Franklin D. Roosevelt Inaugurated Tomorrow

A sketch from As Thousands Cheer

Moss Hart (1904–1961)
From American Musicals: The Complete Books and Lyrics of 16 Broadway Classics 1927–1969

Interesting Links
An interview with Laurence Maslon on America’s “great, optimistic, ebullient, indigenous art form” (Reader’s Almanac)

Audio: From the radio program Broadway to Main Street, hosted by Laurence Maslon: “As Thousands Cheer,” with sketches and songs, including “Easter Parade,” “Supper Time,” and “Heat Wave"; performances by Ethel Waters, Judy Garland, and others

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Man Who Came to Dinner, With George Kaufman Directing,” Morton Eustis
• “The Life and Death of Vaudeville,” Fred Allen

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American Musicals: The Complete Books and Lyrics of 16 Broadway Classics 1927–1969
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Illustration used on the cover of sheet music for the songs from As Thousands Cheer.

After the success of their musical comedy Face the Music in 1932, Irving Berlin and Moss Hart agreed to collaborate on a follow-up Broadway production. Hart told The New York Times:

The idea for As Thousands Cheer was broached to me by Mr. Berlin more than a year ago, before I had journeyed westward to the city of dreadful night known as Hollywood. We both agreed that we had no desire to do a conventional sort of revue with the usual blackout sketches, songs and dances. So we hit upon the idea of writing a topical revue right off the front pages of the newspapers.

Each song or sketch was introduced by a projected newspaper headline, one that either contextualized the material to follow or provided an ironic contrast. “Whatever satire there may be in the piece,” Berlin told an interviewer, was “really implicit in the news items.”

Alternating sketches, songs, and dance numbers, annual revues had been the most elaborate and popular offerings of any given theatrical season since before the First World War. According to Laurence Maslon, As Thousands Cheer represents “the best, and one of the last, examples of the revue form—a potent genre that dominated Broadway for two decades.” The show opened at the Music Box on September 30, 1933, and ran for four hundred performances—the second biggest hit of Berlin’s pre-WWII career, behind The Music Box Revue of 1921. (It was never filmed; the 1943 MGM film Thousands Cheer bears no relation to the Berlin-Hart collaboration.)

As Thousands Cheer opens with an extended triple-scene prologue before launching into its first sketch, “Franklin D. Roosevelt Inaugurated Tomorrow.” In November 1932—less than a year before the show’s opening night—Roosevelt, in a landslide, defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover by 57.4 to 39.6 percent of the popular vote. The curtains open with the outgoing president (played by Leslie Adams) and Mrs. Hoover (Helen Broderick) packing up their belongings in the Oval Office on the eve of the inauguration—the last, as it happens, to occur on March 4. It was unheard of for a Broadway musical to portray still-living, real-life subjects, and (as Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon point out in Make ‘Em Laugh) this scene was also “the first time an actual president was parodied in front of a live audience.” In fact, Berlin had originally composed a musical number for Helen Broderick with a chorus ending, “In a humbler place we'll have to dwell, / But a silk hat or a derby, / You will always be my Herbie, / And those twenty million people can go to hell.” It was dropped during rehearsals.

Notes: On page 100 the Hoovers discuss Ogden Mills, Hoover’s secretary of the Treasury during the last year of his administration; he succeeded Andrew Mellon, who resigned after impeachment proceedings were begun against him in Congress. A few lines later, Mrs. Hoover mentions a medicine ball, used when Hoover played an arduous version of volleyball with his staff on the South Lawn of the White House; they became known as the Medicine Ball Cabinet. In the final section of the sketch, several members of the Hoover administration are lampooned. Charles Curtis was Hoover’s vice president and former Senate majority leader. Born and raised on a Kaw reservation in Kansas Territory, he was the first man with significant American Indian ancestry elected to national office. Dolly Gann was Curtis’s half-sister; when his wife died, she assumed the role of his social ambassador and created a scandal when she “pulled rank” over other congressional wives at state dinners and functions. Henry Stimson was secretary of state. As the sketch closes, the Hoovers sing lines from “Tony’s Wife” and “Fit as a Fiddle (And Ready for Love),” two songs popular during Hoover’s last year in office.

