U-M Creative Currents

Political Satire Meets Musical History

• Arts Initiative • Season 2 • Episode 1

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We're thrilled to have Andrew Kohler, Alfred and Jane Wolin Managing Editor, and Jacob Kerzner, Associate Editor, from the Gershwin Initiative join us on U-M Creative Currents to talk about the Gershwin brothers' musical masterpiece, Of Thee I Sing, taking stage November 3 at the Michigan Theater. With narration delivered by NPR and New York Times music journalist and U-M Arts Journalism Fellow Anastasia Tsioulcas, this very special election year presentation is one-night only.

Of Thee I Sing is a joint production and collaboration between Marquee Arts and the Gershwin Initiative at U-M, made possible through the generous support of the U-M Arts Initiative, Michigan Medicine, and Arbor Brewing Company. 

Visit marquee-arts.org for tickets and additional information.




Mark Clague:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the U of M Creative Currents podcast, a Michigan arts podcast produced by the University of Michigan Arts Initiative, where we're looking at creativity across the entire University of Michigan campus. Today, we're diving into a timely topic, art and democracy, looking at a new production of the Gershwin musical, Of the I Sing, which will be performed just coming up on Sunday, November 3rd at 4 p.m. at the Michigan Theater.

Unknown:

And this is... ¶¶

Mark Clague:

And this is a product of the University of Michigan's Gershwin Initiative, which is a partnership with the Gershwin family. We have two special guests, Andrew Kohler, who's the Alfred and Jane Wolin Managing Editor of the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition, and his partner in editorial excellence, let's say, rather than crime, Jacob Kersner, Associate Editor, who's focusing on the Gershwin Brothers musical theater work. So welcome to Creative Currents. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Mark. Good to see you. So we're just going to have a fun conversation here, but tell us Maybe, Andy, what is this musical of The I Sing? What is it about?

Andrew Kohler:

This musical of The I Sing was written by George and Ira Gershwin in 1931 with the esteemed playwright George S. Kaufman, who also wrote The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It With You with Moss Hart. He usually collaborated, for example, The Royal Family with Edna Ferber. And for this project, he worked with Maury Reiskind. And Reiskind had been a political activist. He was An interesting figure because he started in World War I. He was an anti-war activist, more on the progressive side, and then he became quite reactionary later in life, at which point Kaufman cut ties with him, although he and Ira continued to play cards. I have it on good authority from Ira's biographer, Michael Owen.

Mark Clague:

So that always part of the creative process, right? So we've got a creative team of four. We have a composer, George Gershwin. We have his brother,

Andrew Kohler:

Ira. Oh, yes, thank you. I forgot that not everybody just knows um about these two and thinks about them constantly like we do yes george the great composer born 1898 died 1937 tragically young ira lived a good long life until 1983 he was two years older than george uh they were um also partners in artistic excellence for much of their career really starting around 1924 ira became george's primary lyricist and um and they worked together for the show of The I Sing. It's actually the second in a trilogy of political shows. The first was called Strike Up the Band. It opened in 1927 off Broadway, and it was an anti-war satire that everybody found too depressing to go onto Broadway. Just Kaufman had written the book, so then they brought in Reiskin to rework it, and then it was successful in 1930. And then they decided to do Of The I Sing. And two years later, there was a sequel called Let Him Eat Cake. So we have a trilogy.

Mark Clague:

Yes. Jacob, tell us a little bit about this particular show. What is the story? What happens?

Jacob Kerzner:

Yeah. So this show centers around presidential candidate John P. Wintergreen. And in some of the notes, they specify that the P stands for peppermint. So John Peppermint Wintergreen is the presidential candidate in this. It's a very serious satire. A very, very serious play. And the program note at the beginning specifies that this is a show set in no particular time. This is not about specific people in U.S. history. This is a satire of all times of the U.S. and its politics at large. And so John P. Wintergreen is running for president, and his committee, his presidential committee, decides that the best bet for his campaign would be to run on love. So they hold this massive beauty contest across the whole country to select the one most beautiful woman in the country to be the presidential wife. So Wintergreen is unmarried. Wintergreen is unmarried, yes.

Andrew Kohler:

Well, he's not looking for a first lady. The committee is looking for a first lady. He's initially not sold on the idea.

Jacob Kerzner:

Yes.

