I left the theatre whistling the scenery) and real pace and humour. The problems with both was that they are dull – there was simply too much dialogue, and not particularly funny or engaging dialogue at that –and there was only one good tune in each work – the title song in Of Thee and the wonderful Mine in Cake.

William Dazeley, as John P Wintergreen, and Rebecca Moon, standing in for an indisposed Bibi Heal and making her Opera North debut, as Mary, his wife, were excellent in both productions, believable and approachable characters who really came to life. In Of Thee Heather Shipp played the unlucky–in–love Diana Devereaux as if she were Lalume in Kismet, and Richard Stuart annoyingly played the French Ambassador as a poor man’s Hercule Poirot, who’s Belgian anyway and not French: his was a poor show. In both productions Steven Beard played the insignificant Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom with a lolloping gait which quickly became an annoyance and not the humorous caricature it was supposed to be.

Although these two productions had things in them which were admirable – the choral singing was superb – they only served to prove that these musicals are very dated and rather dull. Some blame must fall on the production which lacked real pizzazz to bring the pieces to life – it was all rather reverential – and I doubt anyone would have complained if half the dialogue had been cut, which would certainly have helped the pacing. Finally, the band never really swung, but this was because there was nothing in the music to allow it to swing.

Over the years I’ve read quite a lot about Gershwin and his Broadway shows and I am grateful to Opera North for giving us these works, but now that we’ve seen and heard them let’s move on to something rather better and more deserving of our time. There was a lot of G&S in both shows and I would love to see a good production of one of their works, or, if Opera North wishes to continue looking at Broadway, there are many shows by Cole Porter which deserve our attention – The Gay Divorce (1932) and Anything Goes (1934) immediately spring to mind.

Bob Briggs

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