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Scene: The curtains part to disclose the famous “Oval Room” of the White House, which Mr. and Mrs. Hoover use as a sitting room to their bedroom. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Man Who Came to Dinner With George Kaufman Directing

Morton Eustis (1905–1944)
From The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Interesting Links

Laurence Maslon on Kaufman & Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner (Reader’s Almanac)

What George S. Kaufman learned from the Marx Brothers (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections:
• “Audience Tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea,” Elia Kazan
• “Stage Struck,” Channing Pollock

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The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner
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Pullman Company advertisement featuring Alexander Woollcott, 1940.

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Seventy-three years ago this week, on October 16, 1939, one of Broadway’s most successful comedies made its debut. The Man Who Came to Dinner was supposed to have premiered at the Music Box a week earlier, on October 10, but the opening was delayed while George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart hurriedly rewrote the third act, adding a new scene. Although the play—as well as its subsequent film and radio adaptations—continues to delight audiences, modern-day theatergoers may not be aware that various characters in the play are satirical portraits of real-life celebrities, including such household names as Harpo Marx and Noël Coward. As Laurence Maslon explains:

Its main character, Sheridan Whiteside, was transparently based on one of the most dramatic, infuriating, and improbable celebrities of the era between the wars: Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott was a drama critic, raconteur, radio host, essayist, and charter member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, but that barely suggests his influence then on middlebrow culture. He was a tastemaker of popular fiction on a scale that would have made Oprah Winfrey’s encomiums seem like fortune cookie messages. His barbed wit would have sliced Simon Cowell for breakfast. . . .

Famous coast-to-coast by 1938 as the host of a radio show called The Town Crier, Woollcott regaled his audience with an idiosyncratic mix of stories, reviews, and personal predilections. Although he could be quite vicious, Woollcott had a wide sentimental streak and often devoted broadcasts to wrongly convicted murderers, war veterans, seeing-eye dogs—and, of course, Christmas. Eventually, Woollcott fancied himself an actor and demanded that his pals Kaufman and Hart concoct a play for him. It wasn’t difficult to put the melodramatic Woollcott on stage—what to do with his character once he got there was another matter.

Although the idea for a play based on Woollcott’s “character” came from Woollcott himself, he eventually removed himself from the production. Hart and Kaufman were wondering how to pursue the project when Woollcott visited Hart’s home for an overnight stay, treating the members of the household abhorrently and complaining the entire time. Aghast, Hart described the nightmarish guest to Kaufman and wondered aloud how horrible it would have been if the Woollcott had been injured and had to stay there the whole summer.

Thus was born the central premise of what became the final play. The show would prove to be a huge hit, featuring Monty Wooley in the lead role and running on Broadway for 739 performances—“an exceptionally long run in 1939–40,” notes Jared Brown in his biography of Hart.

And what did Woollcott think of Kaufman and Hart’s biting portrait of him as an unbearably cantankerous misanthrope? In short, he loved it. When the play went on its West Coast tour, he even stepped into the lead role, treating audiences to the sight of a celebrity acting as a satirical version of a character based on his own public persona. At the end of one performance, cheered on by repeated curtain calls, Woollcott riffed off one of his character’s signature lines from the play and announced to the audience that he planned to sue the authors for $150,000.

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‘All right, Mr. Kaufman?’ the stage manager asks. . . . ‘Yes, any time you’re ready.’ . . . George S. Kaufman has a whispered colloquy with Monty Woolley. He stands centre stage surveying the green living-room-hall in Mesalia, Ohio, which Donald Oenslager has designed for The Man Who Came to Dinner. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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