Andrew Kohler:

But basically

Jacob Kerzner:

they're trying to get him elected by any means necessary. By any means necessary. And love seems like the perfect idea because who doesn't love? So yes, this woman, Diana Devereaux, a Southern belle, wins the beauty contest, and so he is set up to marry this woman, but then he falls in love with one of his staffers, Mary Turner, who can bake better corn muffins than anyone else. And she can do it without corn. Yes, without corn. No corn in these corn muffins. But they're still the absolute best. And so, of course... the country is scandalized. There's the most beautiful woman who's supposed to be the first lady, but then if he's running on love, he ought to follow his love. He ought to hold true to who he loves. So it's a fun representation of sort of the way the United States and politics perceive everyday people and how these politicians... portray themselves as everyday or seek to understand but perhaps don't always understand the city.

Mark Clague:

Yeah, so that's interesting, because when we think of this Gershwin trilogy of musicals, and it seems like there's so much of their time and place, they're so topical, there's so many jokes that are about the 1920s and 30s, and of course you have the rise of fascism in Europe and populism and sort of war, you're between World War I and World War II, you have a time of sort of rampant sexism, racism, lots of isms, and so I guess one would think that this show has no bearing on today. Like, you know, here we are close to 100 years earlier, not quite that much. But it seems like there's actually quite a bit of contemporary resonance.

Andrew Kohler:

I would like to read my favorite passage. This is from the book, and the book meaning the dialogue of the show. And it's actually not quite the dialogue. This is from the election reel. What's supposed to happen as the election results come in is we get sort of a film reel, like a news film real, that at the end announces next week Norma Shearer in Love Girl, and then to finish off, the Metro Goldman Mayor Lion appears, it opens its mouth, it crows. So just to give you a little bit of context. And shortly before that, we get a bulletin. At a late hour tonight, the defeated candidate sent the following telegram to John P. Wintergreen, the winner. Heartily congratulate you on your splendid victory and charge fraud in Indiana, Illinois, New Nebraska, Montana, Washington, Ohio, and Massachusetts. After which, at midnight tonight, Alexander Throttlebottom refused to concede his election as vice president. So accusations of fraud, a stolen election. And in the sequel, Wintergreen loses re-election and begs the Supreme Court just to throw it out. Oh, wow.

Mark Clague:

So that does echo a few things we may have heard recently. A few. As I recall, Wintergreen himself votes several times

Andrew Kohler:

as well. Yes, he... casts the remaining four votes needed to win his election. That's right before in the film reel.

Mark Clague:

Yeah, well, none of those things would ever happen again, of course. It doesn't predict life. Not at all. Pretty amazing. So, Jacob, can you tell us a little bit about who will be performing?

Jacob Kerzner:

Yeah, we've got a wide range of lineup for this performance on November 3rd. We have a professional orchestra with a mix of comedic professionals and paid students from the university playing the 21-piece orchestration. We then have Professor Catherine Walker from the University of Michigan Musical Theatre Department conducting the performance, and she will be conducting a number of her musical theatre students playing the roles as the singers. And so those range from some excellent upperclassmen playing the principal role and the named characters to the full first-year class as our populist chorus. I understand you'll be on stage, too. I will. I will be playing piano in the orchestra, so that will be fun. It's always fun playing my own edited score, and then I get to find mistakes as I go. If there's anyone I trust to find my own mistakes, it's me. Yes,

Andrew Kohler:

because this is our first... our first test drive of the materials. This is the first time they will be performed.

Mark Clague:

I see. So this is part of this larger critical edition series. Yes, that's correct. The George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition at the university. Andy, can you tell us what is a critical edition or what's that larger project?

Andrew Kohler:

Oh, sure. So first, this is a complete works edition, meaning that we consider the Gershwins important enough that everything they did should be represented in an accurate scholarly volume. So like Beethoven or Mozart? Exactly, like Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, they have their editions. You have the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, which is, I don't know how many iterations it's gone through, but a lot. And so now we are doing one for the Gershwins. And they, of course, have an enormous output. What's challenging is, unfortunately, musical theater was not very well preserved from this era. They would do a show and then they would take it to Broadway. Well, they would do a tryout, then they would drop a bunch of songs and add a bunch of songs and rewrite the whole thing and take it to Broadway. And that's considered their... Insofar as we have a definitive version, we tend to consider it the Broadway version. Yeah, but these were commercial projects. Yes, they were

Mark Clague:

commercial. They were not composing great

Andrew Kohler:

works of art for posterity. Well, that's not how they were looking at it although to quote um of the icing itself posterity is just around the corner

Mark Clague:

so jacob tell me in doing a critical editing project like this like what did you actually do behind the scenes

Jacob Kerzner:

yeah so the the history of this show is is a rocky one so the show opened on broadway in 1931 um and then at some point after that the musical materials aside from the published piano vocal score and a few other small bits were essentially lost and then in 1987 this infamous story of a Warner Brothers warehouse containing a box of scores actually probably boxes of scores but a box of of the I sing parts was found and recovered and that led to a rediscovery of several shows some Gershwin some by other writers of the time and so these materials were very quickly put together into this concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and then that is the recording that lives on as the authoritative original Broadway recording but now with the Gershwin initiative and the critical edition I've had the chance to look closer and take each of those individual parts and put them together into new scores and see how these fit together and try to correct any mistakes that may have come and even go to the Schubert archive in New York and find some of the original materials that the original cast used and see what markings they may have made in the rehearsal process in New York and see what they may have changed on their feet that didn't end up in the published copy and try to just sort of slowly guide myself towards what the version on December 26th 1931 must have felt like and

Andrew Kohler:

yes you heard that correct they opened the day after Christmas because you know you need something to do the day after you've unwrapped all your presents you go to a Broadway show and I'm sure all the I'm sure the cast really appreciated on you know on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that they were opening a show on the 26th so

Jacob Kerzner:

yeah it's been great to explore all the different versions of lyrics the different even versions of characters they added some characters between their Boston tryout and the New York production. So there's so much that evolves. It's a pretty big

Mark Clague:

cast, right? There's like the Supreme Court and there's

Jacob Kerzner:

a French ambassador. Hugely. I believe the

Andrew Kohler:

original cast on Broadway was 60 people.

Mark Clague:

Yes,

Andrew Kohler:

there's a great stage direction that says, a dozen secretaries enter. Another dozen secretaries enter. So we're not going to have quite that many secretaries, but you'll get the gestalt. ¶¶

Unknown:

Bye.

Speaker 03:

So

Mark Clague:

this is a concert production or concert performance. So full orchestra, not just piano. Yes. And it's the original orchestration. Yes. Sort of the first time anybody's heard these probably since like 31, 32, right?

Jacob Kerzner:

Well, in this version. So the 1987 recording was these orchestrations, but there are some lyrics that didn't end up on that recording. There are some sort of versions of these numbers that didn't end up on that recording. Okay.

Andrew Kohler:

And there are also some versions of these numbers that did end up on that recording. Yes, because the original piano vocal score was published well in advance. It wasn't really meant to be a representation of the show as a work of art in this very definitive way. So you get some sections in the song Love is Sweeping the Country that didn't make the final cut. There's an introduction to the title number that I've never actually heard, but it is in the original piano vocal score. I don't think we've even found any orchestrations for it original. So it was probably never done on stage. So the publications can be a bit deceiving, especially because for a lot of these shows, they'll put out some individual sheet music, and those will be designed for home performance. So they'll be quite a bit modified from what you had on stage. So just a piano accompaniment, for example. We need to have an intro and an outro that work for, I don't know, when you're playing this at one of your salons.

Mark Clague:

But this is part of the editorial process, double-checking, finding those hidden mistakes and typos in probably the thousands and thousands of little dots and dashes.

Jacob Kerzner:

Hugely. I probably found a dozen in rehearsal last

Mark Clague:

night. Well, that's great. And it's really nice. I mean, I think that's part of what the University of Michigan is trying to do is bring research and performance together. The other thing that's exciting about this performance is your narrator.

Jacob Kerzner:

to the people we have. And this narration will be read by Anastasia Tsoulkas, who is the current inaugural Arts Initiative and Knights Wallace Arts Journalism Fellow.

Mark Clague:

Is that, yes? Yeah, so that's another connection between the Arts Initiative and the Gershwin Initiative and the show. So that's exciting to have that come together. One thing we could talk about is the other connections to politics today is the that the Supreme Court and impeachment play an important role in this story. Yes,

Andrew Kohler:

yes. So

Mark Clague:

tell us a little bit about that.

Andrew Kohler:

We've got the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine Supreme Court judges as they announce themselves. They are the AKs who make the OKs. Those of you who don't know, Yiddish might not realize that means Alta Kaka, which is, it's sort of like saying old fart. And they are old. And they are super old. Indeed, meant to be superannuated. They also, interestingly, use a whole tone scale, which George Gershwin went on to use, always with negative connotations when he wrote Porgy and Bess. Make of that what you will.

Mark Clague:

But yeah, Gershwin was bringing pretty sophisticated

Andrew Kohler:

musical versions from French music. Very much so, yes. And Impressionism, right, into his music. And we can't give too much of it away, but let's just say that the Supreme Court does wind up inserting itself into some rather personal decisions in people's lives. Some intervening to a

Mark Clague:

presidential contest at the very end.

Andrew Kohler:

Yes, and among other

Mark Clague:

things. So people can get tickets to this at Marquis Arts, which is the name of the Michigan Theater. And this is sort of a benefit concert to help out the Gershwin Initiative. And I also think this is the first of two concerts, right? Yes. So there's a concert in January on the 26th, the centennial celebration of George Gershwin's Concerto on F. with Jace Ogren and the University Philharmonia Orchestra. And then Suyin Huang is the piano soloist, right?

Andrew Kohler:

And we also will have some excerpts of the three Gershwin shows that had their premieres in 1925. So it'll be a full centennial for the Gershwins. There were the shows Tiptoes and Tell Me More. Buddy De Silva was also lyricist on Tell Me More. And then a musical about a Russian peasant uprising by composers George Gershwin and Herbert Stothart and lyricist and book writers Otto Harbach and Oskar Hammerstein II. It is the one Hammerstein-Gershwin show called Song of the Flame. It's a very interesting one. Another interesting connection to things today. And you'll get to hear the overture for that, which I have not found a recording of that anywhere, Jacob. Have you? I

Jacob Kerzner:

don't believe so. Yeah, so this might

Andrew Kohler:

be a rare opportunity to hear it. I

Jacob Kerzner:

haven't checked. There was a pretty popular film of the... Oh, yes. of the musical from, I believe, the same year or shortly after. So a lot of that music is used in it, but this is probably the first performance of this overture for quite a while.

Andrew Kohler:

Yes, and certainly in this, and things always get modified for the movies. Yes. There are two piccolos. I just noticed that yesterday. It's very exciting.

Mark Clague:

Well, you obviously get in the weeds with these musical materials just a little bit. Indeed. You have no idea, listeners. But it sounds like it's It's a lot of fun to do this work. Yes. How did you come to work for the Gershwin Edition?

Andrew Kohler:

I did my musicology degree, PhD here. I finished in the fall of 2014. I was writing a dissertation on Karl Orff, for whom I am now writing the entry in the revision of the Grove Dictionary. And I was very lucky that this project got started up, and I got to work first as an editorial assistant, and I found it suited me, and I decided to stick around. That's great. How about you, Jacob?

Jacob Kerzner:

Yeah, I found my way here in perhaps a less straightforward way. My background is musical theater, and I found myself on a few projects that were dealing directly with archival materials. I was part of a reconstruction of Jerome Robbins' Broadway, which was a collection of numbers all staged or choreographed by Jerome Robbins. So I was part of that reconstruction at the Muni in St. Louis. I was also part of the recent Oklahoma revival. And so I had experience working with these estates and these older shows and figuring out how to piece these things together in a way that is both honoring the history and also practical for production companies in 2024. So then I know

Mark Clague:

there's been an incredible amount of work for you both really to pull this off. And I'm really excited to see the show. Oh, so are we. Yeah, so thank you so much for all the work you're doing. And everybody should go grab their tickets at marqueearts.org, I believe, with a hyphen in the middle. But it's Of the I Sing, again, on Sunday, November 3rd, so two days before the election. It's a good time to get some giggles in. The

Jacob Kerzner:

show lives in this place of optimism. It's a satire, but it does live in this place of hope. Okay, that is great. of pulling in 1931, pulling the country out of the depression.

Andrew Kohler:

Yes, which is reference, and they make references to the depression throughout, the best of which being the Senate saying, the country thinks it's got depression, ha, ha, ha. Just wait until we get in session, ha, ha, ha. Then you'll find out what depression really means. Sounds very optimistic. But we could certainly use a little

Mark Clague:

love and a little laughter. So thanks so much. We're all looking forward to the show. Thank you. Thanks, Mark.

Unknown:

you

Mark Clague:

Thank you. Please visit our website at arts.umich.edu. Thanks for listening.